Esperanza Mani-Cortez told the court on Wednesday what she admitted to detectives in 2016: She knew her underage daughters were being sexually abused by her boyfriend, but turned the other cheek because he was supporting the family financially.

“I would feel bad, but I needed money to pay rent,” she testified through a Spanish interpreter in Superior Court in Hackensack.

The testimony corroborated that of her two daughters — now 16 and 13 — who took the stand Tuesday and described their alleged sexual encounters with Alfredo Rosales, who they said assaulted them multiple times in his Englewood apartment.

Rosales, 53, is on trial in connection with several crimes, including aggravated sexual assault, criminal sexual contact, human trafficking and endangering the welfare of a child.

The trial will continue Thursday and extend into next week.

Mani-Cortez, who met Rosales in 2010, is a key witness in the state’s assault and human trafficking case against him.

“We’re both at fault for doing things we shouldn’t have done, but we did,” Mani-Cortez said Wednesday.

For a brief time she lived with her children in Rosales’ one-bedroom apartment in Englewood. The abuse started there, the girls testified, and continued when Mani-Cortez relocated her family to Philadelphia.

On dozens of occasions, Mani-Cortez would place her daughters alone on a bus from Philadelphia to Englewood. Rosales would pick them up in front of the Englewood library on a Friday night, the girls testified. Sometimes he would take them out for dinner and then they would go to his apartment. The next day, their mother would arrive.

Some of Mani-Cortez’s testimony contradicted that of her two daughters. She claimed that Rosales wouldn’t touch them on Friday nights, but would wait until she arrived on Saturdays. Also, she said Rosales would touch but not penetrate them, which the girls denied.

“How would you know what happened if you were not with them?” Assistant Prosecutor Mark Chiavola asked.

"Because he told me," Mani-Cortez responded.

Rosales was arrested in 2016 after Englewood police received a tip that he was in the company of a then-14-year-old girl with whom he may have been engaging in sexual activity.

An investigation by the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office Special Victims Unit and the Englewood police found that Rosales had been allegedly assaulting the two girls since 2010. Authorities said Rosales paid the mother to make the two girls available to him for sex.

In court Wednesday, Rosales’ defense counsel took aim at conflicting statements Mani-Cortez gave to police. At first she denied knowing about the abuse, out of fear that her children would be taken, but she later confessed, Mani-Cortez testified.

She pleaded guilty to human trafficking and received a 20-year prison sentence.

Judge James Guida reminded the jury on Wednesday that Mani-Cortez’s plea is not evidence of Rosales’ guilt.

Prosecutors, however, say Rosales was complicit in the arrangement by Mani-Cortez to “lure, entice and transport” the girls to Philadelphia.



