Las Vegas club promoter charged with raping woman in 2016

A former Las Vegas club promoter has been charged with drugging a woman’s drink and raping her in a VIP bathroom in 2016.

Jalal Hossain, 44, was arrested Feb. 16 and charged with sexual assault and battery with intent to commit sexual assault. He told police he used to be a club promoter who worked on the Strip but now works in a call center, according to his arrest report.

The woman told police she and her husband were at Fizz Las Vegas at Caesars Palace in June 2016 when they met Hossain, who introduced himself as “Jay Holiday.”

The woman, talking to Las Vegas police in January 2019, said Hossain served her and her husband each a shot. She told police Hossain called the shot the “Bill Cosby.” The woman told police she laughed at Hossain naming the shot after Bill Cosby, who has been accused by more than 60 women of sexual misconduct and who was convicted in 2018 of drugging an sexually assaulting a woman.

During a December 2019 interview with Metropolitan Police Department detectives, Hossain laughed while discussing the name of the drink. He denied serving the couple the shots, and he denied raping the woman.

The husband later told police he remembered thinking “Bill Cosby” was an odd title for a drink.

“It didn’t feel like I had taken a shot,” the woman told detectives. “It had felt like I had taken a shot with something else (in) it.”

The woman started feeling faint and when she needed a bathroom, Hossain offered to escort her to a VIP area to use a bathroom, the report said. But bouncers would not let the husband through the VIP area to reach his wife, the husband told police.

When they were alone, the report said, Hossain pushed the woman against a wall, removed some of her clothing and raped her. She and her husband departed Las Vegas the next day. She told police that she found out she was pregnant a week later.

The husband also told police he felt he was drugged by the shot. He said he felt “dizzy and not completely there.”

The woman said she didn’t say anything to anybody about the night until after her child was born in 2017. Almost two more years went by before the couple reported it to the Marion County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon, where they live.

The woman told Las Vegas police she waited so long to report it because she feared she would not be believed by authorities.

“She stated feeling she ‘didn’t matter’ and was ‘just another girl that goes to Vegas,’” detectives wrote in the report.

Hossain, who was released from the Clark County Detention Center on his own recognizance Feb. 18, is due for a preliminary hearing in Las Vegas Justice Court on March 19.

In 2017, a bar in Washington, D.C., received backlash after naming a tequila cocktail with empty pill capsules floating in it the “Pill Cosby.” The bar removed the drink from its menu and apologized amid calls it was insensitive to sexual assault victims.

Contact Dalton LaFerney at dlaferney@reviewjournal.com or at 702-383-0288. Follow @daltonlaferney on Twitter.