Alleged victim testifies against ex- police officer
Woman describes sexual touching when she was in elementary school
A city woman testified on Tuesday that her mother’s acquaintance, then an active Calgary police officer, sexually touched her on a number of occasions during sleepovers at his southeast home when she was in elementary school in the 1990s.
The complainant, now in her late 20s, told Crown prosecutor Jenny Rees that Stephen Huggett showered and played gymnastics with her and also gave her wine to drink one night before groping her.
The witness said Huggett, 60, who pleaded not guilty to sexual assault and sexual interference at the start of trial, always had a camera set up on the tripod in his bedroom and often videotaped them doing gymnastics on the bed.
She said her mother knew Huggett for a few years, when she was in grades 4 to 7.
“I remember having sleepovers at his home ... my memories of the sleepovers are not happy,” she recalled. “I stopped going after the last incident with the wine.”
The woman recalled Huggett once told her when she was in Grade 6 or 7, “you’re so pretty, I wish I was younger so I could date you.”
She said she wrote other things like diary entries in her school notebook so her mother would not find them, and was surprised several pages of diary- like entries were produced while she testified as she had not seen them since about 1998.
“I didn’t remember what was written in it. It was just something I had written down to express what happened to me and how I felt,” she told defence lawyer Alain Hepner during cross- examination.
Hepner suggested that she and Huggett never showered together and that he gave her grape juice instead of wine, but she insisted that was what happened.
She recalled feeling weak after he gave her the wine and massaged her inner thigh.
On other occasions, she said, Huggett would draw pictures and write things like “I love you” on her back and she had to guess what he was drawing. She noted he would also do “crazy kissing,” in which they would put their tongues in each other’s mouths.
The complainant’s mother testified that she had serious concerns about Huggett showering with her daughter, always walking around the home naked, giving her alcohol and “not just kissing her on the lips but to French kiss her.”
“I had observed ( him) showering with ( my daughter) and I requested him not to do that. He didn’t see it as a problem,” the mother told Rees. “I also told him I had concerns about him being around her without clothes on and to put something on. He was very defensive and felt I was wrong.
“He gave her alcohol when she was 10 or 11. He said it was better for him to let her try it than for a stranger to do it. He said if I trusted and would be around him for a long time, it shouldn’t be an issue.”
She said she finally called police in 2001 after she found the diary pages.
Police initially investigated the allegations and the daughter said she was taken to some location to make a recorded phone call to the accused, but no charges were laid. Police later revived the investigation and Huggett was charged in 2013.
Huggett, who retired from the Calgary Police Service in 2007 after 25 years on the force, was previously convicted and jailed for nine months on child pornography charges in 2009.