Crown seeks 221/2 years for rapist
Warning: This story contains disturbing details.
EDMONTON A former Edmonton bar promoter convicted of multiple sexual assaults should be sentenced to 22½ years in prison, Crown prosecutors argue.
Matthew Mcknight, 33, was back in court Wednesday for the first time since a jury found him guilty in January on five of 13 counts of sexual assault, in Edmonton’s first major case of the #Metoo era.
Two of Mcknight’s victims and three of their family members struggled through tears to read impact statements during the first of a three-day sentencing hearing, detailing the lasting damage caused by the rapes: including depression, panic attacks, lost jobs, shattered relationships and suicide attempts.
“I have waited a very long time to be able to stand in front of you and tell you exactly how much damage you have caused me,” one woman, whose name is protected by a publication ban, said to Mcknight.
“For years, I have been terrified of you, you haunted my dreams and dictated my waking moments. But now I have realized that my voice is what you should have been afraid of all along.”
A jury convicted Mcknight of the assaults, which spanned 2010 to 2016, after a sprawling 62-day trial that began last fall and stretched into January.
All five assaults took place in Mcknight’s Edmonton apartment. The victims were aged 17 to 22 at the time.
Lead Crown prosecutor Mark Huyser-wierenga described Mcknight as a predator who targeted young women using his resources as a bar promoter, including free drinks and limo rides.
Dino Bottos, Mcknight’s lawyer, argued the women had consensual sex with Mcknight, regretted it, and “re-characterized” what happened after learning he was under police investigation.
The hearing is taking place in an unusual courtroom because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Due to the amount of interest in the case, Mcknight’s sentencing was set for B201, a cavernous basement courtroom built more than a decade ago for a gang trial involving dozens of defendants. Most observers were seated in prisoner’s boxes separated by Plexiglas. All wore masks.
Mcknight, who remains out on bail, sat in a wooden prisoner’s box, wearing a grey suit and a black mask. His family sat in a gallery in the rear of the courtroom.
Huyser-wierenga argued Mcknight’s crimes constituted “major” sexual assaults, which carry a starting point sentence of three years. He said there were few if any mitigating factors.
The Crown also argued the assaults were “drug facilitated,” either by alcohol or a date rape drug. Huyser-wierenga argued some of the sentences should be increased because of circumstantial evidence around drugging.
That idea faced pushback from Queen’s Bench Justice Doreen Sulyma.
“I can’t understand how you can take bare verdicts of guilty and start going back through the evidence to insert drugs,” she said. “And I did charge (the jury) on this — I don’t think there was evidence of drugs, only evidence of blackouts.”
Huyser-wierenga allowed that the Crown had no direct evidence of drugging, but said that given the victims’ experiences, it follows that some sort of drugging was involved.
“What other inference could be made, reasonably?” he asked, adding the accounts of the women have been “endorsed by the jury ruling.”
One of the victims described arriving home after blacking out and being assaulted by Mcknight after a night out in the fall of 2014. She found her terrified mother, who hadn’t heard from her since the
For years, I have been terrified of you, you haunted my dreams and dictated my waking moments.
night before.
“She saw the bruises forming on my arms. Swollen. Flaming pain,” she said. “It took everything in me not to break down right there and cry. Tell her everything that you did to me … but you scared me into silence.”
In the ensuing months and years, she became suicidal, to the point her psychologist suggested her family hide their medications and sharp objects.
“My family held (me) while I had panic attacks, rocked me while I screamed and cried,” she said. “A grown woman, taken down to the emotional level of an infant.”
Huyser-wierenga said he anticipated the defence will argue Mcknight’s assault by an Edmonton Remand Centre prisoner after being arrested in August 2016 should lead to a lesser sentence.
The defence has yet to make its submissions.