Guilty until proven innocent

Ururyar case shows burden of accused

Ontario Court Judge Melvyn Green was kind enough to say the magic words: “The presumption of innocence is effectively restored to you.”

But the words have no weight or power outside a courtroom. They are without magic.

The next time a prospective employer Googles Mustafa Ururyar’s name, what comes up is unlikely to be any more to his benefit than it was in October, when the company in the educational sector where he was working appears to have done the same thing and then fired him.

As evidence of this, and the increasing meaninglessness of a court decision, the day before the case was resolved, the alleged victim, Mandi Gray, was still talking about her “rape”.

By her tweets, she knew on Monday the charge against Ururyar would be dropped and settled with a common law peace bond.

But on Tuesday Gray was published in the Dec. 12 issue of NOW Magazine saying, “But when I was raped in 2015…” and the same day tweeted, “Punishing the dude (Ururyar) will not solve misogyny or rape. It will not unrape me.”

As long as Gray can’t be un-raped, Ururyar can’t be un-charged. As his lawyer Daniel Brown told the judge Wednesday, “Once charged, never entirely exonerated.”

For the record, Ururyar was charged with sexually assaulting Gray in his downtown room in the early hours of Jan. 31, 2015.

The two, then both York University teaching assistants and grad students, had started a casual sexual relationship about two weeks before.

The night of the alleged assault, Gray had texted Ururyar, asking him to come to the bar where she was with some colleagues and saying, “Drink and then we can have hot sex.” She said he later suddenly turned mean and belittling and forced sex upon her; he said they had consensual sex, as they had before.

Ururyar was convicted in July of 2016 by a near-toretirement judge, Marvin Zuker, who berated him mercilessly and delivered a bizarre feminist screed that quoted the poet Maya Angelou; within a few days, Zuker then unleashed a sneering rant about Ururyar himself, made fun of his sureties (his mother and girlfriend) and ordered him detained in custody pending his sentencing.

(The best illustration of the Zuker madness was when, determined to turn himself inside out, he wrote, “We don’t even know what the phrase ‘hot sex’ means.”)

Two Superior Court judges, one who heard the bail application (Ururyar was released) and the other who heard the appeal of Zuker’s decision, found the judge’s reasoning incomprehensible.

The conviction was smartly overturned, a new trial ordered, in July of this year.

In the months that followed, prosecutor Jennifer Lofft told Green, there were “ongoing discussions among all parties” — this appeared to be a gentle correction of Gray’s repeated public complaints that she was always the last to learn of developments in the case.

In the end, Lofft said, she concluded that a second trial was not in the interests of justice; thus, the peace bond.

It leaves Ururyar, who is 30 now and back living in his home city of Vancouver, in theory the same man he was when he was charged — cloaked in that presumption of innocence, with no criminal record. But he’s not the same. There were the 10 days he spent in jail, thanks to Zuker.

In an exclusive interview at Brown’s office with the National Post on the eve of his final court appearance, Ururyar said jail was “a little bit” scary, but it was “more a loss of autonomy and dignity, having to be strip-searched every time you went in and out, not being able to sleep very well.”

There was the financial burden, “tens of thousands in legal fees alone,” Brown said, plus flights from Vancouver for court appearances.

Some of Ururyar’s life — his PhD, his work — was put on hold, but some of it he said has been “destroyed.” The damage to his reputation, and to his name and future, hurts the most.

But if he was bewildered by Zuker’s attack upon him, he can no more explain it than he can what motivated the allegation. Asked if he was angry at Gray, he said, “I am, for sure.

“At the end of the day, she knows what happened, she knows the truth of what happened and she’s going to live with what she’s done to me for the rest of her life. “I am too.” As Brown said, “Answering the question of motive is always something that judges want to hear, but it’s something that’s almost impossible to answer, for a defence lawyer or a person accused of a crime.”

Yet the mantra is always, “Why would someone make up this allegation?”

Brown said, “If every allegation was true, we wouldn’t need the criminal justice system, and we know that there are countless examples where people come to court and they’re not honest, and they’re not honest for a whole host of reasons, most of them known to them and not known to anyone else.”

In the end, Ururyar considers his case was more the result of a “one judge”, not the justice system.

But as Brown pointed out, “A single complaint is enough to initiate an investigation, lead to a criminal charge and drag somebody through the entire court process.

“It doesn’t take much to initiate a complaint,” he said, “nor does that need to be substantiated in any meaningful way.”

In the end, Brown said, in the #MeToo era it has come to this: “Anyone accused of a sexual crime must be guilty unless they can clear their name. We ask them to explain why would somebody lie.”

“To prove a negative,” Ururyar whispered.

Mustafa Ururyar