BLATCHFORD: A ‘VICTIM’ IN ONE RULING, A LIAR IN ANOTHER.

The Ontario Criminal Injuries Compensation Board last year awarded $6,000 for pain and suffering to a discredited sexual assault complainant whose evidence about her purported injuries was later found to be “completely contradicted” by her family doctor.

The award was made last spring, six months before an Ontario Superior Court deputy judge found that the woman “provided false information to the police and lied to the police about the sexual assault knowing that a criminal prosecution was likely to follow.”

Though the compensation hearing officer couldn’t have known what a small claims court deputy judge would subsequently rule, she nonetheless had reason to be careful about the woman’s allegation.

For one thing, Crown prosecutors already had withdrawn a criminal charge of sexual assault against the man in 2013, this following an unusually brief preliminary hearing during which the woman, then 40, was the only witness and gave a florid account of how he had bitten her all over and “just savaged me.”

The charge was formally withdrawn after a judicial pre-trial, which is a meeting among lawyers and the presiding judge. And by then, the physician had testified in the small claims court action the man had started — and eventually won — against the complainant.

At that proceeding, the doctor said she saw the woman, who had been her patient for five years, for a pre-booked physical on the very day after she later claimed to have been assaulted, and that “I didn’t see any bruises or injuries and my examination would have entailed examination of the breasts and full body.”

The doctor said the woman made no mention of an alleged attack until the physical was over and she had dressed, and that all she’d said then was that there’d been “a confrontation that led to violence and unconsented sex” with a man she’d been dating.

“I did not get the sense that it was ‘a rape yesterday’ (situation), and the patient didn’t present as such,” the doctor testified.

Both the complainant and the accused were self-represented in the small claims court proceeding, and it was during the complainant’s cross-examination of the doctor that she blamed the physician’s secretary for allegedly not telling the physician she’d complained about being sexually assaulted.

The accused man sought to call the physician as a witness before the compensation board, or at least to be able to present her testimony at the small claims court hearing, but was denied.

Though Postmedia is not using the names of either accuser or accused or any information that would tend to identify them, the organization has obtained copies of the transcript of the entire preliminary hearing, the prosecutor’s note to the man’s lawyer announcing the charge was being dropped, the compensation board decision, the transcript of testimony given by the physician at the small claims court hearing, as well as the 50-plus page decision of the Superior Court judge.

The judge awarded the man about $24,000, plus interest. The amount includes about $18,000 in legal costs for the man to defend the charge of sexual assault, $2,500 for loss of reputation and $2,500 for aggravated damages.

He spent five days in jail before getting bail on the criminal charge.

The two had dated for about eight months, seeing one another mostly on weekends in one or another of their small Ontario cities, when the purported assault occurred.

They had broken up after, the man claimed, the woman kept trying to have unprotected sex (she already had children and he didn’t want any at his age), and, she claimed, the “abusive” relationship culminated in the sexual assault.

The judge’s decision also reveals the local police investigation of the complainant’s allegation was sloppy, if not outright inept.

When she first complained, about three months after the alleged assault, the officer, who is now retired and living in the United States, didn’t have her provide either a video or audio recorded statement but rather asked her to write out her statement at home.

And as the judge noted, the officer “appears to have accepted (the complainant’s) information that her family physician noted physical injuries … without verifying that information with the family physician.”

It was only four months after the man had been charged that the officer even contacted the physician.

And though the notes the doctor faxed him show she saw “no bruises or bodily injuries,” the officer never reinterviewed the complainant about the contradictions.

The judge found that the man had been defamed by his accuser, and that he very nearly met the four-pronged test for “malicious prosecution.”

In the end, the judge said, he found the doctor to be a credible witness, and preferred her evidence to that of the complainant, whom he found had used “the criminal process for purposes of retribution …”

Similarly, he said, he found the man more credible than the woman.

“I make a finding that the alleged sexual assault did not occur and that the sexual intercourse and other sexual activity that occurred … was consensual. I also make a finding that … (the complainant) had no reasonable and probable cause to submit the allegation of sexual assault to the police.”

The woman is now trying to appeal that decision.