Accused rapist investigated in sex assault case 15 years ago
Fifteen years before accused rapist Paul Batchelor was put on trial for rape in Ottawa earlier this year, he was investigated for another sexual assault by police in rural Ontario. The former insurance salesman pleaded guilty to common assault in that case and received a conditional discharge.
The 2004 case against Paul David Batchelor is hard to track because he was later granted a pardon by the federal government.
Batchelor, 34, won acquittals in two rape cases on June 21, and the Ontario Crown attorney’s office served him with a notice of appeal last week, claiming the trial judge made errors that warranted new trials.
Batchelor took the stand in his own defence and Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Beaudoin accepted his evidence that he had consent in both cases, a claim that differed wildly from the accounts the women told at trial. They detailed horrific accounts of sexual assault in 2015 at Batchelor’s Sandy Hill apartment, just a few minutes walk from the University of Ottawa, where he studied economics at the time.
The judge described the accused rapist as a polite gentleman in the face of an aggressive cross-examination by Assistant Crown Attorney Sabrina Goldfarb.
Though the judge in both cases sided with the accused’s version of events, he acknowledged that Batchelor’s credibility was “seriously challenged” when he told Ottawa police that he had never been questioned about sexual assault in the past.
“It was then put to him that he had been pardoned for having committed sexual assault,” the judge told court.
But the judge said Batchelor’s explanation for the omission was “credible.” Beaudoin said he believed Batchelor’s story that he thought he was accused of common assault, not sexual assault. The judge noted that Batchelor was only 19 in 2004, and his excuse that he had “blocked it out of his mind is credible.”
Beaudoin also told court that Batchelor pleaded guilty in the 2004 case and received a conditional discharge. The judge said there was no evidence presented in court that he was charged with sexual assault in 2004.
Batchelor is on bail awaiting scheduled trials for three more sexual assault cases. Since this newspaper reported on his two rape acquittals in June, four more women have complained to the Ottawa Police Service’s sex-assault unit about him. None of the women in any of the cases know one another.
On the other side of the river, Gatineau police are investigating Batchelor on accusations that he threatened to kill a woman on July 11. According to police, Batchelor is also being investigated for impaired driving and breaching bail conditions on the same day. Batchelor has not been formally charged and the Quebec allegations are far from being tested in court.
At his recent rape trials, the first woman testified that she was too intimidated to say no, but the judge didn’t find her testimony reliable.
“Given her combative answers on the stand, her statements that she suddenly became this intimidated person are not reliable,” Beaudoin told court.
The judge found that the woman gave “long speeches” on consent.
“I find that she gave long speeches on consent and gave contradictory answers to many questions. She was very assertive and it is difficult to accept her evidence, as contradictory as it was, that she felt she had no choice but to comply with his demand for oral sex.
“She identified no behaviour on his part that would have resulted in a change from the pleasant man she had met in the pub and in the drive in the car to this forceful, controlling man she described once they got into his apartment,” Beaudoin told court.
As for the alleged rape and “rough sex,” the judge said he found it difficult to accept the complainant’s “increasingly dramatic descriptions of the violent rape she claims to have ultimately endured when the photographic evidence and the hospital reports are reviewed.”
The woman testified that she screamed, “no!” loudly and pleaded for him to stop.
Beaudoin told court: “Curiously, no one seems to have heard her cries.”
The judge sided with Batchelor, saying: “It is difficult to accept that he would have continued assaulting (the woman) with his knowledge that her very loud screams could be heard.”
Batchelor was also acquitted in the second rape case involving a University of Ottawa student. In that case, the judge said, the most significant challenge to the woman’s credibility was that her timing was off by an hour or so.
Defence lawyer Oliver Abergel told court it was simply a case where the sexual activity started to go further than what the complainant originally intended, and, when she realized Batchelor wanted to have intercourse, she decided against it and left his apartment.
In both cases, the judge said Batchelor had consent for all of the sexual activity and noted consent could be given through actions without speaking a single word. Both women testified they did not remain silent, but rather protested against the sex attacks they described.