Woman testifies broker forced himself on her
She says she locked herself in an office bathroom after he pushed her onto a couch
A woman who went to see former Hamilton mortgage broker Dennis (Dinesh) Khanna after he said he’d fix payment discrepancies has testified that he instead forced himself on her and tried to have sex with her.
Khanna, 63, of Oakville, is on trial for six sexual assault charges and one charge of defrauding mortgage lenders.
The woman, testifying Friday, is the first of four women who went to police complaining of sexual assault by Khanna.
She said she met Khanna in 1999 when she and her then-husband needed a small loan and friends referred her to him. She contacted Khanna again in 2012 when her mother was experiencing basement flooding at her house and couldn’t get financing to fix it. By this time, the woman had moved in with her mother, and the two of them got a $10,000 loan at 15 per cent from Khanna that court heard later ended up being a $98,000 mortgage.
The woman said at one point the money her mother was paying Khanna on the mortgage was not being passed on to the financial institution that granted it. “We were supposed to have one mortgage and we ended up with two.”
Khanna was not returning her calls so she went to his office in December 2014, and he told her he would fix everything. His mortgage brokerage operated as Metro Financial Planning.
“He promised to make one mortgage and do it at 5 per cent, and I believed him,” she said.
When she hadn’t heard anything by February 2015, she called again and he told her to come one evening to sign the paperwork.
Khanna was alone at the office and led her into a back room where he said it would be warmer because he was having trouble with the heating at his office, she said. He left her in the room, saying he would be right back, she said. When he returned, he had his penis out of his pants and in his hands, she said.
“He came straight in front of me and pushed me on the couch and said ‘you want it,’” she testified. “I was in shock. I got up and pushed him away and ran into the bathroom.”
She locked the door and “I was crying and asking why he was doing this to me.”
He told her, “You want it. You can’t do anything about it. I am God, no one is going to believe you,” she said. “I kept screaming to let me go.”
While still locked in the bathroom, she noticed semen on her coat and wiped it off with a paper towel, she said. She finally got out when Khanna went to the front of his office.
“He told me not to say anything or he’ll take my mother’s house.”
She left but put the paper towel in her pocket and preserved it in a plastic sandwich bag until she went to police. “I kept it because I didn’t think anyone would believe me.”
In an agreed statement of facts read out at the start of the trial, Khanna admits that based on DNA analysis, the semen is his.
Khanna’s lawyer, John Rosen, suggested the woman was lying about the sexual assault from the beginning, to which she responded “that is not correct.”
Rosen questioned her on a number of documents with her signature on them, including the original loan and mortgage papers.
In many of her answers, the woman said handwritten notes by Khanna involving additional money or terms were made after she and her mother signed the documents, and she had not been aware of them.
She admitted they sometimes signed documents that only had their names on them and had not been filled in by Khanna because they entrusted him to do it later.