‘He just came up and grabbed her’

Trial concludes for man charged with sexually assaulting woman in George Street bar

Testifying Tuesday at the trial of a 48-year-old man accused of sexually assaulting her friend during a concert at a George Street bar a year ago, a woman explained she was emotional because she was nervous, not because she was having trouble with her evidence.

“I saw when he actually did grab her from behind,” the woman told the court, demonstrating by turning to face the judge and making an underhanded upward swing with her right arm, her hand in a grabbing position.

“She was standing up and she was kind of braced on one leg, because she likes to headbang a little bit, and he just came up and grabbed her underneath.”

The woman said she and her friend and a group of friends attended the show at the Rockhouse on the night in question, and they all fended off a man they didn’t know who put his arms around them. At one point he put his arms around her, the witness said, and her boyfriend forced him off and told him to get lost.

One of the women in the group pointed her finger in the man’s face and said “Leave now.”

“He came in and he was very intoxicated. He was putting his arms around everyone, all the girls,” the woman testified. “We’d tell him to go away and he’d go away for 20 minutes, then come back.

“Everyone saw him. He wasn’t just a normal person who walked in and casually watched the show,” the woman said. “He walked in and started doing this.”

The woman was the fourth witness called to testify at the sexual assault trial by prosecutor Jacqueline Macmillan. Earlier in the day, the complainant wrapped up her testimony.

She told the court she had been standing near the stage, taking pictures and dancing when a man approached her and persistently put his arms around her. Each time she removed them and told him to stop, she said, but he wouldn’t listen.

The man moved closer and at one point pressed his genitals against her buttocks, she said, and she told him to get away from her.

“The next thing I knew, I felt a hand. … The hand went between my legs and grabbed me,” the woman told the court.

Defence lawyer Rosellen Sullivan focused her cross-examination on the possibility that the woman’s identification of the man who assaulted her was tainted by photos she had seen before she gave her statement to police.

The day after the alleged assault, the woman had posted on social media, hoping to identify the man responsible. She was subsequently sent a photo of a man at the show taken by a professional photographer, whom she identified as the man who assaulted her. The complainant later discovered other photos of the same man on other social media sites.

Under Sullivan’s cross-examination, the woman insisted she had formed her description of the man based on her view of him that night, and not from the photos.

RNC Const. Jessica Browne, the lead investigator in the case, testified she was aware of the possibility the woman’s identification of the assailant could be tainted, so she sent one of the photos to her colleagues, asking if anyone could identify the man, which another officer did.

Browne acknowledged she told the complainant the man in the photo had been positively identified, and admitted that giving the woman that confirmation was problematic.

In her closing submissions, Sullivan told Judge David Orr, “There’s no better example of contamination” of a suspect’s identification.

“Once that happened, there is no way you can convict (the man),” she said.

Macmillan disagreed, arguing that the testimony of the complainant and her friend left no doubt the accused was the man who committed the sexual assault. Both women had been clear in their evidence and had based their description on having spent hours in the bar with the man present, seeing him close up for at least 15 or 20 minutes in front of a well-lit stage.

Orr will deliver his verdict Dec. 19.