Trailer Park Boys actress testifies
DEFENCE PRESENTS LUCY DECOUTERE WITH DAMNING PHOTOS DURING HER TESTIMONY
Prosecutors said they would. Thus was court briefly delayed Thursday morning as disclosure of the Hnatiw phone call was made.
What the disclosure contains isn’t known, but Henein warned DeCoutere to think carefully about “if the thing you have not disclosed is some after- the- fact communication,” or something else.
It was a stunning cap to a trial that veered from extreme to extreme, the testimony one minute sounding like it came straight from a therapist’s couch to being challenged and discredited in the next.
DeCoutere alleges that on a Friday night in July of 2003, after a flirtatious email correspondence that saw her come to Toronto in part to see Ghomeshi, they were back at his house when he suddenly “took me by the throat and held me against the wall, cutting off my breath, and slapped me three times. The bewitching, bewildering sex assault trial of Jian Ghomeshi grew ever more melodramatic Thursday as the fallen CBC star’s second accuser took the witness box.
This was Trailer Park Boys actor and Royal Canadian Air Force reserves captain Lucy DeCoutere, who became the “face” of the scandal surrounding the 48- year- old Ghomeshi when in the fall of 2014, she got court permission to have the usual publication ban protecting identification of alleged sex assault victims waived in her case.
Before DeCoutere left at the end of the day, Ghomeshi’s lead defence lawyer, Marie Henein, had presented her with damning photographs of them together just hours after he allegedly attacked her and vengeful emails she wrote saying, “I want him f — king decimated” and “The guy’s a s — tshow; time to flush.”
More ominously, Henein told Ontario Court Judge William Horkins that Tuesday, after the first complainant had completed her testimony, DeCoutere’s lawyer, Gillian Hnatiw, called prosecutors to ask if, hypothetically, she had information about “post- assault” conduct or contact ( both terms were used) between DeCoutere and Ghomeshi, they would be interested in knowing about it.
See BLATCHFORD on NP3
I remember not being able to breathe; SHOCK AND SURPRISE. I had never had an adult hit me before. We weren’t having an argument. I was just COMPLETELY BEWILDERED by what happened, therefore I tried to BRUSH IT OFF. — LUCY DECOUTERE alleged JIAN GHOMESHI hit her.
( DeCoutere agreed with Henein the date of that dinner and the alleged assault was July 4, 2003. If so, that would mean the date on the Toronto police information, as the document describing the allegations is called, is wrong. It says the alleged attack occurred between June 27, 2003 and July 2, 2003.)
There was no discussion beforehand of the two of them doing anything like this, DeCoutere said, and in no way did she consent to it.
Neither did either of them, she said, ever speak about it — not that night or any other.
Yet even by her own admission, her behaviour immediately afterward and for the next decade was little short of “ridiculous.”
She stayed at his house for about another hour, chatting amiably, saw him several more times over the ensuing weekend, even sent him flowers to thank him for being a such a good host when she returned to her Halifax home, and indeed kept up a perfectly cordial businesslike relationship with him for about 11 years.
Essentially, as DeCoutere explained it in her examinationin- chief by prosecutor Corie Langdon, she did all that because she was polite and cursed, as many women are, with the personality of a “pleaser;” she didn’t want Ghomeshi to think “I couldn’t handle” the choking and the slaps; she didn’t want to leave in a huff and “seem rude;” besides, she’d already committed to seeing him over the weekend, and more broadly, she even felt “sorry for him, that he thought this was an appropriate thing to do … I didn’t tell people about it because I wanted to protect him, I didn’t want people to know this about him.”
Yet in cross- examination, DeCoutere agreed with Henein that she didn’t disclose, either to the police on Nov. 6, or in any of the 19 media interviews she did before and after she spoke to police, that she and Ghomeshi had kissed on the couch, after the attack, and also kissed goodbye.
Certainly, DeCoutere also didn’t disclose that the day after the alleged attack, she not only had brunch with Ghomeshi, but also gambolled afterward in Riverdale Park with him.
Henein showed her two photographs of the two of them on the grass, Ghomeshi wearing an open shirt that showed his chest, DeCoutere gazing at him with what for all the world appeared to be affection, if not adoration.
And DeCoutere never told anyone that, as Henein put it, “You were cuddling Mr. Ghomeshi, the man who just hours ago, choked you and slapped you?”
“That’s correct ,” DeCoutere said. “I didn’t know these photos existed.”
“You do now,” Henein replied with trademark ferocious coolness.
What was important about the pictures — and others showing the two at a barbecue the following day — is that they are so at odds with DeCoutere’s sworn police statement and even her testimony here that while she continued to be nice to Ghomeshi after the alleged attack, it was a function of the complicated emotions that women often feel in such situations.
“You were having a pretty good time with a guy who’d just assaulted you?” Henein asked, about the barbecue pictures.
“Yeah,” said DeCoutere, adding that Ghomeshi had pretty great friends.
“You thought he was a pretty great guy, too?” Henein asked.
“Yeah,” said DeCoutere, “but I had very mixed feelings.”
Even DeCoutere’s motives in coming forward were challenged, and by her own words.
In an Oct. 26 email to a friend, for instance, she said “He’s walked the line so long, all the while becoming more famous….” On the day police charged Ghomeshi, DeCoutere wrote in a note to a friend, “I hope he’s panic-eating in a high- calorie way.” In a Feb. 24, 2015 email, appearing to delight in the fact that one of the detectives was an Iranian, like Ghomeshi, she wrote, “F—k Ghomeshi.”
Again ominously, at least for the case against Ghomeshi, Henein also referred to several emails between DeCoutere and “another complainant,” where DeCoutere discussed cheerfully that actor Mia Farrow was now “on our team” ( Farrow had tweeted her support for the IbelieveLucy hashtag that was spawned in the scandal) and celebrated an upcoming Vanity Fair magazine piece “on the whole s — tshow — hello cover!”
National Post cblatchford@ postmedia. com
HE’S WALKED THE LINE SO LONG, ALL THE WHILE BECOMING MORE FAMOUS.