Accuser’s memory also on trial
It is tempting to say that if the first complainant in the Jian Ghomeshi sex assault trial thought the former CBC star threw a hard right cross, that was before she learned about Marie Henein’s.
Alas, it would be giving too much credit to Henein, who is Ghomeshi’s lead defence lawyer. She was very good in her day-and-ahalf-long cross-examination of the woman, but so unreliable a witness — so flaky — was the woman that it was akin to shooting a flea with an elephant gun.
Ghomeshi is charged with two counts of sex assault relating to this now 54-year-old woman. They were allegedly vicious attacks.
One, in December of 2002, happened in his car and involved him allegedly yanking the woman’s hair and pulling her head back until it hurt.
The other, on Jan. 2, 2003, happened at his Riverdale, Toronto, home and involved him allegedly grabbing the woman by the hair again and punching her hard three times in the side of the head, such that her ears rang and she felt as if she had walked into a pole.
COURT HEARS WITNESS SENT GHOMESHI FLIRTY EMAILS, BIKINI PHOTO AFTER THEIR ENCOUNTER
One of the few constants in the woman’s story — as told first to various media two years ago when the scandal around Ghomeshi broke in the press, then in a sworn statement to Toronto police, and finally in examinationin-chief here — was that she was shattered by the second attack.
As she told police in her Nov. 1, 2014 statement, “I left and I didn’t come back and I didn’t have any more dealings with him after that.”
But Henein’s questioning culminated with the stunning revelation that this woman, who just the day before told Ontario Court Judge William Horkins that she was so traumatized after the second assault that she “had to relive” the violence every time she saw Ghomeshi’s face on TV, in fact had emailed him twice a year later, once attaching a picture of herself in a string bikini.
“Hello Play>Boy (Ghomeshi then had a TV show called Play),” was the subject line of the Jan. 16, 2004 email. “Good to see you again! Your show is still great. When you take a break from ploughing snow naked, take a look,” she said, at a link to a video of her and a friend in a band singing.
“If you want to keep in touch this is my email!!!!” She added her cell number and her name.
Ghomeshi, she told Henein, never replied.
On June 22 that same year, the woman wrote again.
“Hi Jian,” she said. “I’ve been watching you on Screw The Vote (a documentary Ghomeshi did that year on why young people don’t vote in federal elections) and I thought I’d drop you a line and say hello. Hope all is well.” She then asked him to pass on regards to a mutual friend.
The attached photo, entitled Beach, was taken two days earlier and sent to Ghomeshi three hours after she downloaded it.
The woman had an explanation.
“I wanted Jian to call me,” she told Henein, “so I could ask him why did he violently punch me in the head. If I’d just said ‘Give me a call’, I didn’t think he would.
“The email was bait, to call me, so I could get him to call me.”
She said she didn’t remember actually seeing Ghomeshi after the second assault and said “reaching out to him like this was the only way to get” the explanation she craved.
“But you didn’t tell the police?” Henein asked, pointing out she had told the detectives no fewer than six times that she had had no further communication with him.
The woman’s first and only mention of a possible contact came when she told prosecutor Michael Callaghan that she had “a vague recollection of composing an email, but I don’t remember if I even sent it.”
Her forgetting of the emails and photo “bait” were only the most serious of her multiple omissions or corrections to her memory.
The woman appears to consider that a memory bank works like a hot tub.
Once, she told Henein, “What I’ll tell you is after I sat with those memories, I remembered that.”
Another time, she said, “I didn’t forget. I did not lie … The more you sit with a memory ...” She also said, “The memories are in there, I just wasn’t pulling it out, I just needed to sit with it.”
As fallible as she was, the woman’s disintegration on the stand may also illustrate the perils of police investigations and prosecutions that unfold in a politically charged atmosphere.
Ghomeshi was fired as host of the radio show Q in October 2014, amid a torrent of allegations in the Toronto Star and on social media from a variety of accusers.
At one point, then-Toronto police chief Bill Blair held a press conference, inviting women to come forward if they had been sexually assaulted and promising sensitive treatment.
The woman did just that, the next day.
The interview with her lasted about 44 minutes. Minus five minutes for police to get the requisite cautions out of the way, the woman told her story for the first 14 minutes, the detectives asked about a dozen questions over the next 25.
There was no second interview, despite a number of red flags that might have caught the detectives’ attention, particularly the fact that the woman emailed them 38 times.
Her turn in the witness box over Tuesday, the first complainant issued a statement through her lawyer, Jake Jesin.
This was a jarringly chipper bit of business; anyone hearing Jesin read it aloud on the steps of the courthouse would have imagined the woman had knocked it out of the park.
Why, he read, she had found the experience of testifying “extraordinarily difficult,” but she always knew it would be like that.
“I remain satisfied that I chose to come forward,” she said, and encouraged “other victims of abuse to come forward and not be afraid.”
The disconnect between the sturdy soldier-on tone of the statement and what had just happened in Courtroom 125 was as staggering as everything else.
I WANTED JIAN TO CALL ME. SO I COULD ASK HIM WHY DID HE VIOLENTLY PUNCH ME IN THE HEAD.