Complainant a victim of the system: Blatchford

For me, the aha moment — the moment that had the unmistakable ring of truth and was also endearing — with the testimony of the first complainant in the Jian Ghomeshi case came early on.

It was such a small and inconsequential line.

The woman, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, was being questioned by prosecutor Michael Callaghan.

She was describing how she first met the former Q host at a CBC Christmas party in 2002; she knew of him, she said, but had some connection to him through a friend of hers who wrote some music for Moxy Fruvous, the band Ghomeshi used to be in.

She was working the party as a server, one of a plethora of part-time jobs she held — makeup artist, caterer, commercials — in those days; she has two children, then young, and they came first.

She and Ghomeshi flirted madly; he kept asking her to come back with more hors d’oeuvres, and she found him charming and fun.

He asked her to come to a taping of Play, his TV show on CBC, and a couple of days later, she did. The show was taped at the bar in the old Movenpick restaurant, which was in the CBC building.

Ghomeshi’s face lit up when he saw her arrive, she said, they spoke in between breaks, and after, they stayed for a drink.

Two of his CBC colleagues came in — Evan Solomon, who later had his own difficulties over conflict of interest allegations, and journalist Carole MacNeil.

“I didn’t know any of them,” the woman said. When Callaghan asked how it went, she replied, and she wasn’t being droll, just telling it as it was, “I was doing a lot of listening.”

Oh, I bet she was: It’s hard to imagine there was much oxygen for her at that table, let alone that she would have got a word in edgewise among that confident, powerful trio.

The publication ban prevents the media from using any information about the woman that would identify her.

I understand its purpose, but rue one effect, because it precludes me explaining how it is that I suspect she was, even at 41, which she was when she met Ghomeshi, a bit naive. Probably all I can safely say is that she’s a suburban girl, extremely pretty and certainly not stupid, but for all that, I think unsophisticated, and no match for the then-worldly, famous Ghomeshi.

Though she was roasted and toasted in cross-examination by the former broadcaster’s lead lawyer, Marie Henein, it’s important to note that for all the inconsistencies in the woman’s evidence — some significant — a constant in her police statement, many media interviews and testimony this week is her claim that Ghomeshi struck her hard, with a closed fist she thought, on the side of the head.

Her tough ride in the witness box wasn’t because the alleged victims of sex assault can’t get a break in the criminal courts, which is what many predicted.

The woman did have a rotten time, though in fairness to her, she was describing events that took place 13 years earlier.

Her difficulties arose, in my view, in part because it appears her allegations weren’t as thoroughly investigated by the police as perhaps they should have been and because prosecutors didn’t thoroughly examine her or re-examine her at all.

The blow of those terribly damaging emails and the bikini photo she sent Ghomeshi, for instance, a year after the second alleged assault where he purportedly smacked her in the head, would have been mitigated had she been asked followup questions when she mentioned, voluntarily in examination-in-chief, that she had “a vague memory” of writing a note to him, in anger, but wasn’t sure she’d sent it.

“You aren’t trying to hide the fact that you might have written Mr. Ghomeshi?” prosecutors could have asked.

The question alone would have diffused the impact of Henein’s revelation.

As for the woman’s police interview, she was interviewed but once, and only for 44 minutes in total, and with aged allegations like these, with a complainant who is trying to remember events of more than a decade ago, that would rarely be enough.

The woman came forward to police after then Chief Bill Blair, under enormous pressure by the media as the firestorm of allegations was all around Ghomeshi, in an impromptu press conference on Oct. 30, 2014, urged women to report.

“Our first priority is their safety,” he said of alleged victims, “and their recovery.”

The better favour would have been to investigate the hell out of the allegations — Henein, for instance, said Ghomeshi didn’t own a bright yellow VW Beetle at the time, as the woman testified he did, but surely police could have discovered every car he ever drove — and to have been less concerned with honouring the woman’s feelings and to have pressed her with difficult questions.

She wasn’t, in short, brutalized by a cruel criminal justice system that doesn’t care a whit about sex assault. That isn’t the lesson here. Rather, it is, report early.

But I suspect the woman was let down nonetheless, and done in rather by delicacy and the condescension to women (and all who aren’t lawyers, if I may be frank) that is inherent in the system.

Its servants killed her softly, with kindness.