N.D.G. massage therapist admits more sex assaults
Crown asks for 30-month sentence after guilty pleas on 7 counts in total
David Kost, the massage therapist who pleaded guilty to having sexually assaulted two of his clients earlier this year, has pleaded guilty to having done the same to five other women.
Kost, 49, entered the guilty pleas to five counts of sexual assault at the Montreal courthouse on Tuesday. The prosecutor later requested a 30-month sentence. Kost used to operate a massage therapy practice in Notre-Dame-de- Grâce. Until recently, he also owned a fish shop on Somerled Ave. The shop closed shortly after he pleaded guilty to having sexually assaulted two of his clients in 2016.
Following the guilty pleas, other women who were sexually abused by Kost came forward. During the hearing on Tuesday before Quebec Court Judge Denis Mondor, Kost uttered the words: “Yes, Your Honour” as the five counts were read out loud and he was asked if he was entering the guilty pleas willingly.
The five other women were abused in the same manner as the first two cases. The abuse occurred between 2012 and 2015 and involved him rubbing his erect penis on a client’s body as he massaged her. In other cases, he also inserted his fingers inside the client’s vagina while massaging them. Two of the women filed victim impact statements, including one who wrote that Kost’s sexual abuse defeated the entire purpose of seeing him for massage therapy. The woman had plans to run a half-marathon and sought help from Kost as she prepared. The sexual assault ruined her plans, and she described having lost half of her hair because of the stress she felt afterward.
One of the seven women sexually assaulted by Kost filed a complaint against him in 2014 with a professional association that represents massage therapists. He was suspended and excluded from the association. Despite the sanctions, Kost sexually assaulted other women while he continued to offer massage therapy. Prosecutor Anne Gauvin noted this as an aggravating factor, and she asked that Kost be sentenced to a 30-month prison term.
The sentence is significantly longer than the nine-month prison term Gauvin requested this year after Kost pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting two women. Mondor had yet to deliver a decision on that request when the five other women came forward.
Defence lawyer Johanne Delfausse suggested a prison term of 15 months would be more appropriate in Kost’s case.
“He is a good person. We are not just the person of our actions. There is a human being behind this,” Delfausse said, noting that one of the victims, who was friends with Kost before he sexually assaulted her, stayed in contact with him after it happened and asked if he would massage a woman she knew even though he admitted to her that he lost his licence in 2016. The same woman told the police that, before she filed her complaint, she considered what Kost did to have been “an awkward flirtation.”
Eileen Travers, a woman who described herself as Kost’s best friend for many years, travelled from New York to testify on his behalf on Tuesday. The professional writer, a former reporter with the Montreal Gazette, said she has known Kost since she was 17 and described him as a person who helps others. Travers said that when they were much younger, Kost was hospitalized after he came to the aid of a woman who was being followed down a street in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce by three men in a car who were calling her names.
She said that Kost named his fish shop after her and that he gave much of himself through his food business, including for a charity event in support of the Montreal Children’s Hospital.
She said that, after the first guilty pleas, Kost was forced to close his fish shop after protesters pasted copies of newspaper reports of the sexual abuse on surfaces close to his place of business. She said Kost is now $100,000 in debt, works for minimum wage and had to move to the Eastern Townships because he fears being recognized in Montreal.
“It’s destroyed him,” Travers said. “I was afraid he was going to kill himself.”
Mondor will deliver his decision on the sentence on September 6.