LAWYER GRILLS LIN JUN’S EX-LOVER
Testimony offered a few tender glimpses of the human being he loved
It was a cri de coeur.
It may have come through a Mandarin translator; it may have been said politely and in an even voice, but it was a cry from the heart nonetheless.
“Do I have to look at these pictures?” Lin Feng, the former lover of the late Lin Jun (no relation), asked. (To avoid confusion, I’ll refer to the two men by their first names.)
At this, prosecutor Louis Bouthillier objected, and Quebec Superior Court Judge Guy Cournoyer agreed, and the hideousness was over.
Feng was enduring crossexamination by Luc Leclair, the lawyer for Luka Rocco Magnotta, the 32-year-old man conceded by Leclair this week to have committed “the physical acts” of killing someone, dismemberment and other cruelties on Jun.
Magnotta is pleading not guilty to five offences, including firstdegree murder, on the grounds he suffers from a mental disorder and isn’t criminally responsible.
Leclair had just shown Feng two still photographs taken from a pornographic movie called Extreme Pleasures 2 which Jun apparently downloaded shortly before his death.
By this point, Feng already had testified he had never seen the movie, didn’t use that search engine, wasn’t particularly interested in pornography and in addition, that he’d already left Montreal and returned to China for the summer so he couldn’t possibly have known what Jun downloaded.
Yet there was Leclair, hand on his hip, providing avid commentary for the pictures: “This is a young man, tied with rope, with another man holding a black dildo?” and “The same young man tied with rope and another man holding a black dildo and penetrating him with it?”
The effect of the exercise, if not its intent, appeared to be to embarrass Feng, whose only crime was to come to Canada to testify, and Jun, whose crime was to get himself killed.
In Quebec courts, witnesses testify standing up, facing the jury, with their backs to the public gallery. But Feng’s face was flushed with distress as Leclair showed him the pictures and described them.
Cross-examination is rarely a picnic. It’s not meant to be, but rather the testing of a witness’s testimony, which sometimes makes for terse exchanges and even dramatic flourishes along the lines of “I put it to you that you’re lying” or “I suggest you knew Mr. Smith was going to rob that man?”
But Leclair was being aggressive, even salacious, with a witness who appeared not to have an axe to grind, who was not combative and who, most critically, wasn’t even in the country when the movie was downloaded.
The two Lins were living together as a gay couple in Montreal, a kinder clime surely than the repressive one in their native China.
Feng was working for a Chinese software firm, and travelling back and forth between his two countries; Jun was going to school at Concordia University. They were of a similar age — Feng is six months younger than Jun, who was 33 when he was killed — and had much in common, having met when they were students in Beijing.
Friends at first, they became lovers only after Jun returned for a time to Shanghai, one of China’s most liberal cities. The relationship continued in Montreal until shortly before Jun’s death.
They had just broken up, or as Feng put it in direct examination with Bouthillier, moved back “to a friendship relationship.”
Jun was “experiencing some pressure from his family,” Feng said. “He was kind of obliged to go into a relationship with a girl and eventually go into a marriage.” His parents didn’t know he was gay.
But they were still friendly, still texting one another, he said. The last message he got from Jun was as he woke up on the morning of May 25; with the 12-hour time difference between China and Canada, it was about midnight on May 24 in Montreal. Jun just texted him good morning.
Feng replied, and saw that Jun had read the text, but he didn’t reply. He texted several more times over the next day or two, but this time, Jun didn’t open the messages. Worried, Feng called one of their friends and had him check out a couple of Jun’s haunts; no luck.
“I still didn’t have any news,” he said. “That’s why I flew back here.” He saw on the web the discovery of a dead body in Montreal, he said, “but it didn’t cross my mind it was his.”
It was May 30. His flight stopped over in Doha, Qatar, and there a friend called him with the news that the dead man was Lin Jun. The friend had seen the name on a TV news clip.
Back in Canada, Feng looked for a few minutes at the notorious video of the attack on Jun, and “I came to the conclusion it wasn’t him,” he said. How his heart must have leaped.
Indeed, as the jurors have heard, the first 53 seconds of the video feature another man, bound as Jun was bound — this was apparently Magnotta’s dress rehearsal — but where the first man walked out of the small apartment alive, Jun did not.
Feng phoned the police to tell them the man in the video wasn’t Jun. But he was wrong.
In his testimony, he offered a few tender glimpses of the complicated human being he loved: Jun was losing the hair at the back and had had hair transplants; they talked about Hollywood; they didn’t drink much or do any drugs; Jun was fit, and worked out at a club three times a week; he was faithful to Jun, and so far as he knew, Jun faithful to him.
Thus, in his demeanour and his manner, did this slim shavenheaded man bestow a measure of dignity upon the man he loved. Lin Jun could have done with a little more of such kindness.