Blatchford on why the case disintegrated
COMPLAINANTS TOLD LIES, OMITTED DETAILS, MISLED POLICE AND PROSECUTORS
In the magnificent words of the Tragically Hip, in their 1989 Boots or Hearts song, when it starts to fall apart, man, it really falls apart.
At the just-concluded sexual assault trial of the fallen CBC star Jian Ghomeshi, prosecutors Mike Callaghan and Corie Langdon didn’t have long to wait.
Their first unpleasant surprise came on opening day last week with the first of three female accusers in the witness stand in a Toronto courtroom — she was and is still considered their strongest complainant and is certainly the least discredited — but it sure didn’t stop there.
Complainant No. 2, Trailer Park Boys actor and Royal Canadian Air Force captain Lucy DeCoutere, who waived the mandatory publication ban on her identity and thus became the face and symbol of Ghomeshi’s accusers, was next.
Despite protestations she had no romantic or sexual interest in Ghomeshi after her purported assault — “I guarantee you that,” she told his lead lawyer, the formidable Marie Henein — it turned out she had all but stalked the 48-year-old former star — all this after he’d allegedly choked and slapped her hard in the face — and had told him in an email she wanted to “f--- your brains out.”
A few days later, DeCoutere wrote him an oldschool love letter that ended with the line “I love your hands.”
Incredibly, the last complainant flamed out even more spectacularly as Henein got her to acknowledge she’d told lies, omitted details and de- liberately misled police and prosecutors and then confronted her with the fact that after the alleged attack, she had taken Ghomeshi home with her one night and, as the lawyer so inimitably put it, “messed around and gave him a hand job.”
The latter two accusers — the former Q host is pleading not guilty to four sex assault charges and one of choking DeCoutere — made 11th-hour disclosures of some of these details only on the eve of their taking the witness stand. The disclosures came so late they sandbagged prosecutors and left them unable to combat them.
But though these developments caused actual gasps in the crowded Old City Hall courtroom and had lawyers the city over reeling in disbelief at the havoc unfolding in courtroom No. 125, the die had been cast long before that.
As one veteran Toronto lawyer put it this week, “the criminal justice system has been hijacked by ideology,” in this instance, the feminist cant that accusers must always be believed.
WE BELIEVE VICTIMS WHEN THEY COME IN, 100%, WE ARE BEHIND THEM 100%.
The Ghomeshi prosecution was born in the late fall/early winter of 2014 in the same maelstrom that saw Bill Cosby first called out as a rapist, the Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women movement find wind under its social media wings, two Liberal MPs in Ottawa kicked out of caucus with shredded reputations after vague and anonymous allegations from New Democrat MPs and a developing “national conversation” about sexual assault and harassment and the barriers to reporting it.
The prosecution originally, floridly unfolded in the pages of one of the country’s biggest newspapers, the Toronto Star, which first published allegations against Ghomeshi by what were then three anonymous women, and then on social media through Twitter hashtags such as #IBelieveLucy, #BeenRapedNeverReported (started in support of the Ghomeshi accusers, it grew like wildfire) and the more generic #IBelieveThem.
This publicity alone spelled trouble enough for the complainants in court.
The alleged victims reported to Toronto Police only after they had been well-interviewed — in DeCoutere’s case, nine times — in the pages of the Star and other newspapers and on air at the CBC and other stations.
While that may have been empowering for the women, it meant their versions of what happened were well on the public record already — and that meant any inconsistencies or differences between what they told the media and what they told police were there for the getting by the defence team.
Witness credibility always matters in court, but particularly in sex assault cases, where almost by definition other witnesses are scarce, and especially with historic or dated allegations like these, where the events took place in 2002 and 2003 and any potential forensic evidence is long lost.
Additionally, DeCoutere and the third complainant quickly bonded as online friends over Ghomeshi, and in less than a year, from Oct. 29, 2014 to Sept. 23 last year, the two women exchanged more than 5,000 Facebook messages.
( The first complainant was not similarly tainted.)
That raised the spectre of witness collusion, and certainly, with the two women regularly reporting in to one another when they met with detectives or prosecutors, tracking Ghomeshi’s every court appearance and gleefully savouring his fall from grace, it was at least damaging.
It was particularly galling in DeCoutere’s case, for in the same period that she was nodding her head sorrowfully in TV interviews about Ghomeshi’s situation and professing compassion for him, she was telling her newfound Facebook friend, “I want him f---ing decimated.”
There was, in other words, a lynching in the collective air.
For a time, it appeared as though anyone who had ever had a date with Ghomeshi, good or bad, felt the need to go online and “share” it — and months where his name appeared far more often in major Canadian news outlet headlines than Cosby’s.
It was reminiscent of the curious child abuse/satanic ritual/predator ring cases that seemed to sweep across North America in the 1980s and early 1990s — notorious among them the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, Calif., where allega- tions grew ever wilder as 384 youngsters were identified as having been sexually abused; the Little Rascals day care in Edenton, N.C., which saw the allegedly victimized children name a total of 30 abusers, and, closer to home, the historic child abuse allegations in Cornwall, Ont., which eventually grew to become claims that “a clan of pedophiles” of prominent local citizens was operating in town.
What those cases have in common is that, for a time, suspicion itself appeared downright contagious, and the procedure for interviewing ostensible victims was deeply flawed.
What happened in the Ghomeshi case isn’t the same, of course, but there are echoes enough to be troubling.
As the allegations against Ghomeshi in the media and online grew, the pressure mounted on the police: Why did none of these women feel “safe” reporting to them?
Four days after the CBC fired Ghomeshi and the Star published its first story on the scandal, then-police chief Bill Blair encouraged women to report.
“Our first priority is their safety,” he said of alleged victims, “and their recovery.”
It was an astonishing remark for the head of an agency whose primary func- tion, many would have imagined, was to investigate allegations of crime, not comfort those reporting it.
Yet two days later, Insp. Joanna Beaven-Desjardins, commander of the force’s sex crimes unit, held a press conference to announce that three women had come forward with allegations against Ghomeshi.
In a question-and-answer session afterward, speaking generally, Beaven-Desjardins said repeatedly that “We believe victims when they come in, 100 per cent, we are behind them 100 per cent,” and “We believe them right from the onset, there’s never a doubt about believing them” and “it’s all about the victims and moving them forward.”
The three Ghomeshi accusers all duly pronounced themselves satisfied by their treatment at the hands of police. All said they felt “safe” and respected.
The results of the investigation itself are less clear.
But what did emerge about the probe at trial isn’t encouraging.
The first complainant, for instance, was interviewed once, a process that took less than an hour and which, after time deducted for various standard cautions, saw the woman “tell her story” for 14 minutes, and detectives question her for a grand total of 35 minutes.
And when the third complainant arranged to give her late-in-the-day second statement, and told the officers what it was about — that “little detail” about her taking Ghomeshi home and masturbating him — the detectives spent only nine minutes asking her about the encounter, nine minutes after 13 months of the woman steadfastly maintaining she’d kept her distance from Ghomeshi after the alleged assault.
Strangely, given the remarkable nature of the disclosure, the interview wasn’t recorded.
This isn’t the first time the practices of the sex assault unit and Beaven-Desjardins have been criticized.
Late last month, lawyer Brian Greenspan said that against the clear advice of senior prosecutors, whom unusually in this instance were consulted by police, the unit last fall laid a sex assault charge it knew would fail against prominent Brazilian soccer star Lucas Domingues Piazon and smeared him as a rapist at a press conference.
The charge was withdrawn Jan. 26.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan police commissioner and Britain’s senior law enforcement officer, wrote in The Guardian this week that it may be time for Britain to consider dropping its policy of automatically believing those who claim they have been sexually abused.
The policy was embraced in 2014, of course, the year the presumption of guilt, not innocence, took hold the planet over.
“A good investigator,” he wrote, “would go and test the accuracy of the allegations and the evidence with an open mind …”
Test the evidence, an open mind: who could have imagined these would ever be deemed revolutionary concepts for a police force?
When a jury was deadlocked in the trial of one of the chief alleged villains in the McMartin Preschool scandal, several hundred people took to the streets in protest. They carried signs that read “We believe the children.”
And on the very days when DeCoutere and the third complainant were being most roundly discredited inside Old City Hall, there were still protesters on the steps outside, with signs that read # believe all survivors and #IBELIEVEHER.
They might just as well have been covering their eyes and ears, blinder than any statue of Themis, the goddess of justice.
The judge will deliver his verdict on March 24.