Ottawa sex-slave convict maintaining he is innocent
It’s been a year since Antonio “Anthony” Comunale was convicted of using teenaged girls as sex slaves in a Nepean basement, and because he never took the stand, the court never heard his side of the story.
The public finally got a glimpse of his version on Friday, when at his sentencing hearing his lawyer Michael Edelson told court that his client has always maintained his innocence and, in fact, had been deprived of the right to testify in his own defence at trial.
The fresh details were revealed during submissions from Edelson, who was not the trial lawyer. He referred to a sex-behaviour assessment and pre-sentence report in which Comunale is adamant that the bondage sex was consensual, that the case should never have gone to trial, and that when it did he never got a chance to testify.
It is not known why Comunale didn’t take the stand and when asked, his new lawyer, Edelson, declined to comment, citing solicitorclient privilege.
Comunale was convicted last year of sexual assault and forcible confinement for attacks on two 16-year-old girls on the 2014 Victoria Day weekend.
Both girls gave horrifying accounts during five-day trial that they were plied with booze until they were falling-down drunk.
One said she had been hog-tied and gagged, then repeatedly raped in a Nepean basement by newfound friend Caroline Budd, 21, and Comunale, 32. The girl testified that she screamed in pain and begged them to stop but that the couple just laughed.
“They said I’m a good sex slave. … They wouldn’t stop,” the girl told the court. “They were giggling and laughing.”
During the trial, defence lawyers for the defence branded the teen victims as “pretty little liars” who concocted the sex-attack stories to keep out of trouble with their parents for being “naughty girls.”
But Ontario Court Justice Kent Kirkland, in his last ruling before retiring, described the girls’ testimony as “compelling, credible and reliable.” That there were inconsistencies, the judge said, suggested “they did not conspire to fabricate their stories.”
Budd, a mentally ill woman with the emotional age of a 13-year-old, was sentenced to federal prison for two years earlier this year. She is now out on bail awaiting an appeal of her conviction for keeping teenaged girls as sex slaves in her parents’ basement.
At Caroline Budd’s sentencing hearing, her lawyer urged the judge to spare the young woman a jail sentence in light of her emotional capacity, her list of mental disorders and a court-appointed psychiatrist’s conclusion that the “vulnerable” woman was “most at risk of being taken advantage of by other offenders due to her tendency to depend on others.”
The court also heard that a psychologist said Budd might have been coerced by Comunale.
But Ontario Court Justice Kent Kirkland said any notion that Budd was a male-coerced female sex offender would be little consolation to the two young victims whose pleas for mercy were ignored as they were terrorized in the basement. gdimmock@postmedia.com twitter/crimegarden