Man jailed for sexually assaulting woman in Pictou County cabin

A man who sexually assaulted a sleeping, intoxicated stranger during a Nova Scotia cabin party has been sentenced to two years in prison.

Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Nick Scaravelli said the man violated the woman when she was in a vulnerable state and unable to consent.

Citing deterrence and denunciation, Scaravelli sentenced the 39-year-old man to two years in prison, followed by three years of probation.

“Sexual assault on a sleeping woman who had been highly intoxicated is a gross violation of her sexual and personal integrity,” Scaravelli said in a written decision released Wednesday. “Although the offender’s own intoxication later that evening may have affected his thought processes, it is not a mitigating factor ... Although there was no evidence of premeditation or gratuitous violence, the level of moral culpability of this offence is high.”

The man and the victim, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, were strangers at the time of the 2014 incident during a cabin party in the Pictou County community of Garden of Eden.

The decision said the woman was intoxicated when she arrived at the cottage around 10 p.m., and became “extremely intoxicated” later in the evening.

At one point, her then-boyfriend found her passed out on an all-terrain vehicle outside the cottage. She was incoherent and refused to go with her partner, and ran off.

She awoke the next day, disoriented and fully clothed on a bed in another cabin, with no recollection of how she got there.

As she was returning through the woods on an all-terrain vehicle, she felt pain in her rectum and had a flashback of the assault.

She then went to the hospital, where a sexual assault examination was conducted. DNA found on the victim’s vagina and anus matched the DNA profile of the man, who was also at the party.

The man, who is married with three children, testified that the victim was sober enough to consent, and the pair had consensual sex.

Scaravelli called the offender’s evidence “inconsistent with the whole of the evidence.”

He said he accepted the victim’s evidence that she was asleep or unconscious at the time of the assault and did not consent to sex.

“(The victim) described the physical and emotional pain she endured throughout this process. She felt ashamed and humiliated,” Scaravelli wrote. “Her relationship with her children and her friends was affected as well as the relationship with her partner at the time. She lost confidence in herself and trust in the people around her.”

The man was also ordered to participate in a sexual offender treatment program.