Guilty of four sexual assaults | Comedian raped women in their sleep

A comedian who forced women to have sex while they slept was found guilty of committing four sexual assaults. While he accused a victim of making it all up to get revenge, Émile Beaudry was caught out by her silence and confessions via text message.

“I should have made sure you were awake,” the accused apologized to a victim after a sexual assault.

At the end of a trial last year, Judge Manlio Del Negro found Émile Beaudry guilty of four counts of sexual assault in mid-July at the Montreal courthouse. The Quebec Court judge believed the two victims and completely rejected the defence based on the accused’s “imagination.”

Émile Beaudry, a 42-year-old Montrealer, is a relatively unknown actor who has appeared in a few short films in the last decade. His credentials include roles in a few episodes of the series District 31 And Living memories.

The identities of both victims are protected by court order, so we are omitting some details of the case.

A first victim

Émile Beaudry is determined to have sex with his date. But the victim doesn’t want to. The accused insists, but the woman holds her ground and goes to bed. When she wakes up, Beaudry is on top of her, penetrating her.

“Go back to sleep, you’re so beautiful, it won’t take long,” he tells her. The woman repeats her refusal: “Go back to sleep,” he replies. She asks him to stop several times, without success.

Same scenario the second time. The act is done “with anger and violence” and causes “great pain” to the victim.

Later, when they were no longer seeing each other, the woman spoke to him again about these events. Émile Beaudry burst into tears. The victim then had to “console him from [l]’having raped her’. Then, the accused threatened her: “If you file a complaint or if you damage my reputation, I will have no choice but to defend myself and you don’t want to go through that.”

Strangulation

A few years later, Émile Beaudry did the same thing to a new flame. One evening, the woman woke up to find the accused penetrating her and grabbing her throat. He was not wearing a condom. The woman asked him to stop, and he pulled out. The woman noticed red spots around her eyes, probably caused by the strangulation.

“I should have made sure you were awake,” Beaudry later wrote to her in a text message. “I failed to listen by not making sure you were awake,” he continued.

Another time, while the woman was drunk, Émile Beaudry took advantage of the situation to sexually assault her. On several occasions, the woman told him she was “not in a fit state”. Nothing worked. He caused her great pain.

At trial, Émile Beaudry accused one of the victims of making up the story out of revenge. A version rejected by the judge, who maintained that the victims showed no animosity or desire for revenge. Even if they were not “perfect” victims, the judge accepted their “sincere” and “credible” testimonies.

Text messages

The judge particularly held against Beaudry his writings during voluminous text message exchanges with the victims. Even though the women repeatedly accused him of having assaulted them, Beaudry never corrected the facts and instead seemed to take responsibility for his wrongdoing. An “implicit admission,” the judge concluded.

“The text message exchanges are not only abundant, but highly compromising for the accused. He does not refute the allegations of sexual misconduct […]”Not only that, but he also assumes responsibility for it,” the judge analyses.

In one case, the accused recounted at trial that he stopped having sex when he saw that the act was not “developing”.[ait] not.” According to Judge Del Negro, the relationship was “not developing because the complainant was asleep and unable to consent to the relationship.” The judge also refutes that the “smile” of a sleepy woman reflects any consent.

Sentencing observations are scheduled for next fall.^e Mathieu Castonguay represents the public prosecutor, while Mr.^e Anne-Geneviève Robert defends the offender.