A 34-year-old Montrealer accused of repeatedly sexually assaulting his nine-year-old half-sister was acquitted on Tuesday due to his credible denial and unreliable Crown witnesses. The crimes with which he was charged were particularly sordid.
Posted yesterday at 4:53 p.m.
The now-adolescent complainant testified at trial that she was assaulted seven or eight times by her “uncle” in the summer of 2016 in Montreal. The girl considered the accused as her uncle, but in fact, he was her half-brother since they have the same father. To protect the identity of the victim, we cannot name the accused in this case.
That summer, the accused lived in the same apartment as the girl. It was therefore in the absence of the child’s parents that the accused took action, according to the complainant’s account.
One afternoon, the girl claims to have entered the room of the accused, while he was masturbating while watching a pornographic video. Shortly after, the accused allegedly asked him to drop his pants and get on all fours. According to the complainant, this is how the accused entered her anus for several minutes.
“During the attack, she thought that it was going to pass since it was something normal, that it was not so serious and that the accused would eventually stop”, relates the judge.
The accused did it the same way several times over two weeks, the complainant testified. At the last opportunity, the girl claims to have felt severe pain in the lower abdomen as if someone had hit her. She was about to cry. The accused then stopped and told her to dry her tears. The complainant says she had been bleeding for a week.
Subsequently, the complainant claims to have become “unpleasant” and to have “grown up too quickly for her age”. It was in January 2021 that she revealed everything to her mother. The latter claims to have then obtained a confession from the accused during a family meeting at McDonald’s. After discussions with the girl’s father, in Africa, the mother would have asked the accused to do something in their native country because this situation was a “curse”.
A “scenario set up” against him, defends the accused
At trial, the accused strongly denied having sexually assaulted his stepsister. He admits to a single accidental event: touching the complainant’s back while taking a towel in the shower in 2014. He maintains that this case is a “scenario set up” against him to encourage him to leave Canada because his father l had designated as the beneficiary of his life insurance policy.
Judge Érick Vanchestein believes that the accused delivered a “simple, sincere and direct” version by answering all the questions “without any reluctance”, in particular that on his overconsumption of pornography. Even if his testimony was not “totally believed” by the judge, it cannot be rejected “totally” and raises a “doubt in the mind” of the Tribunal.
Justice Vanchestein also has “serious doubts” about the reliability of the key Crown witnesses. The judge does not hold “in any rigor” to the complainant as to her inaccuracies in connection with the assaults, but underlines her “slight tendency to amplify certain facts”.
His story loses reliability above all because of a “central” element. According to the complainant, the accused was viewing pornography on a laptop computer in his bedroom prior to the assaults. However, the accused and the complainant’s mother maintain that the accused did not have a laptop computer at that time.
The judge also noted the “significant inaccuracies” and “gaps” in the testimony of the complainant’s mother concerning the events that followed her daughter’s denunciation.
During his police interrogation, the defendant said that the girl accidentally touched his penis over his clothes while she was playing with him in the living room in the presence of other family members. According to the judge, this is not a “valid” confession, since the investigator was too insistent during the interrogation.
Me Charles Doucet led the case for the public prosecutor, while the accused was defended by Mr.e Julien Archambault.