(Quebec) There are two Harold LeBels, according to the Crown: one who says he remembers almost perfectly the night of October 2017 at the heart of his sexual assault trial, and the other who has memory lapses and confides to the police that he does not really remember the evening.
The memory of the former deputy was at the heart of the cross-examination conducted by the prosecution on Tuesday, at the Rimouski courthouse.
“It’s crazy, everything good I did, and everything for an evening that I don’t really remember what happened,” said the former Parti Québécois elected official to the police officers who told him. questioned after his arrest on December 15, 2020. On Monday, the prosecution also revealed that he had spoken of ” blackout to investigators.
The Crown also insisted on the differences between the answers given by the accused in court and those given to the investigators. To the latter, for example, he said he did not remember if the two women had slept one or two nights at his house in October 2017. In front of the court, he said he remembered very well that it was two nights.
To explain all this, Harold LeBel mentioned that he was stressed during his interrogation and was dragged out of bed at 6:45 a.m. by the police that morning. Then, the news of his arrest came out in the newspapers. “Everything was falling apart in front of me,” he replied to the Crown prosecutor. “I was not in a good mood. »
The Crown tried to demonstrate that he was rather in full possession of his faculties after his arrest. He even bothered to leave the police station in a car with tinted windows. He also asked to change his surgical mask before going out in front of the media, because he was wearing one from the Festi Jazz de Rimouski and he did not want to splash the event.
The prosecution again tried to understand why the 60-year-old man had chosen to sleep in the Murphy bed with the complainant, rather than asking the two young women to sleep in the same bed. “I never thought of” asking them, replied Mr. LeBel.
“I was trapped in the situation. I had never planned all that, me. […] The trap is that I was in my apartment, I had a girl in one bed and a girl in another,” the defendant told the jury. “I should have woken up a girl to tell her to go join the other one”.
The cross-examination ended in the morning of Tuesday, which marks the end of the evidence. Oral arguments will take place on Wednesday. Then, Judge Serge Francœur, of the Superior Court, will give his instructions to the jury on Monday for deliberations.
In all, the jurors heard three testimonies. That of a crime scene technician from the Sûreté du Québec was mainly aimed at establishing the layout of Harold LeBel’s condo, where the events of October 2017 took place.
The decisive testimonies are those of the complainant, whom a court order prohibits identification, and Harold LeBel.
The first told how the man had tried to kiss her while her colleague had gone to sleep in LeBel’s bed. The unsolicited kiss had taken her by surprise, she said. She would have rejected the advances of the then deputy. The man would then have tried to undo her bra, then to force the door of the bathroom where she had taken refuge.
He then slept next to her in a Murphy bed where she said she spent the night paralyzed while he touched her buttocks and anus.
Mr. LeBel rather assures that after the consensual kiss, he lay down next to her and fell asleep. The next day, he says he woke up with his right hand in his hair and his right arm on her, a closeness that occurred despite him by chance during sleep.