sex-assault-trial-highlights-perils

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[url]http://o.canada.com/2013/09/04/sex-assault-trial-highlights-perils-young-women-face-in-todays-world/[/url]

Christie Blatchford
Published: September 4, 2013, 8:35 pm
Updated: 10 hours ago

Thereâ??s a trial going on at the downtown Toronto courthouse which, however it is resolved, offers a sharp lesson in the potential perils of the modern world for young women.

Two men, 27-year-old Patrick Sikorski and 30-year-old Daniel Griffiths, are accused of sexual assault, administering a noxious substance with intent to commit a sexual assault and committing a gang sexual assault.

They are both pleading not guilty, and Wednesday, in closing arguments, their lawyers, Eddie Greenspan and David Humphrey, ferociously attacked the prosecutionâ??s case and described the alleged victim as a dangerous and unreliable witness who, as Greenspan put it once, â??pieced together a storyâ? because â??she simply cannot reconcile casual sex as something she would have had that night.â?

Itâ??s a complicated case, but Ontario Superior Court Judge Ian Nordheimer â?? and this is a judge-alone trial, with no jury â?? neatly summarized the main elements in a March ruling.

The 32-year-old woman and a girlfriend met the two men â?? Sikorski and Griffiths are like different-sized versions of one another, both slim and good-looking, the former taller and a bit heavier than the latter â?? at a bar on Dec. 4, 2009.

They had some drinks and were invited to Sikorskiâ??s condo, where they had more drinks, at which point the woman (her identity, like that of the woman who was with her that night and that of another who showed up on the scene, is protected) felt faint.

The next thing the alleged victim knew, she woke early the next morning with no memory of what happened. Her girlfriend was passed out or asleep. She too had virtually no memory of what had occurred.

(Similar charges against the two men in relation to this second woman were withdrawn at a preliminary hearing.)

The third woman, 29, had come to the condo at some point in the evening/morning, and she helped the two other women find their clothes, get dressed and leave.

Essentially, this third woman â?? though she believed she and Sikorski were a bit of an item, he apparently considered her merely â??a friend with benefitsâ? â?? and the two men told the other women the party was over and gave them the bumâ??s rush out of the joint

The third woman testified she was angry and a little surprised to arrive at the condo, at Sikorskiâ??s repeated texted invitation, and find two naked young women there.

In an earlier age, one might have expected her to stomp out of the place.

But what she did, after getting the two women out of there, was stick around to have sex with Sikorski and Griffiths and even agreed to have some of the sex videotaped, though apparently not all of it.

This information is contained in the judgeâ??s ruling to which I referred earlier.

Prosecutor Lorna Spencer had argued the tape and third womanâ??s evidence about the sex was relevant, in that it showed that the two men were prepared to record the sex even when she objected (and therefore was telling of their attitude towards consent) and that because it showed them having sex together, it demonstrated they would have been willing to have sex together with the alleged victim.

But Judge Nordheimer ruled it wasnâ??t relevant, in part because the tape showed only small portions of the sexual activity, and in part because the woman, however she may have felt about the videoing, testified that the â??sexual activity was entirely consensual and that the idea of the respondents together having sexual activity with her was a collective one.â?

As the judge said, â??The video is not helpfulâ? about what the men would have done with an unwilling woman.

Thereâ??s a world of difference, he said, between â??the act of openly recording someone over their protests and the act of engaging in sexual activity with someone over their objection.â?

As the defence lawyers made clear in their arguments, the testimony of the alleged victim was filled with inconsistencies and fragments she remembered only later, in flashbacks, and she stuck stubbornly to her version of events even when she was contradicted by other evidence.

The best illustration of this, Greenspan pointed out, was the fact that she claimed to have been merely feeling good when she left one bar to meet the men at another, and insisted that friends who claimed sheâ??d had between six and eight vodka drinks were wrong.

There are other whopping problems with the prosecutionâ??s case, both defence lawyers said â?? chiefly the unlikelihood that Sikorski and Griffiths would have drugged and assaulted the woman given that Sikorskiâ??s uncle, who also lived at the condo, was home that night â?? and then that Sikorski would have, for good measure, invited over the third woman as a witness.

The only evidence of any drug was in traces of a prescription opioid â?? not a typical date-rape drug â?? found on a glass with Sikorskiâ??s fingerprints on it.

But 60 hours elapsed between the time of the alleged incident and the time the police searched the condo â?? and it appears, by the presence of more than 15 glasses with the prints of more than a dozen different people on them, that there had been a party in the intervening days.

But, if itâ??s very much up in the air what happened that night, let alone whether Judge Nordheimer will acquit or convict the two men, what is perfectly clear is how very complicated and scary the world now is for young women.

There are date-rape drugs that incapacitate and wipe out memory. There are cameras and men who like to record themselves having sex. There are men for whom a threesome is the norm. And there are women, like the third on the scene that night, who cheerfully agree to all that.

The surveillance video showed those four young people entering the condo building, all of them seeming happy, friendly, at 2:34 a.m.; the victim was smiling.

Not two hours later, at 4:28 a.m., the victim and her friend were captured leaving. The victim stumbled out the doors and fell to the ground. Just another fun Friday night in the big city.

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