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Inside the Crown's teetering case against billionaire Frank Stronach at Toronto rape trial
Analysis
She entered the courtroom on crutches, tottering toward the witness stand, barely managing to get up and seated, an elderly woman of 73. But she spoke with confidence, lively and engaged with her questioner, telling a story that happened in Toronto in 1977, soon after her 25th birthday.
“It happened so quickly. I was just pushed forward, face first, from behind, fairly forceful,” she said. “It wasn’t violent but it was firm.”
She had met Frank Stronach at Rooney’s, the nightspot the billionaire auto parts magnate owned near Yonge and St. Clair. Stronach, now 93 but then 45, had sent Champagne to her birthday party table, and they had eaten dinner together multiple times in the adjoining restaurant he also owned, Le Connaisseur .
They ate lobster there that fall evening, she testified. “I can’t remember whether we migrated to Rooney’s but at some point he said ‘Would you like to see my apartment?’”
She said she felt no apprehension, that they were on polite and friendly terms, so she agreed, and they drove the short way in his Cadillac to an apartment near Mount Pleasant Road and Balliol Street. Inside, he briefly stepped away, then suddenly reappeared behind her.
He pushed her over an armchair, she said, lifted her skirt. She remembered her two-piece dress in red wool with a dashed pattern of ivory and grey from the St. Regis Room in the old Simpsons department store. She was wearing stockings and a garter belt, bra, panties and a half slip. She testified he tried to penetrate the underwear that remained on. She could feel his penis, she said, but could not say whether it was exposed.
“Frankly, it was kind of bizarre,” she said. “It was kind of pathetic…. I have to say I felt betrayed.… I freed myself from this bizarre event and I gathered up my things and I left.”
Seven young women of 1980s Toronto are the alleged victims in this high stakes rape prosecution of a famous, powerful man. All have now testified, and the Crown’s case is complete. The defence will call evidence starting Monday. Stronach has pleaded not guilty to all 12 charges for offences that allegedly took place between 1977 and 1990.
Now older and in some cases frail and elderly, most complainants came forward ten years ago, amid a cultural revolution in the ethics and law of sexual assault, broadly known as #MeToo. Looking back to the incidents, many said they tried to put it behind them, expecting not to be believed or even listened to.
Back then, some lived in apartments in the Yonge and Eglinton area, another with her mother in Cabbagetown. Most first crossed paths with Stronach at Rooney’s. Some allege he raped them at his Harbour Castle condo, in one case after a dinner date in the adjoined revolving restaurant. The Balliol incident is unique, and seems to be among the cases the defence will claim never happened at all, that he may never have even had an apartment there. With others at the Harbour Castle condo, Stronach’s counsel will argue that either the women consented to sex or he reasonably and honestly believed they had.
“When you find yourself in a condominium, I don’t know how many storeys up, late at night, with a man you really don’t know, and he starts doing something like that, you have a choice, I suppose, to struggle or just to acquiesce, and you don’t know what’s going to happen if you struggle,” one woman testified.
Rooney’s is long since torn down and the Harbour Castle restaurant no longer revolves, but these places make up more than just the geographical context of the alleged crimes. They are circumstantial similarities that mutually support the credibility of each other, Crown prosecutors argue. For example, the drive in Stronach’s sports car down Yonge Street from Rooney’s to Harbourfront to see the view of the Toronto Islands from his condo was not just a common coincidence in these stories, but also allegedly a legally relevant criminal pattern.
In their testimony that ended this week, the women’s memories of these places were among the most deeply examined, some details vague and hazy, others shockingly precise: the peacocks etched in the mirrors at Rooney’s, with its mirrored disco ball, the black leather and chrome furniture at the Harbour Castle condo, the mirrored ceiling over the bed, the mucked out stalls of Stronach’s equestrian barn in Aurora.
Many complainants alleged a routine of being urged into the apartment to admire the view, then briefly left alone only to have Stronach appear suddenly behind them, lead them firmly toward a bed, and be all over them, ripping at their pantyhose, ignoring their tears and refusals, barely undressing either of them, just enough for quick intercourse not using a condom. Then, his uncomfortable insistence on driving her home, to Cabbagetown, High Park, Yonge and Eglinton.
Many of these details intersect. But in criminal law, common narrative features can cut both ways. They can cast suspicion on a witness as much as a defendant.
They can suggest separate similar stories are more likely true, as the Crown argues. But they can also suggest the storytellers have influenced each other, as the defence argues. More crucially, they can suggest the Crown improperly coached them, as will be argued in an all-or-nothing application that could torpedo all the charges at the trial’s end, in about two weeks.
This is a case that played out in public media before it reached Ontario Superior Court. Already, the court has watched a witness’s anonymized segment on a CBC documentary about Stronach, and heard a transcript of her interview with a Toronto Star reporter. There has even been a cameo by Jane Boon, a writer who lives in New York, who is not a complainant in this trial but is suing Stronach civilly for allegedly sexually assaulting her when she was a co-op student at his auto parts company Magna, a story broadly similar to the others, and very similar to one.
Boon showed up at court during the complainants’ testimony despite an order that potential witnesses were excluded, and had to be explicitly told by the judge to leave, but not before coming in and approaching the bench to within a couple of feet of where Stronach himself was sitting, perhaps not their final courtroom encounter.
Boon’s public disclosure of her allegations figured in one of the trial’s most dramatic moments so far.
A complainant witness had testified that her father had known Stronach, that her family had visited the Stronach mansion for dinner, and that as a university student her mother got her a summer job at Magna. Instantly credible, sophisticated, articulate, this witness under cross-examination eventually started to seem like she was trying to outfox the defence lawyer and not quite managing it.
She flagged her own use of the conditional tense for her memories, “I would have …” which she used in her preparatory meetings with Crown. She had discussed it as a weird way to phrase testimony, and so made efforts not to use it on the stand, none of which made her memory seem more natural. Nor did her testimony about making sure to avoid the “omissions” the Crown had drawn to her attention, details that would be useful to the prosecution’s case. Rather, it made her testimony seem like a series of deductions and efforts to be precisely consistent with how she had told the story before.
So, when she showed up the next day wanting to apologize for lying to the court under oath that she had not read Boon’s newspaper article about her allegations, you could almost hear another plank splitting in the architecture of this case.
“I wanted to say, sorry, I don’t have anything to hide or anything to gain by being here,” she said. She continued to explain why she initially lied until the judge stopped her, saying it wasn’t “an opportunity to make a speech.”
This episode also got the prosecutors in trouble, one of several mistakes so far.
“You knew she wasn’t telling the truth and you did nothing,” the judge said. “I want you to reflect on that. It’s not what I expect from the Crown.”
Stronach also faces another upcoming criminal trial for six sexual assault charges in York Region, spanning dates from 1988 to 2024.
In the Toronto case, seven witnesses have now testified. The Crown’s case is over, and the defence will begin on Monday.
The testimony of each witness has failed in its own way to definitively seal the case against him. Witnesses have had their credibility attacked for lying, or seeming to invent details, or conveniently remember them on the witness stand. In one case, a witness acknowledged a long track record of litigation that reveals what even a civil judge has described as dishonesty, including allegedly framing a man for making death threats.
One witness had such an emotional breakdown on the stand, after hours of rambling testimony in which the judge instructed her over and over again in vain to simply answer the questions, that a Toronto Police crisis team with medical support was called in. Not long before that, another dramatic moment came when defence counsel caught this witness secretly reading from hidden notes. She falsely claimed this was just a recipe for salmon in cream sauce, prompting a brief panic about whether these notes — written, she eventually admitted, the night before about what to say in testimony — could be taken into evidence, and whether they might include private information. They were, but the point is moot because the Crown asked the judge to withdraw both charges involving this witness: first the forcible confinement because her testimony did not support it, then the sexual assault because her testimony was so “garbled,” as the judge said, that she had to be excused. A brief recess was called to break this hard news to her before it was published by media.
Two other charges are the subject of a defence request for directed verdicts of not guilty: one because it is charged under the post-1983 sexual assault law but the witness testified it might have been 1982, and the other from 1977 because it might not meet the legal requirements of the outdated charge of attempted rape.
In courtroom 4-9 at the University Avenue courthouse, this long awaited case, 40 years in the making and 20 years since the first report was made to police, is slowly falling apart.
Its significance may be neither here nor there, but it should not go unmentioned that this is a trial conducted by women. There are men around: the bailiff on the door, a defence associate, a Crown specialist who lost an early battle, Stronach himself, always silent. But beyond the gallery threshold it is almost all women: registrar, reporter, judge, prosecutors, defence counsel.
The defence will argue at the end of trial that the Crown has improperly coached and tainted the witnesses, and so the charges should be stayed because of this abuse of process. The judge has already ruled this claim has an “air of reality,” but has yet to hear the arguments.
The way things are going, it seems Stronach might not even need that.
Through cross examination, the defence has elicited some details of witnesses learning details of other complainants’ stories through the media — including torn pantyhose and the view from the condo over the Toronto Islands — but nothing like the deliberate collusion it seemed to hint at when the trial began. None of the complainants said they knew each other or had discussed the case, although some have had discussions with the same civil lawyer.
Over and over again, witnesses explained key details of their stories not as memories but as deductions. Not “I did this,” but “I would have done this,” or “It must have been….” That includes date ranges for the alleged rapes in some cases more than a year wide, and in one case maybe spring but also maybe fall, a deduction based on the memory of not wearing a coat.
The overall impression is of a prosecution on the ropes, sometimes blindsided by its own witnesses, despite the alleged coaching.
Last month, the first witness initially presented as especially credible because of her experience in politics. But there were hints of the troubles to come, including a cursory mention to the prosecutor of bipolar disorder, and a curious claim to have suffered at the time from paralyzed vocal chords that left her functionally mute, even though at least some of her story involved her talking.
Asked to estimate what floor she was on in the alleged crime scene condo, she paused, and curiously said, “Excuse me for a second as a I use my hands for my own brain,” and then arranged her hands in front of her face to visualize.
For someone who had testified about this before at a preliminary inquiry, as all the witnesses had, it was an odd way to go about it, no less baffling than when she later explained the vocal paralysis was a consequence of doing John Wayne impressions to amuse herself.
By the end of her cross examination, she was flummoxed and flailing on every question, seemed to realize it, and tried to be combative in return.
She described working at Stronach’s thoroughbred horse racing stables in Aurora, Ont., a rich countryside area just north of Toronto. She had come from working at Woodbine Racetrack, where Stronach was a legend, famous as much for his equestrian interests as for Magna. She had been there just two weeks before the alleged incident, which she claimed to be “90 per cent” sure it was in 1981.
At Rooney’s with two other female grooms to celebrate her birthday, she said Stronach showed up with Champagne, molested her on the dance floor, shoved her into a booth, he was like an “octopus.” She testified she woke up later on her back, looking up into her own face reflected in a mirrored ceiling with Stronach’s naked back and buttocks on top of her.
“I have spent 40 years trying to figure out how I got into that bed,” she testified.
She said he drove her back up Yonge Street to her car at Rooney’s, then she drove back south toward the westbound highway to her parents’ house in Mississauga, but stopped on Queen Street West to get her rage out through yelling, swearing, and stomping her feet.
She reported this first in 2015. She came to feel then that she would be a hypocrite to keep silent as the Ghomeshi saga unfolded. She also once told a police officer she was prompted by that year’s news about Bill Cosby. Defence counsel suggested she was a “storyteller,” a fabulist if not actually a liar, who had never worked at Stronach’s barn at all.
The final witness brought the prosecution’s case to a close with similar allegations of rape in the Harbour Castle condo as she cried throughout.
But she also introduced similar problems of credibility, including factually false testimony the defence characterized as lies, not about the alleged crime, which the defence is set to argue was consensual sex, but about what she had read about the case before testifying, and the discussions she had with other people before speaking to police, including civil lawyers. She has not filed a lawsuit.
“I’m not some retired housewife,” she said. “I’m risking a lot just being here today.” She repeatedly called herself a “tax-paying citizen” before cross-examination about her business drew even that into doubt.
With nothing but defence evidence to come, and legal arguments about whether prosecutors and police engaged in an abuse of process, it seems the Ontario Crown is on track to bookend the #MeToo movement with two major failed rape prosecutions of powerful famous men, Jian Ghomeshi, whose case prompted many of these women to come forward, and now Frank Stronach.
National Post
Unpublished Newswire
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