At long last, billionaire Frank Stronach’s high-profile sex assault trial has sputtered to an end.
Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy told the 93-year-old she hopes to have a decision by June on whether the former auto parts magnate is guilty or innocent of sexually assaulting three young women more than 40 years ago.
It’s difficult to “trust all women” when the crown does such a poor job.
The mantra of the #MeToo movement has been “Believe women.”
According to the lawyer for billionaire Frank Stronach, that’s led to the elderly business magnate being unjustly accused of sexual assault thanks to reckless police who took complainants strictly on their word alone without doing the slightest investigation.
It has been a bad week for anyone who saw Cesar Chavez as a hero. Across several states, his murals are being painted over and his statues are being boxed up…
Ana Murguia remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him. She walked along a dirt trail, entered the rundown building, passed his secretary and stepped into his office.
He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been. He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her and pulled her pants down. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her afterward. “They’d get jealous.”
The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. Ms. Murguia said she was summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times over the next four years.
In his first major sit-down from behind bars, the disgraced mogul fumes about life at Rikers (“I’m dying here”), his wrecked legacy and his delusions about the future (“I will be proven innocent. That I promise you”).
The day before I was to meet Harvey Weinstein, a blizzard dumped a foot of snow on New York, grinding the city to a halt. It seemed like an omen. Waking in my hotel the next morning, I half hoped that Rikers would be closed as well. Then my phone buzzed with a terse email from a prison administrator: “We’re on!” it said.
So, I called an Uber and nervously set off with a cameraman and a trunk full of recording equipment for the short voyage to Rikers, the notorious island facility in Queens where Weinstein has been incarcerated for much of the past six years.
Two more charges will be withdrawn in the sexual assault trial of Frank Stronach, meaning the Canadian businessman is now facing seven counts, down from the original 12.
“We are not going to make submissions at the conclusion of the trial, that there is sufficient evidence to sustain findings of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt with respect to the allegations relating to … counts seven and eight on the indictment,” Crown prosecutor Jelena Vlacic told court on Monday.
When Frank Stronach’s sex assault trial got underway in Toronto last month, seven women were accusing him of sexual misconduct dating back decades.
It had the potential to be one of the most explosive trials the city has seen — Stronach, 93, an auto-parts tycoon and one of Canada’s richest men, was alleged to be a serial date rapist who preyed on young women in ’70s and ’80s Toronto.
Three-and-a-half weeks later, Ontario Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy has heard from all seven women, and the Crown has closed its case.
For years, those who accused former Hedley frontman Jacob Hoggard of sexual assault remained nameless. But now, one of them is speaking out in a new documentary.
Previously referred to as J.B. or the “Ottawa woman,” Jessica Baker is now revealing her identity as the survivor of a 2016 assault by Hoggard in a Toronto hotel room.
Scandalous pregnancy-faker Laura Owens isn’t the only Owens in her family with immeasurable levels of audacity.
Ronn Owens, a famous former talk radio host in San Francisco on KGO and father of Laura Owens, has filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, listing over $2.3 million in debts. Meanwhile, he and his spouse, journalist Jan Black, pull in $21,000 per month in pensions and Social Security. Somehow, the Owens family ran up more than $300,000 in debt this year alone and then opened a GoFundMe that pulled in over $130,000 from fans — many likely living on fixed incomes as Owens’ fans are mostly senior citizens.
“#MeToo changed our culture, but it couldn’t change our courts.” “No justice for the victim.” “Survivors of sexual assault need our understanding, not courts deaf to their complaints.”
Those and many, many other headlines and ledes blared out Friday that, in one form or the other, the woman known only as “E.M.,” who had alleged five Hockey Canada junior players had gang assaulted her in 2018, had been let down by the justice system or even wronged by it.
The whole world changed in the near-decade between two of the most high-profile sexual assault trials in recent Canadian history. But inside the courtroom, it was as if no time had passed at all.
Outside, the world had been fundamentally reordered by a pandemic, by a reality TV star twice elected U.S. President, by the murder of a Black man by a police officer on a Minneapolis street, and by a series of sexual-assault allegations against a high-profile Hollywood film producer, which catalyzed a global reckoning with how we view, talk about, and confront sexual violence. The #MeToo movement was supposed to have marked the end of the era where lecherous men could blithely cop a feel behind a cubicle and expect female discretion, and the beginning of a new one where the public operates from the starting assumption of “believe all women.” And in many workplaces, schools and community spaces, things did change.
It was the correct ruling in my view.
Five former members of Canada’s world junior hockey team were acquitted of sexual assault on Thursday following a high-profile trial involving one complainant, identified only as E.M. due to a publication ban. Ontario Superior Court Justice Maria Carroccia found Michael McLeod, Carter Hart, Alex Formenton, Dillon Dube and Callan Foote not guilty of sexual assault after saying that the complainant’s testimony was not found to be “either credible or reliable.”
Justice Carroccia says she didn’t find complainant’s evidence ‘credible or reliable’
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The first two lines of the Crown’s opening statement in April at the high-profile Hockey Canada sexual assault trial clearly articulated what would become the dominant issue in a trial that captivated the country’s attention.
“This is a case about consent,” Crown attorney Heather Donkers said. “And, equally as important, this is a case about what is not consent.”
It’s an issue that will be finely parsed by Superior Court Justice Maria Carroccia when she delivers her verdicts Thursday in the case of five professional hockey players accused of sexually assaulting a young woman in a London, Ont. hotel room in 2018. Whether the judge finds the woman consented is yet to be decided; both sides have argued over what happened that night, and what it means with respect to Canadian law.
