Bravo to a sexual assault victim who dared to boldly tell the court how she was victimized twice — first by rapist Jacob Hoggard and then by his defence team at his trial.
“No one should ever have to endure the cruelty I faced in this courtroom,” she said fiercely. “The justice system is not built for survivors.”
But survivor she is.
She was finally able to hit back — both in her scathing victim impact statement delivered in a downtown Toronto courtroom Thursday and in her recently launched $2.8 million civil lawsuit against the former Hedley frontman who shattered the life she once knew.
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“Before November 22, 2016 I was a different person,” she said. “A part of me died that day that I will never get back. My life as I knew it was stolen from me and shattered beyond recognition. The assault took away my worth, my privacy, my body, my confidence and my voice.”
In her 20s at the time, the violent sexual assault left her isolated and withdrawn. “I went to sleep praying that I wouldn’t wake up the next morning. Six years later, I still have these nights.”
After meeting on Tinder, the Ottawa woman and Hoggard had arranged to hook up at a Toronto hotel. During their encounter, she testified, he suddenly turned into a different person and ignored her cries of “stop” as he choked her, spit in her mouth, slapped her across the face and viciously assaulted her over and over again.
In June, a jury believed her harrowing account and convicted Hoggard, 38, of sexual assault causing bodily harm. He was acquitted of raping a teenage fan during that same fall of 2016.
Now married with a two-year-old son, the pop star-turned-Vancouver carpenter still faces another charge of sexual assault causing bodily harm in relation to a third complainant in Kirkland Lake.
His lawyer has indicated Hoggard will appeal his conviction and fight the new charge as well.
Coming forward in 2018 unleashed another kind of hell for the Ottawa woman. “I was ridiculed online by complete strangers. Women I’ve never even met were making T-shirts and signs in support of the man that raped me.”
She then had to wait four years for justice, only to be revictimized on the witness stand. “It was part two of the trauma I have endured,” she complained. “I was forced to relive my assault over and over and over again.
“I was forced to listen to a phone call that I didn’t even remember without any choice of my own. I was forced to recount the most traumatic and humiliating moment of my life in front of a room full of strangers and the man that assaulted me.
“My control was once again, painfully taken away from me. Hearing the voice of the man that assaulted me while he stared me dead in the face was painful beyond words.”
Hoggard’s defence lawyer Megan Savard urged Justice Gillian Roberts not to hold the victim’s difficult trial experience against her client. The judge said she wouldn’t, but it was important to recognize what she went through – especially being confronted with another silhouetted complainant in a CBC interview and wrongly accused of it being her.
“That was a terrible mistake,” Roberts said.
The defence filed more than 50 character letters from Hoggard’s family and friends, all vouching for a hard-working family man who’s famous for his homemade spaghetti sauce and pesto sauce.
But he won’t be using those skills if prosecutor Jill Witkin succeeds in her submission — she said the Crown will ask for six to seven years behind bars for the convicted rapist. And it is in a jail cell where he can ponder the multi-million dollar lawsuit that also awaits him.
Filed Oct. 3, the Ottawa woman is claiming damages for pain and suffering including PTSD, thoughts of self-harm and an inability to complete her education.
Her lawsuit was served on Hoggard on this day, along with a piece of advice from a woman who will be his victim no more.
“Don’t worry,” she told him, quoting the same cold words he used as he raped her, “It will be over soon.”
The hearing continues Oct. 14 with a sentence expected Oct. 20.
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