Former Sudbury track coach David Case and one of his athletes, Celine Loyer, sexually assaulted a 19-year-old woman in 2011 after she passed out, a Sudbury court heard Monday, the first day of the trial.
Both Case and Loyer pleaded not guilty to sexual assault charges in front of Superior Court Justice Patricia Hennessy, who is presiding over the case.
The now 28-year-old woman testified Monday she was sexually assaulted after she was invited to a barbecue at Case's home June 17, 2011.
On the night of the alleged offence, Case and Loyer picked her up from her home in the early evening. They were going to have dinner at Case's apartment. She described the evening as “pretty chill,” with casual conversation and jazz music playing in the background.
The three had only recently met. Case and Loyer were regular Saturday morning patrons of the downtown restaurant where she worked. The night she was attacked, the woman said she was offered a shot of vodka to toast a “new friendship,” the court heard.
She passed out after drinking the vodka, and the next thing she remembers clearly is waking up in the back of Case's vehicle four hours later, when they were outside her apartment building at about 1:30 a.m. on June 18.
After she woke up, she said she felt “confused, drowsy and out of it.” Outside her apartment building, she tried to light a cigarette, but lit the wrong end of it, and tossed it onto the ground. She said she had difficulty negotiating the stairs down to her basement apartment, and was met by her partner at the time, who had to change her and put her to bed.
At some point that night, the woman said she had a flashback about what happened during the four-hour window when she was passed out. She remembered laying on her back on the floor of Case's home. Loyer was between her legs, molesting the woman's genitals, and Case was at sitting near her head, telling Loyer what to do.
The victim told the court she was never interested in having sex with either Case or Loyer, and that any sexual activity took place while she was incapacitated and without her consent.
The woman also had bruises resembling fingerprints on her thighs, and marks on her neck, “almost like a bite mark,” she said. She woke up the next day and went to work, but felt very ill. She was shaking, throwing up, had diarrhea and cold and hot sweats.
Her loved ones advised her to report the incident to the police, and to go to the hospital for an examination, because they suspected date rape. She waited until June 22 — five days after the alleged assault – to go to hospital. Photos of the bruises and the nurse's notes were entered as evidence.
When Case and Loyer showed up for their regular Saturday morning breakfast, the woman said she remembers feeling scared, anxious and still confused. She still couldn't piece together what had happened, but the memory of the flashback was still fresh in her mind.
Case and Loyer acted like nothing had happened, and said to her, “Wow, pretty rough night, eh?” and that they were hung over.
They even invited her over again on June 19, and she accepted the invitation, because she still wanted to be friends – and she wanted to find out what happened. She even emailed Case, asking him what took place that night. He told her they all had a lot to drink, and that she started kissing Loyer and tried to get into Case's pants. He told her that, at one point that night, the woman got up, took off her clothes and started masturbating in front of them.
“He told me what happened can stay between them,” she said.
The woman was adamant she only had two drinks that night, despite Loyer's defence attorney, Michael Haraschuk, suggesting she had consumed much more than that.
When she mentioned the flashback to Case, she said he told her she got out of control that night and started disrespecting them in their home.
The complainant doesn't have copies of the email conversation, as they were using the Hushmail encrypted account, and Case, as the original sender, was the only one with the capability of saving them, she said.
“I apologized for my actions and told them I'd never do that if I were in the right state of mind,” she told the court.
That's when she made it clear she wanted no further communication with them.
She said Case sent her another email through Hushmail, but with a different password. Not knowing the password, she would have to contact him to get it. She said she never did that.
In explaining how she first came to know Case and Loyer, the woman testified that one day when he was at the restaurant, Case told her he worked in commodities and could help her invest her money. He told her Loyer had invested with him, and had managed to pay off her tuition as a result.
She said they looked like very nice people, “very well put together, and seemed very successful.” That appealed to her, she said. They seemed to have a lot in common, and they were “definitely people I wanted to be friends with. I aspired to be like them.”
They agreed to meet outside of the restaurant. Through that meeting, they exchanged contact information. The complainant even gave Case $150 in cash to invest on her behalf.
Their relationship progressed to the point where they invited her for dinner.
In cross examination, Haraschuk questioned the woman about her past issues with drinking, as well as the origin of the bruises on her body, suggesting they were from her bumping into a table at work, or from when she had difficulty getting down the stairs on the night of the alleged assault. She also regularly attended the YMCA to work out, and they could have happened there, Haraschuk suggested.
He said the fact the flashback happened while she was asleep suggested it was a dream, not a memory. Haraschuk suggested the illness she had been feeling on June 18 was due to a hangover from drinking too much the night before.
But the complainant was adamant that she had only two drinks — a beer and the shot of vodka. She called herself a “seasoned drinker” at the time of the alleged incident, even having been charged with impaired a few years before the alleged assault, and she had never felt or acted like that before.
The cross-examination will continue Jan. 29 at 10 a.m.
