Our client and the complainant dated for several years, were married for a short period, had a son together, and then divorced. During that relationship, our client pleaded guilty to two instances of assault against the complainant and received discharges instead of convictions – in other words, he did not receive a criminal record. For one case, the complainant wrote a letter to the court, hoping that the second case would resolve the same way as the first case.
In the year following their final divorce order, our client became suspicious of the complainant’s expenses. After months of argument, the complainant went to the police in order to try to complain about the old assault allegations again, saying that she was unhappy that our client did not suffer any real consequences for his prior assaults. However, she also made a new allegation: she claimed that she had been sexually assaulted and assaulted six years earlier at the start of their relationship, before they were married and even before the assaults for which he had pleaded guilty. Our client was charged with sexual assault and assault.
The complainant and our client both testified at trial. The complainant claimed that she never wrote a letter supporting our client in a previous case. She also claimed that our client had apologized for the sexual assault and assault on Facebook, but that she had deleted those messages. However, in cross-examination, the complainant was contradicted by a copy of the letter she had written in the previous case and by our client’s Facebook records, which showed that he never apologized for any assault. In response, the complainant claimed that he forged the letter and edited the Facebook records. When our client testified, he denied the allegation, he explained where the letter came from, and he showed that the Facebook records had not been edited.
The trial judge found that there was no reason to disbelieve our client about the letter, about the Facebook records, or about his denial of the allegations. Furthermore, the trial judge found that the complainant was an unreliable witness and that there was reason to suspect that she had not been telling the truth.
RESULT: Our client was found not guilty of all charges.