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It was an incredibly amazing verdict.
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After six days of deliberation, a jury of 10 men and two women found Hedley leader Jacob Hoggard guilty of sexual assault that caused bodily harm in the brutal rape of an Ottawa college student in 2016, but not guilty of raping a 16-year-old fan in love. or sexually touching her when she was only 15 years old.
Too bad she won’t go straight to jail right away: High Court Judge Gillian Roberts wasn’t prepared to revoke her bail as requested by the Crown.
Hoggard looked affected. The former pop star, who once had the world at his feet, sank into his chair, staring at the shocked lawyer’s desk as his lawyer, Megan Savard, whispered in his ear. without any hesitation assuring him that this was not over.
The Ontario Court of Appeal is just a few meters away.
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The Crown will probably appeal as well. Of the two complainants, it was the 16-year-old who found it most convincing that sex had been against her will. Those of us who have been following the trial since it began in early May assumed that, in any case, Hoggard would be convicted of the charges involving her.
The longer the jury was out, the more it seemed that Hoggard could be acquitted of all charges.
Obviously, the jurors were pending the issue of consent and repeatedly returned to Roberts to ask him about the law surrounding this issue, and they were especially interested in how he related to the Ottawa woman he had met on Tinder and who he had arranged to meet at the Thompson Hotel.
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They seemed to be in trouble because she had lied to Hoggard during a long phone call, secretly recorded by Hoggard, after their meeting when he told her he needed stitches and consulted a lawyer. He said he was trying to provoke him to apologize so he could leave that nightmare behind.
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His lawyer, however, had urged the jury to find that he had no credibility and could not believe it.
It was so problematic in the jury room that the jury members twice told the judge that they could not make a decision on all aspects. Roberts almost let them surrender after the second time, but both the Crown and the defense urged her to continue deliberating.
And so they did, spending most of the weekend listening to reproductions of Hoggard’s testimony and the two whistleblowers.
It seemed like a strong case of Crown: no woman knew about the other when they went to the police in 2018 with strangely similar stories of rape and degradation two years earlier by a famous pop star who seemed to become a different person, a “monster.” a “psychopath,” the flirtatious, kind man they had met online.
They maintained their allegations, even though the pandemic was interrupted, and it took them four years to finally go to trial.
When he took office, Hoggard insisted that he never sexually touched the teenager before the age of 16 and that his sexual encounters with the two complainants were consensual.
The jury was not told that Hoggard is still facing a separate charge of sexual assault that has caused bodily harm since June 2016 in Kirkland Lake with similar allegations.