WARNING: This article contains graphic details heard in court that may not be suitable for some readers.
The complainant in an alleged 2019 sexual assault in Wasaga Beach completed her testimony in a Barrie courtroom on Tuesday.
The woman, now 23, was 17 at the time of the alleged incident that took place as Saturday gave way to Sunday on that Victoria Day long weekend in the resort town.
Reese Shephard, 24 now but 18 at the time, is charged with a single count of sexual assault. He has pleaded not guilty.
A publication ban preventing identifying complainants in sexual assault cases is in effect.
The accused had travelled to Wasaga Beach with a group of friends to attend a party and stay over at the host’s residence, a young woman who he knew from when she had previously lived in the Orangeville area.
The complainant attended the same party and planned to stay over at the same residence.
Shephard’s lawyer, Richard Allman, resumed his cross-examination of the complainant on Tuesday morning.
“It is my duty to confront you with my client’s version of events,” Allman told the woman, who was linked up to the court by video.
Allman posed a series of questions to the complainant that all described a consensual sexual encounter between her and the accused.
“I disagree,” the woman responded each time.
The complainant had testified a day earlier that she had entered a spare bedroom not long after midnight on May 19 with another man and that a consensual sexual encounter followed.
It is the Crown’s position that Shephard later took advantage of the woman sleeping in that same bedroom to trick her into having sex with him by pretending he was the man who had been with her earlier.
Court earlier had heard testimony from the complainant that the man had left the home, waking her up briefly in the process.
When he began his cross-examination on Monday, Allman repeatedly asked the complainant about a “blank spot” in her account. The woman claims the alleged rape occurred when she was fast asleep; Allman continued this line of questioning again on Tuesday, saying it was evidence of a faulty memory.
The woman testified she had little memory and no recognition of Shephard joining her in the darkened room. She testified she only became suspicious after she experienced pain in her vaginal area, which began around the same time as when another man at the party briefly entered the room and asked to join them, and when she began to realize the man with whom she was having sex was circumcised.
“To use my client’s words,” Allman asked the woman about a period of foreplay before intercourse took place, “(he asked you), ‘Are we about to f---?’
“Do you recall that happening?” Allman asked.
“No,” replied the complainant.
Allman also asked the woman about other verbal interactions between his client and her after he entered the room that suggested she was a willing partner.
“You told Reese it felt good and on two occasions you told him not to stop,” Allman told her.
“No,” testified the woman.
The complainant’s mother later took the stand and described what happened after her daughter arrived home at just past 5 a.m. The party took place on the same street where she lived with her parents.
Roused from her sleep, she found her daughter in her bedroom.
“She started crying and said, ‘Mom, I’ve been raped,’” her mother told the court.
The complainant’s mother immediately called 911. The woman’s husband, the complainant’s father, was awakened by the commotion, as was her brother.
“I told the (911) operator, ‘You need to send cops because (my husband) is going to go down there and hurt this boy,’” the woman told court.
Later, at the scene with police also present, the mother of the alleged victim testified she had one thought about what was taking place as the sun was rising on that Sunday morning.
“I just wanted to say to this kid,” in reference to the accused, “‘What were you thinking?’”
The trial before Superior Court Justice Christie continues Wednesday in Courtroom 1 at the Barrie Courthouse on Mulcaster Street.
