Judge at Jacob Hoggard trial apologizes for mistakenly leaking video

WARNING: This text contains explicit information that could affect people who have experienced sexual violence or who know someone who has.

The 37-year-old Hedley artist is accused of inappropriate sexual touching of a minor and sexual assault causing injury to the same teenage girl and an adult.

The error occurred on Wednesday during the cross-examination of the second plaintiff in this case.

The defense presented a video clip of a black-and-white interview with a woman, who says she took time to recover from surgery after meeting the defendant (presumably this is him at that time, Ed).

The plaintiff had claimed that it was not her in this extract, even if it was a question at this time of the pleadings of the vaginal lacerations which she had said to have endured after the alleged rape of November 22, 2016.

The voices of the two video clips have been altered, but that of the black and white clip sounds more like a male voice.

The complainant’s statement caused confusion in court, so the correct excerpt from the complainant’s CBC interview, in color this time, was shown in court.

New instructions to the jury

In her opening address to the jury, Justice Gillian Roberts of the Ontario Superior Court explained that the black-and-white excerpt should never have been tendered as an exhibit in this trial.

She adds that what is said there has absolutely nothing to do with the allegations that the accused faces.

This video clip was shown to you by mistake. Neither the Crown nor the defense knew about it, because they thought it was the same person and it was only later that they realized the mistake.she says.

The magistrate adds that to err is human and that trials are not immune to such mistakes.

She refrained from saying whether the man referred to in the wrong excerpt is the defendant Jacob Hoggard and she urged the jurors never to consider what they heard in their further deliberations.

She assures the jury that she apologized to Complainant Number 2 just before the start of the hearing this morning. After these new instructions, the defense of the accused resumed its cross-examination of the prosecution witness.

End of cross-examination

The telephone call between the woman and the accused is at the heart of the pleadings. At the time, she contacted the accused upon returning from Toronto, where she says she was raped at a downtown hotel.

The plaintiff admits that she never had stitches on her return to Ottawa when she went to see the doctor, contrary to what she told the singer on the phone.

She also claims that she did threaten the singer to seek the services of a lawyer, even though she lied to him by saying that she was working in a law firm at the time.

Thought I’d get an apology from her and then we could move onshe continues.

She also admits that the language she uses during this call is not romantic and that she speaks in an explicit and vulgar way.

Yes, we had agreed to sleep together and it was only a one night stand and not the beginning of a love affairshe explains.

The woman finally acknowledges that she was often in communication with the accused on various social networks before going to Toronto.

The defense then submits to him the text message they exchanged just before the phone call from Jacob Hoggard.

The complainant acknowledges that she did not accuse him of raping her, but rather that he exceeded the limits in the hotel room.

Faced with the accused’s misunderstandings about what she is saying, she replies that[elle] maybe overdoing it and he shouldn’t be worried.

During the Crown’s right of reply, the complainant first asserts that she did not know that the conversation was being recorded and acknowledges that she never used the word rape in this exchange.

She adds that hearing the phone conversation almost six years later was traumatic: I don’t like the calm tone of his voice after the horrible experience he put me throughshe concludes.

The judge asked her to take care of herself by thanking her for her testimony.