Pimp who arranged to have victim gang raped receives four-year prison term

Article content

A man who forced a young woman to work as a stripper and arranged to have her gang raped while he tried to push her to work as an escort was sentenced Friday at the Montreal courthouse to a four-year prison term.

Article content

Emmanuel (Pac-man) Stark, 48, was already serving a sentence as a long term offender when Quebec Court Judge Pierre Dupras sentenced him to the prison term. In March last year, the same judge found Stark guilty of assault, sexual assault, living off the avails of prostitution, and sexual assault while being party to the offense with another person (the gang rape).

Stark was arrested early in 2017 in an investigation into how he preyed on women addicted to crack while hanging out at Place Émilie-Gamelin. During 2016 and 2017, he used their dependency on drugs to convince two women to work as prostitutes for him.

Shortly after the arrest, the Montreal police issued a release saying they suspected Stark had other victims and, months later, he was charged in the case he was sentenced for on Friday.

Article content

The young woman told police she met Stark in 1995 at a fast food restaurant in Pierrefonds while she was a student at a CEGEP. Two months later they were living together and Stark began assaulting the woman while he tried to convince her to work as a stripper.

At first, she would show up at the strip bar Stark ordered her to go to and did nothing. When she returned to her apartment with no money Stark would assault her. She began stripping her to put an end to the beatings and then learned he expected her to also perform oral sex on clients. She eventually began working at other bars, including some outside of Montreal.

Dupras’ 10-page decision describes how Stark raped and sodomized the woman against her will over a period of two years. At one point, while he tried to force her to work as an escort, Stark arranged to have at least seven men gang rape her. He then informed the men that their participation in the gang rape wasn’t free and proceeded to collect money from them.

Article content

Everything came to an end in October 1997, when the victim was beaten so badly she ended up at the Sacré Coeur Hospital. When she was discharged she moved to another country to get away from Stark.

In his decision, Dupras wrote that the repeated violence inflicted on the victim, the gang rape, and the fact that he took all of the victim’s money were aggravating factors in the sentence. He also wrote that he could find no mitigating factors to apply to the sentence.

During sentencing arguments, prosecutor Yasaman Jahanbakhsh asked that Stark be sentenced to a 5-year prison term while defense lawyer Fabrice Poirier argued that a 30-month prison term was more appropriate.

Dupras wrote that he had to take into consideration how the time Stark served behind bars before he was sentenced was mostly used against the sentence he received last year in the case involving the drug addicts he forced into prostitution.

Article content

In that other case, on Dec. 15, Stark was declared a long term offender. He was sentenced to the time he had already served since 2017, the equivalent of 90 months, and Quebec Court Judge Anne-Marie Lanctot applied the long term offender designation for a period of five years. It means the Parole Board of Canada can impose a series of conditions on Stark for a period of five years after the sentence he received on Friday expires.

[email protected]