Recalled to testify, the complainant in an alleged sexual assault that took place at a Wasaga Beach house party on Victoria Day long weekend in 2019 offered potentially critical evidence on Friday.
Reese Shephard, now 24, is on trial facing a single charge of sexual assault after pleading not guilty before Superior Court Justice Vanessa Christie in the judge-alone proceeding. The identity of the complainant is covered by a publication ban that protects the identity of alleged victims of sexual assaults.
The 23-year-old woman was called back to the stand to be questioned about a narrow topic regarding her previous interaction with the accused before the alleged incident. The woman maintained that she only briefly met Shephard once before that night. Moreover, the woman told court she couldn’t remember much about it.
“I don’t have any recollection of what we talked about,” the woman said in response to a question from Crown attorney Dennis Chronopoulos.
The woman also said she had no memory of communicating over social media, messaging apps or by more conventional means such as email, text or phone.
“I’ve never had (Shephard’s) phone number,” she testified.
That position is in sharp contrast to what Shephard told court last week: that he had met the woman as many as seven times previously and that they had bonded because she confided to him that her sister had suffered from addiction issues.
Again, the complainant offered an entirely different scenario.
“No, my sister has never had an addiction problem,” she told court on redirect examination by Chronopoulos.
Shephard’s defence lawyer, Richard Allman, pressed the woman on whether she had read any of BarrieToday’s coverage of the trial, which has been carried on other sites across the Village Media network.
“Are you aware that (this case) has been covered in the popular press?” Allman asked her.
“Only from my (own testimony),” she replied of the two days she spent on the stand, Dec. 16 and 17.
One side says there was virtually no relationship, while the other says there were many more meetings, with at least one conversation over a deeply emotional topic. Like their respective testimony about the encounter that took place in the spare bedroom at the party, both cannot be true.
It’s the Crown’s case that Shephard snuck into the bedroom in the wee hours of the morning and pretended to be another man as a ruse to have sex with her. The encounter stopped quickly once she began to wake up from her stupor and became aware Shephard wasn’t her intended paramour, who had already left the party.
Shephard maintained over his two days on the stand last week that the sex was consensual, if somewhat spontaneous after he encountered her in that bedroom while checking on his sleeping arrangements.
The recall of the complainant was made because of a rule in law called Browne v. Dunn. It refers to a case in Victorian England that established the precedent that if a witness has their evidence contradicted by another witness, they must be afforded the opportunity to respond in cross-examination.
The woman was cross-examined by Allman on critical elements of his client’s defence, but she was not asked about the vast differences in how much Shephard claimed the two had met prior to the alleged assault.
The reason for that could be that Allman, who has otherwise provided Shephard with a vigorous defence, was unaware until his client offered the evidence on the stand.
While a remnant of 19th-century jurisprudence was in play in the courtroom on Friday, evidence introduced during the trial was very much modern-day, including lurid descriptions of sex and talk of hook-up culture. There was even a Snapchat tutorial.
The latest snag has moved final submissions to March 4 in Newmarket, where Christie is presiding over another trial that week.
Shephard was arrested and charged just past 8 a.m. on the morning of May 19, 2019. By the time Christie renders her judgment on an as-yet-undetermined date, the case will be almost six years old, roughly a quarter of the time both the complainant and accused have been alive.
