On a day of denials and explanations, the Crown challenged the truthfulness of the former mayor of Woodstock on trial for sexual assault.
“Mr. Birtch, you’re just making this up as we go, sir,” assistant Crown attorney Jennifer Moser said to Trevor Birtch, 49, midway through her cross-examination.
“I’m not,” Birtch, the former two-term mayor, replied.
Birtch’s second sexual assault trial returned to the court Friday after several days of evidence earlier this month. Friday was set aside for Moser’s cross-examination of Birtch, who testified he believes there was a wide, female-led conspiracy in Woodstock keen on bringing him down.
He has pleaded not guilty to three counts of sexual assault involving the same complainant, a 39-year-old woman who told the court about her health and addiction issues and whose identity is protected by court order. She said she and Birtch saw each other frequently between 2017 and 2022, often with Birtch attending her downtown Woodstock apartment.
Superior Court Justice Spencer Nicholson has heard evidence describing Birtch’s bizarre and sometimes violent sex life that included the abuse of both drugs and booze and unwanted sexual contact and intercourse.
He was found guilty of assault and sexual assault in August after a trial in June involving a woman Birtch was seeing in 2021, at the same time he was seeing the complainant in this trial.
Moser meticulously went through Birtch’s testimony earlier at the trial where he portrayed himself not as an abuser but as more of a knight in shining armour who had befriended the complainant and wanted to help her with her various issues.
She zeroed in on a trip to Turkey Point in August 2021. The woman said she and Birtch drank, smoked pot and snorted cocaine on the trip to a secluded area near the beach, where they encountered a homeless man with a knife.
He was invited to eat with them, but ended up in an argument with the woman, who already had fractured her ankle after tripping over a tree root. The argument turned physical and the woman said she was thrown to the ground, kicked with steel-toed boots, choked and the knife was held to her eye.
A woman nearby threatened to call police, so Birtch packed up the barbecue and the bloodied woman and they left, after telling the man not to worry about what happened. On the way home, he pulled over and, she said, Birtch tried to force her to perform a sex act.
But Birtch testified he stepped into the fight and his shirt was cut when the knife was swung at him. When he heard a woman yell, he encouraged her to make the call. He watched the man throw the knife away and run.
And on the way home, he said he was merely helping the injured woman urinate at the side of the road.
But Moser’s question was why, especially when he was the mayor of Woodstock, did he not wait for the police and paramedics to help them. “This is extremely violent and must have been very upsetting… It must have terrified you,” Moser said.
“She said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’” Birtch said, repeating he did as she wanted. He added that, despite being close to hospitals in Simcoe, Tillsonburg and Woodstock, where he was on the hospital board, the woman didn’t want to go there and waited the next day to attend an Ingersoll hospital.
“You had a responsibility, Mr. Birtch, to ensure that this crime at that moment in time was reported, would you agree with me?” Moser said, especially knowing there was a violent man on the loose in Turkey Point.
“No,” Birtch said adding he has never been contacted by the police. Moser said the police wouldn’t know he had information to give unless he had reported it.
She suggested he was sexually aroused by the beating and, if they had stuck around, the police would have found him impaired. And, she suggested, sexually assaulting the woman at the side of the road was his response to that attack. Birtch disagreed.
Moser suggested it was Birtch, not the woman, who didn’t want to go to the hospital, because it would expose him.
He disagreed with that and all other suggestions that he sexually assaulted the woman several times, when she was high and passed out, or saying she owed him for his help. He said he was trying to help the woman with food and rides, not take advantage of her.
“It did not happen,” he said countless times in the witness box.
Birtch also denied supplying the woman with cocaine and insisted it was crushed up naproxen for an old shoulder injury, not coke, in the coin bags he kept in his medicine cabinet and briefcase. He said he “didn’t have any firsthand knowledge” of the price for a gram of cocaine.
Moser also reviewed the troubling text and audio text exchanges Birtch had with a former friend on Dec. 18, 2021. The friend had been in the throes of a serious health crisis and Moser said the tone of the exchange appeared to show they were catching up on all their personal news.
Birtch disagreed, saying he had been talking to the woman before, during and after the exchange and she had encouraged him to embellish details about his sex life because she was writing a sex story for him for Christmas.
He told the friend he was in love with a woman he wanted to marry and sent pictures of his new love wearing lingerie. He also trashed his ex-wife.
The audio texts included lurid descriptions of sexual activity, both with the victim in the first trial and the “attic” scenario, where he enthusiastically told the friend he had locked up, tied up and beat the current complainant in his attic crawl space. He said his son heard the screaming, but couldn’t find anything wrong.
In court, he agreed the details were “horrific” but “this is exactly what she was asked for” in previous phone calls.
He denied he was bragging about his violent sexual exploits to other people. Moser suggested all of what he described in the texts really happened.
She pointed to the friend’s response on Dec. 23, 2021, when she cut off the friendship and called him “a dangerous predator.”
“She set a trap,” Birtch said.
“This is what happened, Mr. Birtch,” Moser said after her exhaustive review.
“It is not,” Birtch said.
Closing arguments are slated for Sept. 27. Meanwhile, Birtch still faces an impaired driving charge in Woodstock and assault and unlawful entry charges in London.
He is to be sentenced for his first convictions on Nov. 18.