Woodstock’s disgraced former mayor found “the perfect victim” in the woman he routinely sexually abused, the judge said.
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“It is clear to me that Mr. Birtch victimized (the woman) repeatedly during the relationship, plying her with drugs and alcohol, treating her body like he owned her, and doing what he wanted to do to her when he wanted to do it,” Superior Court Justice Spencer Nicholson said in a scathing decision on Wednesday in convicting Trevor Birtch, 49, on two of three counts of sexual assault.
Nicholson said, for the most part, he believed the vulnerable 39-year-old victim with addiction issues and mental and physical health problems, who described an assortment of unwanted sexual encounters at Birtch’s second sexual assault trial last fall.
The judge didn’t believe Birtch and his “blanket denial of sexual impropriety” and the downplaying of his drug use.
“Bluntly, I found Mr. Birtch to be completely incredible and an obvious liar,” Nicholson said.
The judge said Birtch, the two-term mayor who was trounced in the 2022 election after being charged, “wove tale after tale” during his testimony “only to have his lies completely dismantled and laid bare during cross examination“ by assistant Crown attorney Jennifer Moser.
“Some of his explanations were baffling to me and comically incredulous,” Nicholson said. “I find that Mr. Birtch lied frequently and extravagantly during his testimony, frankly insulting the court’s intelligence.”
Mere months before this trial started in the fall, Birtch already had been convicted of sexual assault and assault involving a 45-year-old former girlfriend in 2021. There was some overlap between the two cases.
Last month, Superior Court Justice Michael Carnegie, who presided over the first case, declared a mistrial because of Crown evidence disclosure issues related to a key witness, a former friend of Birtch’s, who testified at the second trial and had a racy text and audio conversation with Birtch about his sex life.
The charges at the trial heard by Nicholson involved a different victim and spanned from 2017 when they first met to 2022, although the bulk of the allegations began in 2019.
“To put it mildly, this is a bizarre case,” Nicholson said.
Nicholson acquitted Birtch on a third sexual assault charge, because the victim had a “vague” memory about the specific encounter in April 2022, the last time they were together, when she said Birtch grabbed her breast while in his car and raped her later at her apartment while she was too high to stop him.
But the judge firmly rejected the defence view that there was a conspiracy by women to humiliate Birtch.
The judge had major difficulties with some of Birtch’s explanations. One was his assertion he crushed up over-the-counter pain medication and put it in coin bags to snort for a shoulder injury, claiming it worked faster and the victim was mistaken when she said it was cocaine.
“I reject that evidence completely,” Nicholson said. “I also find it entirely unbelievable that anyone holding a public position of trust would keep coin bags of crushed-up white powder that was not cocaine on their person, appearing to anyone who might see it to be a drug addict.”
Instead, he believed the victim who said she and Birtch would consume “copious” amounts of drugs and alcohol when together and that Birtch supplied the cocaine.
Nicholson also rejected Bitch’s explanation that he was just trying to fulfill a friend’s request when he gave a violent account of what he called the “attic torture scenario” about tying up, beating and repeatedly raping the victim. The judge called that “utter nonsense.”
The victim denied to the friend and the police that the violence happened, although she could describe Birtch’s house and recalled one visit lasting three or four days. She only remembered wanting a massage and Birtch taking off her clothing.
Nicholson said he couldn’t accept the Crown argument the victim was too high to remember the incident because the victim did have memories of encounters when she was intoxicated.
However, Nicholson said he heard a change in the tone of Birtch’s voice during the conversation with the friend that was played in court.
“Mr. Birtch’s enthusiasm on the audio recording is palpable and disturbing,” he said. “I strongly suspect that Mr. Birtch was high and/or drunk on the audio recordings . . . which includes audiotapes about the attic torture scene.”
Birtch never offered that suggestion in his testimony but “rather, he chose, in my view, to fabricate a totally unbelievable explanation” Nicholson said.
“But he sounds wired on the audio clip,” the judge added and he did not find it believable “that (the victim) would be locked up for several days in Mr. Birtch’s attic, treated like this and have absolutely no recollection of any of the alleged beatings.”
Nicholson said he initially had doubts about the victim’s allegations involving an ill-fated picnic trip to Turkey Point, until Birtch verified some of details in his testimony. The victim said she and Birtch heading to the area, her tripping on a tree root and seriously injuring her ankle, and a homeless man kicking her and holding a knife to her eye while they were preparing the picnic.
Nicholson noted Birtch never called police “which is remarkable given what transpired and his role as both mayor of Woodstock and member of the police services board” and suggested Birtch didn’t call police because he was drunk or high.
Later, Birtch took the victim to a hospital in Ingersoll, not in Woodstock.
On the way home, when the woman said her jaw hurt, Birtch told her he had a “jaw aligner,” pulled over the car, got out, unzipped his pants and tried to force her to perform a sex act. Nicholson rejected Birtch’s explanation that the woman needed to urinate and they stopped at the side of the road for that reason.
Birtch also was convicted of a wide-ranging count that covered the entire time he and the victim knew each other.
“Generally, (the victim) described she was raped frequently by Mr. Birtch once per week or twice every two weeks” starting in 2019, the judge said.
The victim described several unwanted sexual acts initiated by Birtch and said he was “very controlling“ and accused her of not being grateful enough for his help with landlord issues and other problems before initiating sexual activities.
A pre-sentence report was requested by defence lawyer James Battin. Sentencing for Birtch is slated for May 5.