It was a small town concert in northeastern Ontario in the summer of 2016.
After attending the Hedley show at the community complex in Kirkland Lake, she and some other teen fan girls climbed into a van taking lead singer Jacob Hoggard and his bandmates to a bonfire afterparty in a forest behind the Comfort Inn.
And when Hoggard later asked her back to his room, she accepted.
“I mean, I trusted him. I found him pleasant. I didn’t see anything abnormal,” she testified.
But prosecutors allege that trust would prove to be horribly misplaced: “This case is about what happened in Mr. Hoggard’s hotel room that evening,” Crown Lily Gates told the Haileybury jury in her opening statement.
The 40-year-old former frontman for the now defunct pop band has pleaded not guilty to sexual assault. In an agreed statement, Hoggard admitted having sex with the woman in his hotel room but insists it was consensual.
In a dark suit, he sat at his lawyers’ table in the small courtroom as he listened the prosecutor laying out what she expected the jury will hear from their key witness.
“She thought it was cool that Mr. Hoggard wanted to hang out with her one on one,” the prosecutor said. “She thought they might talk for a bit or play guitar. But that is not what happened.”
She alleged the complainant will tell the jury Hoggard raped her vaginally and attempted to rape her anally and the violent assault “involved choking, slapping, that it involved Mr. Hoggard calling her a ‘pig’; that it involved Mr. Hoggard urinating on her.”
The woman, Gates said, will tell them she “did not want nor did she consent to what Jacob Hoggard did to her in that hotel room that night.”
Recommended video
When she took the stand in the late afternoon, the woman, whose identity is protected under a routine publication ban, recalled in a quiet voice how she used to listen to Hedley on the radio and this was her second time seeing the Canadian band in concert. She’d gone to the show with her cousin, but couldn’t recall how she ended up going to the after-party alone.
There were about five to seven other girls in the van heading to the bonfire, she said, but the others were younger, between 12 and 16.
She doesn’t remember if there were other people already at the party once they arrived. She does recall Hoggard and another guy started playing around, jousting with sticks they’d lit on fire, and the band had brought beer and handed her some Coors Light.
She doesn’t do drugs, she assured the court, and only drank on “special occasions.” But that night, she had between five and eight beers. “That’s a lot,” said the woman, now in her 20s.
She was there until the sun came up, she testified, talking to people, watching the guys horse around and chatting with Hoggard — even getting a selfie with the pop star.
Then the party began to break up.
“When the sun started to come up and the other girls started to leave, I tried to arrange a ride home,” she recalled softly. “But then Jacob told me to just stay and that we’ll play some music and have a casual conversation.”
Her testimony continues Wednesday.