Eric Clarke clearly recalls the two teenaged girls he and his fellow runner drove to a Hedley concert after-party in the bush behind the Comfort Inn in Kirkland Lake.
It was eight years ago, but the man remembered the fans after reading about a woman who alleged that lead singer Jacob Hoggard had raped her in his hotel room after she met him at the all-night party that followed his concert at the local hockey arena on June 24, 2016.
“Oh,” Clarke recalled thinking to himself after reading a media account of her allegations, “those are the girls who were in the van with us.”
They were in the white 15-passenger van that the Kirkland Lake festival committee had acquired to ferry the band. His friend “Bear Cat” was their driver, Clarke said, and was taking him and the two girls — who he believed were cousins — from the arena to the party.
He doesn’t know why they were in the van with them — he said it was unusual — but he did remember what he said to them.
“I may have been a little bit rude,” Clarke testified, “and I said, ‘Which one of you is going to f— Jacob tonight?’”
And their reaction? “I think at the time they may have just laughed it off.”
Clarke was called as a defence witness, and the insinuation seemed to be clear: that the complainant was a groupie who hoped to have sex with the former singer.
But when shown a selfie the accuser took that night with Hoggard at the bonfire, Clarke couldn’t identify her as one of the teens in the van with him. “I don’t remember,” he told defence lawyer Megan Savard.
Recommended video
And under cross-examination by Crown Peter Keen, Clarke said Hoggard and about 25 to 30 people were already at the party when they arrrived — many of them teenaged girls — and he didn’t know how the others had got there.
The complainant has told the jury she attended the concert with her cousin but went alone to the bonfire in a minivan with Hoggard and several other girls, some as young as 12.
Clarke was the last defence witness at the trial where Hedley, 40, has pleaded not guilty to sexual assault and testified in his own defence.
According to the complainant, after the party broke up near dawn and she was trying to arrange a ride home, Hoggard invited her back to his room to listen to music and have a “casual conversation.” Instead, she alleged he raped her vaginally after unsuccessfully trying to rape her anally.
She told the jury that during the assault, he degraded her, urinated on her against her will, slapped her and choked her to the point of almost losing consciousness.
Hoggard denied it all. Now a married carpenter with a young son in Burnaby, he insisted it was a romantic, consensual one-night stand.
Under cross-examination by Crown attorney Peter Keen earlier Wednesday, Hoggard admitted to lapses in his memory of the encounter, but was largely steadfast in his description of their interaction, including mutual oral sex in the hotel bathroom that ended with the woman agreeing to urinate on his face.
Keen said the positioning described by Hoggard didn’t make sense in such a small bathtub: “It would be very difficult to do.”
Hoggard disagreed. And he also wouldn’t agree that many would find that urinating on someone was “disgusting” as the complainant had testified. “It depends on the person,” he shrugged.
Keen then tried to suggest that this part of his story was “much more in keeping with a coercive encounter.”
Hoggard’s lawyer quickly objected to what she called an “offensive” line of questioning. “To suggest that certain types of sexual acts are inherently less consensual, I think is highly problematic,” Savard said.
And shortly after that, the prosecutor’s cross-examination sputtered to an end.
Closing arguments are scheduled for Thursday, with final instructions from the judge expected Friday.