A young woman who alleges her high-school basketball coach had sex with her on a regular basis while she was a minor alleged on Wednesday he would often joke he was paying her to sleep with him.
Daniel Lacasse, 45, is on trial at the Montreal courthouse, where he is charged with sexual exploitation. The complainant, who is now an adult, began testifying on Tuesday. She said she met the accused in 2006 while she was in Grade 6 and participated in a one-day basketball tournament at a high school in the St-Laurent borough that was called École secondaire Emile-Legault at the time.
Lacasse ran the basketball program at the school, which is now called École secondaire St-Laurent. He and two other basketball coaches were arrested in 2022 when allegations of sexual abuse emerged. They have all since been fired.
The complainant said Lacasse invited her to attend the high school following her performance in the one-day tournament. She also said that because of her family’s financial situation, he later provided her with money while she attended the high school and covered many of her expenses, including a brace and an MRI at a private clinic after she injured a ligament during a tournament in Boston while she was in Secondary 3.
She said she ended up sleeping on Lacasse’s couch often to avoid problems at her home, and that while she was 16 years old and in Secondary 5, they began having sex on a regular basis. When she testified on Tuesday, she said she would often cry while they had intercourse.
On Wednesday, while answering more questions from prosecutor Jérôme Laflamme, the woman said Lacasse often joked that they were having sex because of the financial support he was providing.
“I felt that I had to give back for receiving on my end,” the complainant said.
She testified that Lacasse abused her and other players at the school verbally and physically. She described an incident in which she alleges Lacasse threw nine basketballs at her during an argument and sprained her wrist.
“He would sometimes ask us to call him Jesus Christ,” she said. “It was to show that he was above us.”
She also alleged that Lacasse became upset at one point in their relationship when he learned she had told another girl that they were having sex. She said Lacasse yelled at her in front of other players and a coach from Vanier College who was trying to recruit her. She said she decided to go to Vanier because all the coaches in the college’s women’s basketball program were women.
She spent a full year at Vanier before she decided to go to a French college that Lacasse was connected to. They continued to be in a relationship until close to the end of her year at the second college, she said. She said she decided to end it because she was interested in a man her age and because Lacasse was making arrangements to have his wife from Cuba move to Canada.
“He said: ‘I like him. He’s a good guy. You can go’,” the woman recalled Lacasse saying after she told him she was seeing someone the same age as her.
After they stopped having sex, she said, Lacasse would pay her to babysit his daughter while he and his wife went out. She said she realized there was something wrong with their past relationship when she looked at Lacasse’s laptop computer while babysitting and “found stuff that confirmed (their relationship) was not all right.”
“That is when it hit me,” she said.
It was at this point that defence lawyer Eddy Ménard objected, before the witness could explain what it was she found. Quebec Court Judge Alexandre Dalmau asked the witness to leave the courtroom while the objection was debated. He agreed that what the witness saw on the computer should not be entered into evidence. He also asked that media not report on the arguments made on the objection to prevent the witness from being influenced while she testifies.
The two other coaches who were arrested — Charles Xavier Boislard, 47, of Brossard, and Robert Luu, 34, of Laval — were charged in 2022 at the same time as Lacasse. They each face multiple charges, including sexual assault. Boislard’s trial is set to begin in November and Luu’s is scheduled to start in January.
The complainant in the Lacasse trial said on Wednesday that Boislard was aware of her relationship with Lacasse while she was in high school.