Hedley frontman Jacob Hoggard guilty of sexual assault causing bodily harm

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It was an incredibly surprising verdict.

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After six days of deliberation, a jury of 10 men and two women found Hedley frontman Jacob Hoggard guilty of sexual assault causing bodily harm in the 2016 brutal rape of an Ottawa college student — but not guilty of raping a lovestruck 16-year-old fan or of touching her sexually when she was just 15.

Too bad he’s not immediately going directly to jail — Superior Court Justice Gillian Roberts was not prepared to revoke his bail as the Crown had requested.

Hoggard looked stricken. The former pop star, who once had the world at his feet, slumped in his chair, staring down at the counsel table in shock as his lawyer, Megan Savard, whispered in his ear, no doubt assuring him this wasn’t over.

The Ontario Court of Appeal is just metres away .

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The Crown will likely appeal, as well. Of the two complainants, it was the 16-year-old who seemed the most convincing that the sex had been against her will. Those of us who have followed the trial since it began at the start of May assumed that if anything, Hoggard would be convicted on the counts involving her.

The longer the jury was out, it appeared Hoggard could be acquitted of all counts.

The jurors were obviously hung up on the issue of consent and repeatedly came back to Roberts to ask about the law that surrounds that issue — and they were particularly interested in how it related to the Ottawa woman he had met on Tinder and arranged to meet at the Thompson Hotel.

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They seemed to have trouble with her having lied to Hoggard during a lengthy phone call — secretly recorded by Hoggard — after their encounter when she told him she needed stitches and she was consulting a lawyer. She said she was trying to provoke him into apologizing so she could put this nightmare behind her.

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His lawyer, though, had urged the jury to find that she had no credibility and couldn’t be believed.

It was so problematic in the jury room that jurors twice told the judge that they couldn’t come to a decision on all counts. Roberts almost let them give up after the second time, but both the Crown and the defence urged her to tell them to keep deliberating.

And so they did, spending most of the weekend listening to playbacks of the testimony from Hoggard and the two complainants.

It seemed like a strong Crown case — neither woman knew of the other when they went to police in 2018 with eerily similar stories of rape and degradation two years earlier by a famous pop star who seemed to become a different person, a “monster,” a “psychopath,” from the flirtatious, kind man they’d met online.

They stood by their allegations, even as the pandemic interrupted, and it took four years to finally come to trial.

When he took the stand, Hoggard insisted he never touched the teen sexually before she turned 16, and that his sexual encounters with both complainants were consensual.

The jury was not told that Hoggard still faces a separate charge of sexual assault causing bodily harm dating to June 2016 in Kirkland Lake with similar allegations.