Warning: This story includes graphic content that may be disturbing to some readers.
The woman at the centre of a gang sex assault at a former Little Italy bar told a jury Thursday the night in question was like “looking through a fishbowl” after one of the accused men made her a drink.
“You’re looking through a fishbowl and everything is weird and wavy...and you start getting dizzy and when I stood up it felt like I couldn’t walk,” the woman said. “It seemed a little weird. It didn’t seem right.”
The woman, whose identity is protected under a publication ban, was testifying at the trial of Gavin MacMillan and Enzo DeJesus Carrasco. MacMillan, an owner at the former College Street Bar, and DeJesus Carrasco, the manager, have both pleaded not guilty to gang sexual assault, administering a stupefying drug and forcible confinement.
The fashion photographer was 24 years old when she came to Toronto in December 2016 for a work event, she told court. She had gone to College Street Bar to meet a friend who worked there.
But at some point, she said, her friend and everyone else at the bar left and she was left with MacMillan and DeJesus. She said she was offered cocaine by DeJesus Carrasco, who had made her drinks earlier in the night. She said the cocaine left her feeling “very, very, very dizzy and very sick.”
“Because the drink didn’t make me sick. It just made it feel like I drank a lot of drinks. But this made me feel very sick and like I blacked out...I feel like there was something else in it.”
The Crown alleges the two men sexually assaulted the woman for at least six hours in various rooms of the bar.
Near the beginning of her testimony, the woman described her memory of the evening as “very hazy and very in and out...It’s kind of like if you kept falling asleep and waking up over and over again.”
Much of what she remembers happened in the basement, she said.
“So I remember the floor and it was horrible,” she said. “Because it was really bumpy cement and it was like crushing my knees and it hurt really, really bad and I just wanted to get off of it.”
Asked by Crown attorney Rick Nathanson, “could you get off of it?” she replied, “I couldn’t because I was being forced to stay on my knees. I wasn’t allowed off of it...Any time I tried to get up I was being pushed back down.”
The woman testified it was MacMillan who was pushing her to the floor, forcing her to perform oral sex.
She later recalled being assaulted upstairs and looking outside the bar.
“I just remember looking at the window and just kind of drifting off and thinking I could see cars and the snow outside and that’s where my mind went to. And I thought people were walking by and they could see everything and trying to wave at people, like, ‘how are you not stopping this?’”
“How are you not stopping what?” Nathanson asked.
“What was happening,” she said.
The woman recalled feeling “horrible pain” in “intimate places” and her “jaw cracking.”
“Any of those sexual acts, did you want any of those things to happen?” Nathanson asked.
“No,” she replied.
She recalled the men, but “mostly MacMillan” pulling on her necklace “very painfully,” leaving bruises on her neck. She recalled DeJesus Carrasco sitting and watching and masturbating.
Recalling another moment, she said, “both of them,” before pausing and exhaling loudly and continuing, “both of them raped me at the same time.”
The woman watched several video clips from that night, but said she did not recall any of it: Her stumbling around; her back being pushed by MacMillan up against the bar; her head being pulled down backwards onto the bar by DeJesus Carrasco. Nor did she remember, she said, being pulled around by her hair, hit over the head and slapped across the face.
She recalled MacMillan calling her a “good girl” and that “he wanted me to call him, ‘Daddy.’”
“I don’t remember (DeJesus Carrasco) talking much through the night. He was very silent,” she said.
She recalled getting her phone and seeing it was 5 o’clock in the morning. It was around that time, she said, that MacMillan left and DeJesus Carrasco offered to get her a taxi.
She said she told the taxi driver the address of her friend’s place, but that DeJesus Carrasco got into the taxi and gave the driver his address.
“I got in and I closed the door and then he just jumps in,” she said.
She said that when they arrived at DeJesus Carrasco’s home, she was feeling exhausted and dizzy and like she “just wanted to lie down.” She said DeJesus Carrasco led her into his bedroom.
“What do you remember happening once you were inside the house?” Nathanson asked her.
“Um, he raped me again,” she said.
The trial is expected to continue Monday.