Autoparts billionaire Frank Stronach, 94, is due in a Toronto courtroom Thursday morning for a sentencing hearing for the crime of indecently assaulting a woman in a Toronto apartment in 1977.
Justice Anne Molloy, who found Stronach guilty in June, is to hear Crown and defence arguments before sentencing him for a crime that technically no longer exists, as it was rewritten in 1983 into the broader Criminal Code offence of sexual assault.
An offender can only be charged with a crime that was in force at the time of the alleged offence. Today’s legal arguments will be based on the law of indecent assault as it then was for the substance of the offence, guided by more recent precedent and comparable sentences.
The conviction is the only guilty finding out of 12 offences initially alleged involving seven women in a trial that went badly sideways over the course of the spring.
All were historic complaints, some older than the modern law of sexual assault itself, most in the 1980s. The charges were laid in 2024.
The trial started provocatively, as the Crown sought to use each case to bolster the credibility of the others. But by trial’s end, only three complainants remained. One woman had an emotional breakdown on the witness stand and gave evidence so garbled and disjointed the judge decided no conviction could flow from it. Another gave such self-contradictory evidence, especially over the year the alleged crime occurred, that Molloy decided she could not convict. One woman tried to apologize after lying on the witness stand about whether she had read another complainant’s account in the media. Another was revealed in cross-examination to have an extensive history of controversial business litigation involving what a judge described as her deceit and dishonesty, and a more recent instance of allegedly falsely reporting to police that a man she had a dispute with threatened to kill her. All those charges failed.
Two guilty findings were recorded in June involving two women. Then a few days later with the trial still in the hands of Molloy, a civil lawyer for one of them made an attempt to extract money through Stronach’s lawyer, but ended up sharing information that contradicted the woman’s testimony under oath. That led Molloy to declare a surprise mistrial over the woman’s charge, leaving only the indecent assault conviction involving the other woman. Chronologically, it was the first of the 12 crimes initially alleged.
This woman was also the alleged victim in another charge of attempted rape, which is likewise a historic charge that no longer exists in criminal law, but Molloy found Stronach not guilty on that count.
Now 74, the woman was a 25-year-old legal secretary at the time of the offence in 1977. When she testified, she said she knew Stronach from Rooney’s, the Toronto bar he owned.
“After dinner there, she agreed to go to a nearby apartment with him. He came up from behind her, flipped her forwards over the upholstered arm of a chair, lifted her skirt, and ground his groin into her pelvic area over her panties. There is no evidence that he took his penis out of his pants. At law, this cannot be attempted rape, as alleged in Count 5, but it indecent assault under Count 6,” Molloy wrote.
“It happened so quickly. I was just pushed forward, face first, from behind, fairly forceful. It wasn’t violent but it was firm… Frankly, it was kind of bizarre,” the victim testified. “It was kind of pathetic… I have to say I felt betrayed… I freed myself from this bizarre event and I gathered up my things and I left.”
Stronach faces a separate trial with similar charges and six complainants in York Region that is not yet scheduled.
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