Paul Haggis Trial: Accuser’s Friend Recalls “Dire” Tone Of Her Calls After Alleged Assault
had committed “borderline rape” against Breest dropped the “borderline” qualification in court on Thursday.
“And ‘drunky-pooh’ is your lighthearted, jokey way of saying ‘drunk’”? Chaudhry asked. Bouzinova said it was. Breest and Bouzinova had been roommates in New York before 2013 and became “close” later on, Bouzinova testified. They weren’t each other’s best friends, she testified, but they have stayed in touch online and Breest was a guest and a speaker at Bouzinova’s wedding two years ago.
She was also urging Breest to stay away from Haggis. “Basically nothing good in my mind was going to come from being around him again,” Bouzinova testified. A fourth Jane Doe testifying in the sexual assault civil trial of filmmaker Paul Haggis said Thursday that she was the target of an “attempted rape” by Haggis outside of her apartment building at night after an event at the Toronto Film Festival in 2015.
The assault ended, she said, when she screamed an expletive loudly enough to draw the attention of a passing stranger. Haggis then stepped back, she testified, realizing “he was going to be seen doing something very awful,” and in that pause she got into the lobby with her electronic key fob, leaving Haggis locked outside, and went to her apartment.
“He was pretending as if he did nothing wrong,” the woman testified. She was asked on cross-examination by a Haggis lawyer, Priah Chaudhry, why she consented to join Haggis for lunch and wine earlier that day at his hotel, even though she said he was, by that time, already making her feel uncomfortable. The woman testified that she thought she was going to a “professional” 30-minute afternoon coffee and didn’t want to make an “enemy” of someone in her industry.