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The mantra of the #MeToo movement has been “Believe women.”

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According to the lawyer for billionaire Frank Stronach, that’s led to the elderly business magnate being unjustly accused of sexual assault thanks to reckless police who took complainants strictly on their word alone without doing the slightest investigation.

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“My client had been essentially labelled a villain in the media and had been publicly prosecuted before the witnesses had been sworn,” defence lawyer Leora Shemesh charged in her fiery final argument at his long-running sex assault trial.

“I fear that our respect for women and the need to advocate for them and ensure that we have a system that balances their needs and encourages reporting doesn’t mean we give up our basic constitutional standards,” she argued.

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“I say with the greatest respect that the pendulum has swung so far the other way that we’ve really lost our ability to balance and respect our constitutional norms. This “Believe all Women” and the “#MeToo” movement and political platforms of not challenging women or testing their complaints really have no place in our criminal justice system.”

Presumed guilty rather than innocent, defence lawyer says

What’s happened, she said, is that the burden of proof has wrongly shifted to the accused, who is now presumed guilty rather than innocent, and as a result, it was up to Stronach to do the investigation that Peel Regional Police failed to do to prove he did not sexually assault these women more than four decades ago.

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At the start of his judge-alone trial in February, Stronach, 93, pleaded not guilty to 12 charges related to seven women in incidents from the 1970s and 1980s. By the end of the evidence, the Crown said it was only pursuing charges involving four of the complainants.

The remaining four women “have lied, manipulated and certainly attempted to deceive the court,” Shemesh argued in her closing. “They all failed quite miserably on credibility and reliability.”

She took particular aim at the woman who said she worked as a groom at his horse farm and was out celebrating her 21st birthday at Rooney’s, a club Stronach owned, when he digitally penetrated her through her pantyhose on the dance floor. The next thing she remembered was waking up in his bed looking up at his mirrored ceiling.

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Shemesh called her story “unhinged.”

“She’s a story teller, a really, really bad story teller,” she alleged.

The woman especially got tripped up on the date of the incident — she said it was her 21st birthday so it was 1980 and she remembered her long-distance fiance had sent her flowers. But evidence suggested Stronach was in Kentucky at the time and her “fiance” testified that they were never engaged and hadn’t met until a few years later.

Then she said it happened in 1981.

Shemesh also presented witnesses who said she never worked at Stronach’s Beechwood Farms and who identified the photo of her with a horse having been taken at Woodbine race track and not the horse farm. Another witness testified she used to check on Stronach’s condo for him and it never had a mirrored ceiling.

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The lawyer pointed to one of her social media posts where she conveyed her disgust with the wealthy.

‘Eat the rich’ attempt?

“Her overall story may be nothing more than an attempt to ‘Eat the rich.’ To politically vilify Mr. Stronach because of her strong views on the disparity between the rich and the poor, of which she was a member of the latter.”

Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy had tough questions for the Crown about that complainant’s reliability as well.

“This is the one that troubles me greatly,” the judge said. “Everything she says is all smoke and mirrors.”

The judge also picked up on Shemesh’s criticism of how police didn’t do anything to corroborate the women’s allegations.

“The court can’t start from the position, ‘I believe the victim. That, of course, would be absolutely wrong. But what about the police investigation?” Molloy asked. “They just assume she’s telling the truth.”

Has his skillful lawyer successfully turned the tables to make it appear that Stronach is the real victim here?

Crown attorney Jelena Vlacic is scheduled to continue her closing remarks on Wednesday.

mmandel@postmedia.com

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