1 day Ago By Michele Mandel
Article content Councillor Michael Thompson remembered the exact moment when his world came crashing down, a memory that had him breaking down on the witness stand for the first time. The six-time Scarborough Centre councillor had missed a call from a 705 number while in a council meeting and a text from an OPP detective. When he returned the call, the officer told him the stunning news: He was being charged with two counts of sexual assault.
“I was just literally shocked. I didn’t know what to do,” he recalled, apologizing as he wiped away tears. “Your whole world, just felt like it was just crushed.
” He remembers asking if it was a joke. He has friends who are police officers and hoped someone was just pulling his leg. But no.
Two women he’d hosted at his friend’s Muskoka cottage over the Canada Day weekend in 2022 had accused him of sexual assault. The death knell to any man who believes he’s wrongly accused — but most especially a politician in the public eye. “Knowing who I am as a person, (of) strong integrity, it was like your entire moment just stopped,” Thompson told his judge-alone trial.
“You could like literally hear your heart beat. At least, I could.” Now the 65-year-old is fighting for his reputation, his political future, and even his freedom.
The veteran councillor spent the day testifying in his own defence in Barrie under gentle questioning by his lawyer Leora Shemesh, repeating over and over again that he did nothing wrong that weekend. And the way Thompson tells it, one of the women who accused him of forcing oral sex was actually the aggressor. They were in the kitchen of the Muskoka cottage getting drinks, he said, when she began kissing him, gyrating her body on his and even putting his hand into his shorts.
Recommended video “She was very forward,” Thompson recalled. Not that he minded. Separated from his wife, the father of two said he found her interesting.
Later that night, he said she came into his bedroom, naked, and woke him to have a shot of tequila with her in the kitchen. She had talked earlier about hooking up once the other two female guests were asleep, so he went with the flow, holding and kissing her. She then led him downstairs to her room, he said, where “she came around and just pushed me down on the bed, on my back.
” She was the one taking the “lead,” he insisted. And it was all consensual: he said she never said ‘No,’ didn’t appear to be intoxicated or uncomfortable. “She was actively kissing me.
” She has testified Thompson was the one who woke her after she blacked out in the wrong bed after a day of heavy drinking and then forced her into oral sex. He maintained the opposite was true. “She initiated it.
I didn’t object to it and she proceeded to go ahead and engage.” But he said she stopped to use the washroom and then he heard her taking a shower. She returned to the bed and asked if he had a condom, he said, and when she couldn’t find one, their sexual encounter was over.
They lay in bed talking about the need for more housing for people — I guess that’s a politician’s version of pillow talk — and he invited her to his Taste of Lawrence street festival with her child. They also talked about meeting for dinner in the city. “I found her interesting and hoped at some point we would connect again when we’re back in Toronto.
” He was also asked about her friend’s accusations: Did Thompson press her to drink alcohol? “(She) has been very untruthful to this court,” he said indignantly. “That’s not true.” Nor did he puff marijuana smoke into her mouth, “Never happened” or ask her to join him in testing the bounciness of the bed — “Absolutely not.
” As for the crux of her sexual assault allegation — that he asked to put sunscreen on her and proceeded to massage her buttocks and breasts, Thompson insisted that didn’t happen, either. Instead, he maintained she was the one who asked him to apply sunscreen on her back and that’s the only area of her body he touched. After breakfast on Canada Day, which he insisted was convivial, they all cleaned up and the second complainant gave him her number before kissing him goodbye.
The next time he heard of her, the OPP were telling him she and her friend were accusing him of sexual assault. Thompson’s cross examination begins Thursday. mmandel@postmedia.
com.
