NEW YORK – Canadian director Paul Haggis, Academy Award winner for “Crash”, was convicted Thursday of rape in New York after a civil trial, in which a jury found him responsible for three sexual offenses against his accuser.
Haggis will have to pay $ 7.5 million in compensation to Haleigh Breest, a publicist who accuses him of raping her in 2013, when she was 26 and he was 59, in the director’s Manhattan apartment after a film premiere, according to local media.
The trial took place for three weeks in a Manhattan court, five years after Breest filed the complaint, and on Thursday the jury unanimously decided that the director is guilty of abusing the woman.
THIS IS CANADIAN DIRECTOR PAUL HAGGIS, DIRECTOR OF “CRASH”
The jury, made up of two women and four men, found after its deliberations that Haggis had committed three crimes: one of first degree rape, another of sexual abuse and a third of criminal sexual act.
The consequences of that verdict are economic, since it is a civil and non-criminal trial, but in addition to the millionaire compensation for the victim, determined this Thursday, another compensation for the damage still remains to be decided, which will probably be known on Monday.
The complainant offered stark testimony, in which she claimed she felt like a “trapped animal” when the director drove her to her Soho apartment instead of a bar and tried to get away from the man, who forced her to perform oral sex on him before raping her.
The defendant said the meeting was consensual and argued that the Church of Scientology, with which he broke up a few years before the reported events, is behind the complaint of Breest and other women who testified against him, according to the New York Post.
