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Frank Stronach arrives at a Toronto Court on Feb. 3. Stronach is facing two trials in connection with alleged sexual offences.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
The first complainant to testify in the sexual assault trial of billionaire Frank Stronach told the court the businessman put his hands all over her “like an octopus” during a night out in the early 1980s before raping her later in the evening under a mirrored ceiling in a Toronto bedroom.
The complainant, who can only be identified as LS because of a court-ordered publication ban, testified that the alleged assault started at Rooney’s, a Toronto restaurant owned by Mr. Stronach. At the time, LS was working as a groom at a horse stable owned by Mr. Stronach and went to the bar that evening to celebrate her coming birthday with two other grooms, she testified.
Under questioning by a Crown prosecutor, LS told the court that Mr. Stronach approached their table with a bottle of champagne and that her next recollection was being on the dancefloor with Mr. Stronach, who stuck his fingers in her vagina.
She said they moved to a booth where this continued. “He seemed like an octopus, he seemed to be all over me, and all I recall is I couldn’t get away,” LS told the court.
The next thing she remembers, LS testified, is waking up and seeing a mirror on the ceiling. She told the court she could see Mr. Stronach’s naked back and bottom in the mirror and that he was on top of her. She said she was confused and terrified.
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The alleged incident is the first evidence cited by Crown prosecutors in the trial of Mr. Stronach, which began on Thursday before Ontario Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy.
Mr. Stronach, 93, has pleaded not guilty to the dozen charges he faces involving seven complainants, which include rape and forcible confinement. The alleged offences took place between 1977 and 1990. One of the charges refers to an alleged sexual assault in Scarborough; the rest were allegedly in Toronto.
The trial is expected to last for several weeks.
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LS, now in her 60s, told the court she didn’t report the incident to police immediately after because she wanted to move on and was skeptical she would be taken seriously. “Who’s going to believe me? Somebody who shovels manure against him? At the time, it always seemed to be the victim’s fault.”
Under cross-examination by Mr. Stronach’s defence lawyer, Leora Shemesh, LS was challenged about what the lawyer said were discrepancies in her story about when this took place.
When LS eventually went to the police in 2015 to complain about Mr. Stronach, she said the alleged events took place in 1980, Ms. Shemesh told the court. After Mr. Stronach’s arrest in 2024, LS granted interviews to media outlets, which also described the alleged events as occurring in 1980, court heard.
On Thursday, under questioning by assistant Crown attorney Jelena Vlacic, LS said she wasn’t totally sure if the incident took place in 1980 or 1981, but that to the best of her recollection, it was in July, 1981.
Ms. Shemesh pressed LS on these two dates: “What I’m going to suggest to you is that the reason you’ve moved from 1980 to 1981 is because during the course of my cross-examination I suggested to you that Mr. Stronach may not have been in the country, right?” she said.
“No,” the complainant responded. “I was unsure before I talked to you.”
The complainant also said, under cross-examination, that she wasn’t sure if the dancefloor she wound up on with Mr. Stronach was at Rooney’s, or at another location. She told the court she has gaps in her memory of that night.
In her opening remarks, assistant Crown attorney Julia Bellehumeur told the court that over the next several weeks, the Crown will prove that Mr. Stronach’s alleged treatment of the women was conducted without their consent, and that the auto-parts magnate either knew they weren’t consenting or was willfully blind that they weren’t consenting.
She said each case will be proven independently, but that prosecutors will “seek to address them as providing circumstantial proof of each other.”
Billionaire Frank Stronach arrives in court to stand trial on sexual-assault charges. It’s the first trial of two he will face in relation to alleged sexual offences spanning decades.
Mr. Stronach will face a separate trial in Newmarket, Ont., later this year, on similar charges relating to incidents that allegedly took place in or near Aurora, Ont. The town is the headquarters of Magna International, the company he founded, which grew into a multinational auto-parts juggernaut.
Mr. Stronach founded Magna in the 1950s. During his time at the helm, the company’s board members included Mike Harris, former premier of Ontario; Franz Vranitzky, former Austrian chancellor; Bill Davis, former Ontario premier; and Trevor Eyton, business titan and one-time senator. Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska was made a strategic partner.
Mr. Stronach left as chairman in 2011.
