A young woman says she was in a state of panic after a taxi driver allegedly touched her thigh and genital area and kissed her on the lips during a cab ride in Halifax last September.
Seyed Abolghasem Sadat Lavasani Bozor, 74, of Halifax is on trial on a charge of sexual assault.
The 21-year-old complainant was the first of three witnesses called by prosecutor Steve Degen as he presented the Crown’s case Monday in Halifax provincial court.
The woman, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, said she and her girlfriend went to The Dome in downtown Halifax with a male friend on the night of Sept. 16. She said she took one hit of Molly, a recreational drug, before they went downtown but it had no effect on her.
She said she had six drinks of alcohol at the bar before helping her “extremely intoxicated” partner outside onto Argyle Street sometime after 3 a.m. Her girlfriend had thrown up in the washroom, she said, and she was concerned that she may have been drugged.
She said they flagged down a cab and she put her girlfriend in the back seat and got in the front passenger seat.
In an exhibit filed at the start of the trial, Bozor admits that he picked the two women up near The Dome at 3:45 a.m. and drove them to an address on Bayers Road.
The complainant called Halifax Regional Police at 4:23 a.m. to report that she had been sexually touched by the cabbie.
She testified Monday from behind a screen that prevented her from seeing the accused, who sat on the prisoners bench with a Farsi interpreter.
She told the court the driver touched her on the thigh a few minutes into the trip, which she estimated took about 15 minutes in total.
“I removed his hand and said no,” she testified.
She said Bozor touched her leg again and stroked her inner thigh, and she again said no and pushed his hand away.
After the vehicle came to a stop at a red light, she said Bozor put his hand back on her leg, moved it further up her thigh and applied pressure to her vaginal area with his fingers, as if “trying to get someone off.”
The driver then asked if he could kiss her and, despite being told no, forced his tongue into her mouth for about two seconds, she said.
After the light turned green and the vehicle began moving, the driver placed his hand on her leg yet again, she said.
At one point, Bozor also reached into the back seat to try to touch her girlfriend, she said.
She said she went into “survival mode” and took out her cellphone to text a friend for help, but the phone’s battery was dead.
She said she remembers thinking “I have to get out of this cab.”
“I felt that I was in danger and I felt that my (girlfriend) was in danger,” she said. “I felt I had to protect her.”
She said the route the driver took to the apartment building seemed longer than the trip downtown, perhaps “because of the situation I was in.”
When the cab reached the destination, she said it took her about five tries to correctly enter her PIN for the debit transaction. “I was panicking,” she said.
She said she got out of the car and then opened the back door and used all her strength to pull her unconscious girlfriend out of the vehicle by the arm and place her on the ground.
The driver got out of the vehicle too, she said.
“He asked if we were good,” she testified. “I said, ‘yes, go.’”
The woman’s partner said she also consumed Molly that night and believes she had three drinks at the bar. She remembers standing at the bar and then waking up in her friend’s bed. She said she has no recollection of the cab ride.
The court also heard from the young man whose apartment the women stayed at that night. He said he went out onto his ninth-floor balcony after he heard shouting from the driveway and looked down to see the complainant standing outside the taxi.
He said she opened the back door and yelled at her girlfriend to get out of the car. He said it appeared to him that the driver, who was also out of the vehicle, was tugging on the woman’s arm as well.
The man said he wasn’t allowed to leave his apartment at the time “for legal reasons,” so he asked his friend to go downstairs and assist the women. The friend had gone downtown with the women that night but had returned to the apartment before them after getting kicked out of the bar.
He said his friend helped the complainant get her girlfriend off the ground and up to the apartment.
Defence lawyer Carbo Kwan told the court Bozor will take the stand Tuesday.
