Billionaire Frank Stronach to hear verdict in his sex assault trial after troubled prosecution

Frank Stronach leaves a Toronto court on Feb. 5. Photo by Peter J Thompson/National Post

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Analysis

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Frank Stronach, 93, the auto parts billionaire accused of preying on young women at the Toronto nightclub he owned in the 1980s and pressuring them into his condo for sex against their will, is scheduled to appear in a Toronto courtroom Friday morning to hear his verdicts.

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Judge Anne Molloy of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice has been writing her reasons in this high profile trial in which the Ontario Crown argued Stronach followed a clear and repeated pattern of sexual predation, and was only exposed when several victims came forward in 2024 in response to news of the first few charges.

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At the trial’s outset in February, prosecutors claimed each woman’s story would bolster the credibility of the others, that they trusted this fabulously wealthy and sophisticated man, a casual acquaintance many decades older than they were, and accepted his invitations to see the lake view from his condo only to be set upon coarsely once inside, sexually assaulted in an entitled and almost perfunctory manner, then driven home as if this were normal.

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But the prosecution went sideways from the beginning.

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First, it was evidence that police and prosecutors had been strategizing testimony with witnesses just days before trial, and helping them to avoid inconsistencies or “omissions,” by failing to mention details that would be important to this legal claim of a similar fact pattern.

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Then, the witnesses themselves in some cases undermined their own claims, in one case by admitting to lying on the stand about what she had read about other complainants’s stories, and then trying to apologize from the witness stand, only to be silenced by the judge who said it was not an opportunity to make a speech. She claimed Stronach sexually assaulted her after a dinner with him to mark the end of her summer internship at his company, Magna, a job arranged through her mother because her late father had been friends with Stronach.

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Frank Stronach at an annual meeting of Magna International Inc. in Toronto in 1987. Photo by John Felstead / The Canadian Press

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Some complainants were so confrontational and combative with Stronach’s defence counsel they had to be cautioned by the judge to just answer questions.

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One woman had an emotional breakdown on the witness stand to the point that emergency support services were required. Her testimony had been completely disjointed by anxiety — “garbled,” as the judge put it — and she was incapable of listening or answering questions. Judge Molloy excused the witness from her cross-examination, and the Crown conceded it no longer had a reasonable prospect of convicting Stronach on the charges involving her.

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The judge also indicated she would be unable to convict on the two charges relating to the first complainant to testify, whose timeline of the alleged sexual assault fell apart under cross examination to the point it was not clear even which year it was supposed to have happened.

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Another complainant was revealed in cross-examination to have an extensive history of controversial business litigation involving what a civil judge has described as her deceit and dishonesty, and a more recent instance of allegedly falsely reporting to police that a man she had a dispute with threatened to kill her.