Ex-Woodstock mayor used cocaine during Zoom council meetings: Witness

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Editor’s note: This story contains details about alleged assaults and sexual assaults that may be disturbing to some readers.

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When Trevor Birtch turned his camera off during online Woodstock city council meetings, the former mayor may not have simply been taking a break from the debate.

“This was during COVID so it was over Zoom and I had to stay behind the computer,” the complainant at his second sexual assault trial testified Friday.

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“He would turn off his square and he would do coke and then go back on and continue his council meeting and I had to stay quiet.”

That wasn’t the most alarming description of Birtch’s conduct on the third day of testimony at his Superior Court of Justice trial where the former two-term mayor has pleaded not guilty to three counts of sexual assault.

The complainant, a 39-year-old woman who began her testimony on Thursday, continued Friday with more accounts of booze, drugs and violent sexual assaults. But she also admitted to memory lapses and a long history of addiction and health issues.

This is Birtch’s second trial this year. In June, he was convicted of sexual assault and assault involving another woman. A sentencing date for those convictions is slated to be set next week.

The identities of both the victim in the first trial and the complainant at the current trial are protected by court order. But as the trial has unfolded, there have been some elements of the two cases that overlap.

The complainant in the current trial said she and Birtch had been in an on-again off-again relationship starting in 2017, pausing in 2018 and rekindled a year later until she said Birtch raped her on her couch in her Woodstock home in April 2019.

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It was a relationship built on what the woman said was Birtch’s controlling behaviour, drugs and alcohol. She said she was ”embarrassed that I kept going back, because I kept letting him into my life.”

The last sexual assault she could remember happened after Birtch had picked her up outside a beer store. Once she was in the car, the witness said he grabbed her breasts. Then, on the drive, they were drinking and ingesting cocaine and possibly some prescription drugs.

Eventually, the pair was back at her home. “I remember being on the couch. I remember being so inebriated to move but I could still speak, barely,” she said.

“I remember him being all over me but I kept saying stuff like, ‘I’m too high, I’m too high, get off of me, stop.’”

“He raped me again and he was gone,” she said. “He left the house.”

This was not the first time, she said, that Birtch had assaulted her. The pair fell into a bizarre pattern  where Birtch would show up to her residence often and unannounced. They got high together many times, the woman said. Her neighbours, she said, would often see the former mayor circling her house.

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She recalled twice when he broke into her home, once when he removed a screen on her window. Once she woke up with Birtch standing over her in bed.

Assistant Crown attorney Jennifer Moser asked the woman about her communications with a previous witness at the trial who had a friendship with Birtch, but was alarmed when he sent a voice message describing how he had tied up, raped, beaten and filmed the woman in his attic crawl space over several days.

The friend reached out to the woman right around the time Birtch was first charged in connection with another woman and she eventually told her and the London police about the disturbing conversation. However, when the police asked the woman about the incident in 2022, she said it didn’t happen.

The woman said she didn’t recall the events and assumed it didn’t happen because she rarely left her home and her pets alone.

But she did recall being at Birtch’s home and the two of them using the crawl space behind his bed as “a little bedroom thing” where they did a lot of drugs. She had no recollection of the violence that was described to her by Birtch’s former friend, but she had little memory of anything that happened when she was at his house.

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It was during one of those visits to his house that she said she saw Birtch snort cocaine while attending an online council meeting.

The witness said she reached out to the victim at the previous trial before any criminal charges were laid to explain that she was “being abused too.”

“I told her stuff just to try to help her,” she said, but she was rebuffed.

The witness said she wasn’t jealous that Birtch was seeing other women, but “he was very jealous,” ordering her not to give out her phone number to family members and even jealous of her pets.

She said had lodged a complaint against Birtch months earlier with the Woodstock police and it went nowhere. Once she heard that the London police had laid charges in connection with the other woman, she realized that the London police would take her seriously.

“The London police listened to me,” she said.

Birtch was still the mayor and on the Woodstock police board when she went to the London police. She said that Birtch was a different person that his public image portrayed.

She said she and Birtch did discuss the sexual assaults in text messages.

“I would call him every name in the book. I was swearing at him. I got past the point of trying to correct his behaviour. I would just tell him he was a rotten person,” she said.

Defence lawyer James Battin began his cross-examination, challenging her memory of a trip to Turkey Point where she said a homeless man beat her up and Birtch wanted her to perform a sex act.

Battin suggested that the events as she recalled them didn’t happen, that there was no sexual assault and that Birtch was trying to help her after she was injured.

Battin’s cross-examination continues on Monday.

jsims@postmedia.com

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