Sex worker says assault left her feeling ‘dirty, scared’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/12/2008 (6522 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IT was on her second “date” with a man she only knew as Bob with the green four-door car that things went horribly wrong.

The 44-year-old former full-time sex-trade worker testified that after she was paid $60 to have intercourse with the man, he sexually assaulted her after she refused to perform sex acts she wasn’t comfortable with.

It was in the late summer of 1999 that this allegedly happened.

“I felt dirty and I was scared — I thought he was going to kill me,” the 44-year-old woman testified, later pointing to identify Robert Geary, 45, in the prisoner’s box as the man who attacked her.

The woman’s name is not being published to protect her identity. She claims that after being assaulted, she was driven to a drug house and dropped off.

Geary, a Belfast aircraft mechanic, showed little emotion while listening to testimony on the second day of his trial. He began Monday by pleading not guilty to 12 criminal charges and is being tried by a judge alone.

Geary was extradited back to Canada in March following his release from prison in Cambridge, England, after serving a four-year sentence for procuring sex from a minor. He was slated to stand trial in Winnipeg in November 2000, but fled the country with his family in August of that year.

The 44-year-old witness testified that it wasn’t until November 1999 that police approached her wanting to talk about a suspect who was allegedly assaulting sex-trade workers.

She said she picked a man fitting Bob’s description out of a photo lineup provided by police, and later gave a written statement to investigators, saying, “This is him…, but when I was with him, he was bald and had a moustache,” court was told.

The woman said she was approached by Bob a third time. Instead of going with him in his car, she said she told him to “stay away from me.”

She also said she wrote down the licence plate number on his car, which was passed on to a local sex-trade workers’ assistance group that had received similar reports of other sex-trade attacks by the same “bad date.”

Court also heard testimony from a now 35-year-old former sex-trade worker who claimed to have been a regular client of a man named Bob, and a close friend of a now-deceased witness who alleged she had a “bad experience” with the same man.

The woman said she questioned him about the alleged attack and was told “at least I didn’t kill her,” she said, later identifying Geary in court as the man who told her this. She herself was never harmed.

Cross examination by defence lawyers Dan Manning and Ryan Amy explored the cocaine addictions of both alleged victims, and each woman admitted that the man they knew as Bob spoke in a voice that had no discernible accent.

The trial continues today.

james.turner@freepress.mb.ca