At Haaima trial, teen girlfriend tells court of accused’s suicide vow | #childpredator | #kidsaftey | #childsaftey

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At the trial of alleged sexual predator Michael Haaima, a Kingston woman told the court the accused, then 24, had threatened suicide if she broke up with him after a fight, just one of the occasions when he had emotionally manipulated her when she was just a teenager.

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“I knew he had been on anti-depressants but didn’t keep pills in the house because he had made (previous suicide) attempts,” the witness testified, explaining why she had taken Haaima’s threats seriously and why she went back to him.

The witness, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, was 15 years old when she met Haaima in 2007 and began a sexual relationship with him that lasted for, by her estimate, eight months to a year. At the time of the suicide threat, Haaima was allegedly making ends meet as a weed dealer and she was in Grade 10 at a Kingston high school.

Haaima is facing 98 charges for incidents dating back to 2007 through to his arrest in 2022. Among the charges against the 40-year-old tech worker are more than 30 counts of sexual assault, including several involving weapons or choking.

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The trial in Ontario Superior Court with Madame Justice Robyn Ryan Bell presiding is expected to run into the fall with the Crown calling 28 witnesses. The case is being tried without a jury, so Haaima’s guilt or innocence will be decided by Bell.

The witness, who is tied to a single count of sexual exploitation, testified across three days this week. In earlier testimony, she expressed doubts and even possibly misgivings about stepping into the witness box at the trial.

She told the court she had no idea why she was contacted by the Ontario Provincial Police in the spring of 2022.

When she was informed that the OPP were investigating Haaima in a joint task force with Kingston Police, her first impulse was to contact him.

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“I tried calling him,” she told the court. But the woman was unable to contact the accused. When asked what she had planned to say to Haaima, she seemed almost sheepish in her reply. “I was going to say, ‘Am I protecting you or not protecting you?’ ”

Only when an OPP detective told the witness she was working for an anti-human-trafficking team did the root cause of the investigation dawn on Haaima’s former girlfriend.

The witness told the court the questioning was cause to revisit memories long dormant and the catalyst for a reassessment of her relationship with Haaima.

“Teenagers think they know everything, but I didn’t know (at 15) what a healthy relationship is,” she told the court. “I wouldn’t let my daughter be a relationship (with an age difference like that between her and Haaima).

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“When I walked (into the interview with the OPP) I didn’t think I was a victim. I left feeling like a victim. I don’t think it was a loving relationship.”

The witness hinted at some reservations and regrets not only about her involvement with the accused, but also the investigation and charges almost two decades after the fact.

“I struggled whether I was going to come (testify at the trial),” she said. “Would I have been fine living my life not feeling like a victim?”

At the end of a brief redirect by assistant Crown Holly Chiavetti on Wednesday, however, the witness seemed to have made peace with her decision and convinced she had done the right thing by testifying.

“I 100 percent believe that testifying was the right thing to do,” she told the court.

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In her first two days of testimony, the witness gave the impression of being non-plussed by testifying at the trial about her relationship with Haaima. At times her descriptions of herself at 15 were self-deprecating, even mocking, including calling herself “a pothead,” “a little weirdo” and “a f—- bitch.”

In that early testimony, the witness confirmed a series of events laid out at the trial by the two previous witnesses, former fast-food employees who, after a time living out of a car, wound up as roommates of the accused.

Haaima’s roommates, two teenage sisters and their then 20-year-old friend, had worked with the witness at a fast-food outlet when she was in Grade 10. Two of those roommates testified last week that they had befriended their younger co-worker and brought her over to Haaima’s house on Selkirk Street to smoke marijuana. It was there the relationship between the teen and the weed dealer began, the court heard,

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The witness told the court she had been attracted to Haaima when she met him and her three co-workers spoke highly of him, saying that he was “fun,” “sweet” and even “wonderful.” She also said that she knew that the roommates had also been sexually involved with them, though they testified last week that Haaima had sexually assaulted them.

When Haaima showed his interest in her, the witness told the court that she told him she was only interested in a monogamous relationship, and he acceded.

“He worshiped me,” she testified. “I was special. I got him.”

Under cross-examination by Haaima’s lawyer, Natasha Calvinho, the witness told the court she expected Haaima to give him weed for free when he had charged his other customers.

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“He (was) being a gentleman in giving you marijuana?” Calvinho asked the witness.

“Yes,” she told the court. “I thought I deserved it.”

The witness also testified that Haaima had told her to protect his supply of marijuana when police arrested him in 2007 for a matter not before the court at this time. “He told me to keep it safe,” she said.

The fight that led to Haaima’s threat of suicide was prompted by his decision to go out with friends to a bar and leaving her alone in his basement apartment where she considered herself unsafe, the witness told the court. In the ensuing argument, she testified that she had thrown her plastic bong at Haaima.

When Calvinho suggested that the witness hadn’t thrown her bong at Haaima but in fact smashed him over the head with it and soaked him with bong water, the witness was visibly angered. “So you were there?” the witness said. “You saw it?”

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Calvinho spent much of her cross-examination of the witness on the transcripts of her statement to the OPP detective investigating Haaima.

One line in the transcript indicated that the detective suggested the witness at 15 couldn’t have consented to sex with Haaima by its legal definition — that at 15 she was not of the age of consent. As Calvinho pointed out, the age of consent in the Criminal Code in 2007 was 14 — in an amendment by Parliament in 2008, the age of consent was raised to 16.

When Haaima’s lawyer suggested that the detective was offering “bad legal advice,” the witness was non-committal.

The trial will continue on Thursday when another complainant is expected to testify.

gjoyce@postmedia.com

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