Rape accuser testifies against filmmaker Paul Haggis | Lifestyle

NEW YORK (AP) — He was a well-known moviemaker. She was a publicist working a movie premiere the place he was a VIP visitor. He’d supplied her a carry house after which invited her to his condo for a drink.

As soon as there screenwriter-director Paul Haggis abruptly tried to kiss her, backed her into his fridge, and had a query for her, accuser Haleigh Breest informed a jury Thursday.

“Are you afraid of me?” he requested, in keeping with her testimony.

And so started, Breest mentioned, a sexual assault that ended with the Oscar winner raping her. She’s suing him in a civil case that is now on trial.

Haggis maintains the 2013 encounter was consensual, and his lawyer has argued that Breest known as it rape as a result of she’s out for cash. She’s in search of unspecified damages.

In a gentle, unsparing tone, Breest recounted what she mentioned was a terrifying, painful assault that left her shocked and “actually struggling to grasp what had occurred.”

“I couldn’t perceive how anyone who appeared like a pleasant man would try this,” she mentioned.

As she spoke with out taking a look at him, Haggis, 69, watched largely expressionlessly, generally rubbing his bearded chin or taking notes.

The Related Press typically doesn’t establish individuals who say they’ve been sexually assaulted except they arrive ahead publicly, as Breest has carried out.

Breest, now 36, mentioned she first met the “Crash” and “Million Greenback Child” screenwriter in 2012 at a premiere afterparty the place she was working.

Breest and Haggis exchanged occasional skilled emails and occasion chitchat, she mentioned, over the months earlier than their paths crossed once more at one other premiere occasion she labored on Jan. 31, 2013.

A tipsy — however not stumbling drunk — Breest accepted the filmmaker’s provide of a trip, after which his invitation for a drink, she informed jurors. She mentioned she urged someplace public as an alternative, however he pushed for his condo in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, and he or she did not need to offend one in all her employer’s red-carpet visitors.

“However simply so you already know,” she testified that she informed him, “I am not sleeping in SoHo tonight.”

But Haggis’ advances started as quickly as she put her baggage down in his loft’s open kitchen, Breest mentioned.

“You have been flirting with me for months,” he quickly mentioned, in keeping with her.

“I do not even know you,” she mentioned she replied.

Breest mentioned she dodged him and thought she’d politely defused the state of affairs when he began exhibiting her the condo. However once they reached a visitor bed room, Haggis “grew to become aggressive in a short time,” pushed her onto the mattress and pulled off her tights and garments as she tried to maintain them on and informed him to cease, she mentioned.

Then, she mentioned, he pressured her to carry out oral intercourse and needed intercourse. She mentioned she requested to take a bathe as a delicate method to get out of the room, however he adopted her there, then steered her again to the visitor bed room and made an extra collection of undesirable sexual strikes that culminated in rape.

“I used to be like a trapped animal. There was nothing for me to do,” she mentioned.

Breest mentioned she handed out quickly afterward, awoke alone on the mattress the following morning and left with out seeing Haggis once more.

That day and within the ensuing months, Breest mentioned, she informed a half-dozen associates that she had been sexually assaulted, naming Haggis to some. She mentioned she knowledgeable her boss the following 12 months that Haggis had carried out one thing unhealthy to her.

Breest did not inform police. She testified that she was scared and anxious about how her allegation can be dealt with.

Nor did she confront Haggis when he emailed her the day after the encounter to ask about images from the premiere. Nor at subsequent screenings or in emails, a few of which she initiated, about social occasions and film issues.

“I didn’t need my work expertise to be awkward,” she testified, so “I pretended like the whole lot was regular. And it wasn’t.”

Behind the scenes, Breest anguished over what had occurred and what to do, in keeping with textual content and different digital messages proven in courtroom.

The communications, despatched to associates, veer from frank descriptions of pressured intercourse — “and I stored saying no” — to moments when she appeared to downplay it (“it type of is” rape).

At occasions she mentioned she needed to keep away from Haggis, at others she mused about seeing him once more to attempt to regain some equanimity and “not be the sufferer.” The messages are salted with lighthearted texting slang — “lol,” “omg,” “haha” — that Breest says had been makes an attempt to make use of humor to defang a tricky topic.

Haggis hasn’t testified so far, and his legal professionals have not but gotten their likelihood to query Breest. In a gap assertion, protection lawyer Priya Chaudhry pointed to among the accuser’s messages — comparable to a remark that she wants “to get one thing out of this” — to query her credibility.

Breest mentioned her remarks simply replicate her horror at being victimized, her need to grab again a way of management in her life, and her confusion at how somebody she thought effectively of may violently activate her.

Now, she mentioned, she understands that night time.

“I assumed I used to be getting a trip house. I agreed to have a drink. What occurred by no means ought to have occurred,” she informed the jury. “And it had nothing to do with me, and the whole lot to do with him and his actions.”