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A jury ordered Academy Award-winning filmmaker Paul Haggis Thursday to pay at the least $7.5 million to a girl who accused him of rape in one in every of a number of #MeToo-era circumstances which have put Hollywood notables’ conduct on trial this fall. The jury additionally plans to award further punitive damages.
Veering from intercourse to red-carpet socializing to Scientology, the civil courtroom trial pitted Haggis, recognized for writing greatest image Oscar winners “Million Dollar Baby” and “Crash,” in opposition to Haleigh Breest, a publicist who met him whereas working at film premieres within the early 2010s. After a screening afterparty in January 2013, he provided her a carry dwelling and invited her to his New York condominium for a drink.
After hugging her attorneys, Breest mentioned she was “very grateful” for the decision as she left courtroom. Haggis declined to remark.
He sat stock-still as the decision was learn, then turned to have a look at his three grownup daughters within the courtroom viewers. One had been crying on a sister’s shoulder.
Read extra:
Paul Haggis trial: Publicist accuses filmmaker of rape, ‘I was like a trapped animal’
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Breest, 36, mentioned Haggis then subjected her to undesirable advances and finally compelled her to carry out oral intercourse and raped her regardless of her entreaties to cease. Haggis, 69, mentioned the publicist was flirtatious and, whereas typically seeming “conflicted,” initiated kisses and oral intercourse in a wholly consensual interplay. He mentioned he couldn’t recall whether or not they had intercourse.
Jurors sided with Breest, who mentioned she suffered psychological {and professional} penalties from her encounter with Haggis. She sued in late 2017.
“I thought I was getting a ride home. I agreed to have a drink. What happened never should have happened. And it had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with him and his actions,” she informed jurors final month.
While awarding her $7.5 million to compensate for struggling, the jury concluded that punitive damages must also be awarded. Jurors return Monday for extra courtroom proceedings to assist them resolve that quantity.
The verdict got here weeks after one other civil jury, within the federal courthouse subsequent door, determined that Kevin Spacey didn’t sexually abuse fellow actor and then-teenager Anthony Rapp in 1986. Meanwhile, “That ’70s Show” actor Danny Masterson and former film magnate Harvey Weinstein are on trial, individually, on felony rape expenses in Los Angeles. Both deny the allegations, and Weinstein is interesting a conviction in New York.
All 4 circumstances adopted the #MeToo upwelling of denunciations, disclosures and calls for for accountability about sexual misconduct, triggered by October 2017 information experiences on a long time of allegations about Weinstein.
Breest, specifically, mentioned she determined to sue Haggis as a result of his public condemnations of Weinstein infuriated her: “This man raped me, and he is presenting himself as a champion of women to the world,” she recalled considering.
Four different ladies additionally testified that they skilled forceful, unwelcome passes — and in a single case, rape — by Haggis in separate encounters going again to 1996. None of the 4 took authorized motion.
“The behavior showed me that he was somebody who was never going to stop,” one lady testified, saying that Haggis repeatedly tried to kiss her in opposition to her will and even adopted her into and out of a taxi to her condominium in Toronto in 2015. His attorneys sought to assail the accusers’ credibility.
The Associated Press usually doesn’t determine individuals who say they’ve been sexually assaulted until they arrive ahead publicly, as Breest has accomplished.
Haggis denied all the allegations. He informed jurors the accusations left him shaken.
“I’m scared because I don’t know why women, why anyone, would lie about things like this,” he mentioned. His protection, in the meantime, launched jurors to a number of ladies — together with ex-wife and former longtime “Dallas” forged member Deborah Rennard — who mentioned the screenwriter-director took it in stride once they rebuffed his romantic or sexual overtures.
During three weeks of testimony, the trial scrutinized textual content messages that Breest despatched to mates about what occurred with Haggis, emails between them earlier than and after the night time in query, and a few variations between their testimony and what they mentioned in early courtroom papers.
The two sides debated whether or not Haggis was bodily able to finishing up the alleged assault eight weeks after a spinal surgical procedure. Psychology consultants provided dueling views about what one known as widespread misconceptions about rape victims’ conduct, equivalent to assumptions that victims would don’t have any subsequent contact with their attackers.
And jurors heard in depth testimony in regards to the Church of Scientology, the faith based by science fiction and fantasy writer L. Ron Hubbard within the Fifties. Haggis was an adherent for many years earlier than publicly renouncing, and denouncing, Scientology in 2009.
Through testimony from Haggis and different ex-members, his protection argued that the church got down to discredit him and may need had one thing to do with the lawsuit.
No witnesses mentioned they knew that Haggis’ accusers or Breest’s attorneys had Scientology ties, and his attorneys acknowledged that Breest herself doesn’t. Still, Haggis lawyer Priya Chaudhry sought to influence jurors that there have been “the footprints, though maybe not the fingerprints, of Scientology’s involvement here.”
The church mentioned in an announcement that it has no involvement within the matter, arguing that Haggis is making an attempt to disgrace his accusers with an “absurd and patently false” declare. Breest’s attorneys have known as it “a shameful and unsupported conspiracy theory.”
The Canadian-born Haggis bought his begin as a TV author, finally penning episodes of such well-known Nineteen Eighties collection as “Diff’rent Strokes” and “Thirtysomething.” He broke into films with a splash with “Million Dollar Baby” and “Crash,” which he additionally directed and co-produced. Each movie received the Academy Award for greatest image, for 2004 and 2005 respectively, and Haggis additionally received a screenwriting Oscar for “Crash.”
His different credit embody the Oscar-nominated screenplay for “Letters From Iwo Jima” and the screenplays for the James Bond films “Casino Royale” and “Quantum of Solace.”
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