THE CANADIAN PRESS
NAPANEE, Ont. — Crown attorneys prosecuting David Frost told a court Wednesday that they would paint a picture of a former hockey coach and agent who controlled the lives of his players so thoroughly that he could order the teens to participate with him in sexual acts.
Lawyers acting for Frost told a judge in this eastern Ontario community that their defence against the four charges of sexual exploitation facing their client would be to deny the acts ever took place.
The trial broke Wednesday as both sides awaited Justice Geoff Griffin’s decision Thursday about whether witnesses who will take the stand can be named and what evidence will be heard at the trial.
Frost continuously scribbled in a black notebook as lawyers for both sides wrangled over pre-trial legal matters in front of Griffin.
The question was the scope of evidence to be heard by the trial and whether the witnesses and participants in the sexual activity, allegedly involving players, their teenage girlfriends and Frost in threesomes, would have their names published after they testified.
The Crown has already summarized evidence that Frost bullied and abused his players, dumping garbage on them in dressing rooms, upending garbage cans on players’ heads and beating the cans with hockey sticks to express his displeasure with how they had played.
Frost coached the Quinte Hawks in the 1990s, when the offences were alleged to have taken place.
Frost’s lawyer Marie Henein argued that the testimony does not paint her client as a pleasant person.
But Henein said it has nothing to do with the crimes with which he is charged and is an attempt by the Crown to give credence to their witnesses and have Griffin, who is hearing the case without a jury, to give less weight to defence witnesses.
The Crown’s evidence includes written testimony from the manager and other workers from the hotel Frost lived at while coaching the team.
The manager complained at length about the filthy room Frost lived in and how he swore at cleaning staff when they tried to get in to clean.
It was a line of evidence that appeared to frustrate Griffin.
“Let’s deal with the charges, not the garbage can on the head or the landlord who doesn’t like him,” he appealed to the lawyers. “These are charges related to sexual exploitation.”
The prosecutors also asked that a number of witnesses be allowed to testify without their names being published.
That argument was opposed by Frost’s lawyer and by a lawyer representing The Globe and Mail and the Ottawa Citizen.
The witnesses, who all agreed to testify after being served subpoenas, told police that they were embarrassed at their youthful sexual exploits, some of which were videotaped and are in the possession of police.
Now in their late 20s, married and some with families, they did not want their names reported in case it damaged their reputations or hurt their families.
Peter Jacobsen, arguing for the two papers, said that fear was not enough to bar their names from the public record.
“Although one can be sympathetic to their discomfort, there is no evidence that there is any real and substantive danger to the administration of justice,” Jacobsen told Griffin.
Griffin, a small-town judge who knows many of the people who appear before him by their first name, noted that anyone from Napanee could drop by the trial, recognize who was testifying and report it out to the town even if the press was muzzled.
(Kingston Whig-Standard)
