HAMILTON–The witness did everything she could to not face the court.
Shrank down low in her chair, turned her head sideways tucking chin into clavicle, and cupped a shielding palm over her cheek.
But there was no hiding the embarrassment and no shrinking from the questions.
Yes, she'd had consensual sex with the accused: vaginal, oral and – only when probed for the third time was this acknowledgment elicited – anal. Yes, she'd become intimate with the defendant when he lived only a few doors away, after knowing him for about a month. Yes, there'd been another lover shortly before and shortly afterwards but none of the relationships had overlapped. Yes, she'd been left pregnant with her fourth child after booting the third man from her home upon discovering he was wanted by police. The evidence made her sound, if not promiscuous, then suggestively easy.
"A black fellow?" asked defence lawyer Davies Bagambariie, of one boyfriend. Indeed. "African?'' Correct. "From Chad?" Didn't know.
And the boyfriend who impregnated her, where was he now? "Back in Jamaica, I think."
The accused is also black, originally from Uganda. The witness – like every other female who's taken the stand against Johnson Aziga as alleged victim at this trial – is white. One might fairly surmise that Aziga liked his women white and plain and perhaps lonely.
This appears to be the darker side of Sex and the City, the downscale bar and nightclub scene of Steel Town, where an altogether unremarkable man could rather easily romance the caution out of a string of females, allegedly infecting 11 of them with HIV between 1993 and 2003. The women who've testified so far – two of them from beyond the grave, their taped statements made just before they succumbed to AIDS-related cancers – have all claimed Aziga never revealed his HIV status.
Aziga, a 52-year-old former civil servant, is believed to be the first Canadian charged with homicide in an HIV infection. He faces 11 counts of aggravated sexual assault and two counts of murder.
Four of the women did not contract HIV but were exposed to the virus without knowledge, the prosecution maintains, and thus were unable to make a responsible decision for themselves in agreeing to unprotected sex.
The woman on the stand yesterday – sobbing even before she sat down – has HIV, diagnosed on Valentine's Day 2003, nearly a year after she ended her relationship with Aziga but when she was already pregnant with another man's child.
Her positive HIV result required the woman to deliver by Caesarean section, her infant son put on medication for three months. He has not developed HIV.
This case is so unusual, unprecedented, that some normal rules don't apply. At this trial, a woman's sexual history is fair game, despite a rape shield law in Canada that routinely forbids such interrogation. But the defence is clearly pursuing an alternate infector scenario, suggesting the affected women contracted HIV from sexual partners other than Aziga.
It is jolting, however, listening to lines of inquiry that have not been heard in Canadian courtrooms for so long, with alleged victims grilled about past sexual partners – as if the clock has been turned back a couple of decades.
The woman, who can be identified only as "Ms K," told court she and Aziga used condoms when they first started having sex but then discarded the practice. "I thought I could trust him and if there was any problems, he would have told me."
As she, for example, told Aziga when she developed a yeast infection. "He looked at me like I made him sick or something ... like I gave him something. He asked me if he could catch it."
Ms K was preceded into the stand by "Ms H," who became sexually involved with Aziga in early 2001, though she knew the defendant as "Pete Johnson." Separated from her husband after more than 20 years of marriage, Ms H had met the defendant in a bar. She too said she'd asked Aziga about sexually transmitted diseases before abandoning condoms and he assured her that he was safe. "I believed him. He took me and he looked in my face and he told me he wasn't." Her voice rising: "Why couldn't he just tell me this? He lied to me!"
Ms H was diagnosed HIV-positive in September 2003, after learning of Aziga's arrest on the news and getting herself tested.
Bagambariie asked whether, when she and Aziga were still using condoms, she'd ever checked the prophylactics for defects, a question that flabbergasted the witness.
"What am I supposed to do, blow them up to check if they have a hole in them?"
