Dr. Amitabh Chauhan, who also faces charges in connection with a similar incident with another woman in 2003, told court that on the night of the alleged assault the victim suggested that “she would crash with us” and that he was “fine with that.” Chauhan also faces charges of sexual assault and intent to stupefy in relation to an eerily similar 2003 alleged incident in Kingston against a former girlfriend. That woman came forward only after reading about the laying of the 2011 charges. “Do you like that? Are you a dirty girl?,” is what Chauhan and his co-accused Dr. Suganthan Kayilasanathan allegedly whispered into the victim’s ear as they allegedly raped her in multiple forms, vaginal, anal, while she asked them to stop before passing out.
TORONTO – One of two Indo-Canadian doctors accused of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman in a hotel room says the little bit of sexual activity they had was consensual.
This was part of testimony delivered in a Toronto courtroom Monday by Ancaster doctor Amitabh Chauhan, who, along with Dr. Suganthan Kayilasanathan, 36, stands accused of slipping a drug into the drink of a then-23-year-old woman before assaulting her on Feb. 12, 2011, reported Toronto Sun.
Chauhan, who at the time was a postgraduate of McMaster University’s plastic surgery department, told the court he and the complainant had developed a correspondence where he would provide her with advice on her own path to the medical profession.
Chauhan, who also faces charges in connection with a similar incident with another woman in 2003, testified he felt some e-mail messages from the woman were “flirtatious.”
He testified he and Kayilasanathan, a Toronto-based family doctor, agreed to meet up in Toronto for a rare night of drinking, clubbing and socializing, and that he and the complainant — whose identity is protected under a publication ban — had talked about her coming along.
He said all three of them had “a good amount” to drink both earlier in the hotel room and later at a dance club. At one point, the complainant suggested she “crash” with them in the room, he said.
“She suggested to me, ‘I’m going to crash here tonight,’” said Chauhan. “She needed a place to stay. She’d been drinking, and she wanted to crash with us.”
Chauhan said when the trio arrived back at the hotel room, he and the woman began slow dancing and kissing. He said he fell back on one of the room’s two beds and the complainant fell with him. He said they began rubbing each other and he performed oral sex on her.
But this, he insisted, is where it ended, as he was too tired and drunk to get an erection.
“I was spent … physically, I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I wasn’t able to have an erection. I was drunk, tired … It just wasn’t going to happen.”
Chauhan said he fell asleep and, not seeing the woman there when he awoke later, text-messaged and called her to make sure she arrived home safely.
In April, Crown lawyers said evidence will show the men’s bodily fluids — including saliva — were found on the woman’s genitals, underwear and bra.
Chauhan testified he isn’t certain exactly what happened between the complainant and Kayilasanathan.
That’s not what happened, not by the victim’s account to police and not, in a subsequent police interview, by her doctor friend’s friend — also a doctor — who’d joined them that evening.
Here is what she said happened: At some point the two doctors put something in her drink, a substance that incapacitated her. And then, together, simultaneously, they raped her in a room at the Sheraton, just down the street from the courthouse where she began testifying earlier.
Here is what the police officer, Det. Dan Luff, says in the audiotaped interview, an exhibit that has already been entered in court, reprising events as had been described to him by the complainant: “You (Chauhan) leave the club and you come back to your room in the hotel. Somewhere in between a substance has been put into one of her drinks that causes her to become a little stupefied that she’s unable to control what’s going on. And from that point she is telling me that you’re standing behind her, (the other man-Kayilasanathan) is in front of her. You rip off her clothes and start to have sex with her.
“As the night goes on, the both of you continue to have sex with her, in multiple forms, vaginal, anal, and she’s asking you, no, to stop. You don’t and when she goes to leave in the morning . . . you try to stop her. You are unable to stop her, otherwise you’d be charged with another charge of forcible confinement, and you’re yelling at your sidekick there that she’s getting away,” reported Toronto Star.
“And while you’re having sex, the two of you are whispering into her ear. ‘Do you like that? Are you a dirty girl?’ That kind of thing, those are the allegations.”
In the interview, Kayilasanathan denies all of this.
Chauhan also faces charges of sexual assault and intent to stupefy in relation to an eerily similar 2003 alleged incident in Kingston against a former girlfriend. That woman came forward only after reading about the laying of the 2011 charges. She finished testifying earlier on Thursday.
Court has also heard from a third woman — a “similar fact” witness — who said she connected with Kayilasanathan through a dating website in 2008, while living in the Maritimes. They’d gone clubbing, which is the last thing she remembered from that night, and that she woke up alone the next day in the doctor’s bed at his condo, unable to move. “It was like I was nailed to the bed, like I was paralyzed,” she testified.
She also came forward when learning of the charges against the doctors and that Toronto police were seeking more witnesses or alleged victims.
In his police interview, Kayilasanathan demands to know whether a rape kit test and toxic screen had been conducted on the complainant, sounding confident — because he’s a doctor and would know such things — that no trace of an incapacitating drug would be found in the woman’s urine and blood.
But, Kayilasanathan adds, his life is ruined anyway.
“Everybody knows my workplace, my family, my father will probably never speak to me again. And it’s all over nothing,” he said.
Kathryn Clarke, a spokeswoman for the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, said Chauhan’s licence expired June 30, 2011. Kayilasanathan is currently practising. The college is investigating both doctors, she said.
Courtesy Toronto Sun and Toronto Star
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