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A B.C. man who sexually assaulted a woman with severe mobility issues due to cerebral palsy has been sentenced to four years in prison.
Elijah Grier-Gaiga was convicted by a jury of a single count of sexual assault between Oct. 1, 2019, and Feb. 1, 2020, against a victim identified as A.B.
“Within that span of time, A.B. testified that Mr. Grier-Gaiga subjected her on multiple occasions to sexual acts to which she did not consent,” B.C. Supreme Court Justice Robin Baird said in his March 4 sentencing decision.
A.B. testified that she met Grier-Gaiga in October 2019 at A.B.’s dormitory on the Vancouver Island University campus in Nanaimo. Thereafter, they met two to three times per week until sometime in January 2020.
A.B. testified that at their first meeting, Grier-Gaiga wanted to go to her private room.
“The complainant went along with this, and described how the offender approached her from behind while she was standing at the sink in her bathroom washing her face. He had a knife which he grazed up her back,” Baird said. “The complainant testified that she felt confused and intimidated by this. Nevertheless, it seems that things proceeded to consensual sexual activity that same evening.”
Baird said the two had consensual sex most times, but A.B. also testified that on six separate occasions, she was forced by Grier-Gaiga into sexual acts to which she did not consent.
Baird said A.B. testified that, from the start of the relationship, Grier-Gaiga exhibited manipulative, controlling, aggressive, threatening and violent behaviour toward her.
In addition to the knife, he showed her firearms in his car.
“She claimed, essentially, that he waged a campaign to eradicate her self-esteem and her will to resist,” the judge said. “He preyed on her physical and emotional vulnerabilities … He laughed at her mobility issues and told her that her weakness was part of her appeal.”
The judge said that Grier-Gaiga told a pre-sentencing report writer that he was totally innocent, and that all of his sexual activity with A.B. was consensual.
“He believed the victim was madly in love with him, and that if she did not like what he was doing, she would not have kept coming back for more,” Baird said.
Still, Grier-Gaiga maintained he was role-playing, and that A.B. wanted to be dominated so he “treated her like crap.”
“I understand there’s a grey area,” Grier-Gaiga told a forensic psychiatric report writer.
