A complainant testified that an alleged incident damaged her ability to start relationships with trust and has put her in a position of having to be “on guard.”
Borderline clinical.
Those were the words a woman used during a police interview to describe how the touch of Ruben Adam Manz felt to her on a day in November of 2019.
The now 37-year-old woman testified over two days, beginning Tuesday, in Regina’s Court of King’s Bench, where the trial of the Regina chiropractor continues.
Manz stands charged with sexually assaulting that woman and six others, all of whom were said to have been his former patients. None can be identified due to a publication ban, which is standard in sexual assault cases.
The 37-year-old who took the stand Tuesday was the Crown’s final witness. She offered an account similar to that of other complainants. She testified that during her fifth appointment with him, Manz touched her breasts as he was performing a neck stretch on her, meant to be part of her treatment.
She told Crown prosecutor Jackie Lane that he hadn’t told her he would need to touch her breast and she did not tell him it was OK to do so.
She’d been referred to Manz by her previous chiropractor, but avoided calling her about it.
“I didn’t want to call her and tell her I had a sneaking suspicion I had just been sexually assaulted and for her to think it was maybe her fault because it was her recommendation and to feel guilt over that. And especially if it was all for nothing.”
Because she wasn’t sure what it was that had happened, defence lawyer Blaine Beaven suggested.
“At that point, I was not sure if the stretch required the touch that had happened,” the witness clarified.
She instead contacted the Chiropractors’ Association Of Saskatchewan (CAS), she testified, which led to her lodging a complaint.
Like a number of other complainants, she did not speak with police about the alleged incident until 2021, after she’d seen news that Manz had been charged for sexual assault. She had no intention of going to police until she learned of the charges, she agreed.
She told Beaven “this may sound stupid,” before testifying that she thought she “did everything right” in contacting the CAS and didn’t know to go to the police about the alleged incident until she saw that others had. Nobody she spoke to about the alleged incident had asked her whether she’d gone to police, she said.
She’d earlier told Lane that seeing the news was “confirmation” that what happened to her was wrong and she felt that if she shared what had happened with police it might stop the same from happening to other women.
She became emotional when telling the prosecutor that the alleged incident had damaged her ability to start relationships with trust and has put her in a position of having to be “on guard.”
Beaven suggested a number of things had made her feel “off” on the date of the alleged incident. He raised that, unlike in her first four appointments, a female intern was not present during treatment on the date in question.
She said she noticed the intern’s absence just as she would’ve noticed if it was warm or cold that day, but it did not raise immediate “wariness.”
Beaven spent time having the witness describe the touch at issue, which she said felt as if the pads of Manz’ fingers were pressing into her breast. She did not look at his hand, she said, and she agreed there was no “cupping” or “squeezing.”
She’d earlier testified that she and Manz normally chatted after an appointment. But following the alleged touching on the date in question, the end of the appointment had felt “abrupt” with no more conversation, she said.
Beaven suggested to her that this had “taken on some importance now, whereas otherwise it might just be a busy chiropractor waiting to do his next appointment.”
“I probably would have thought, if I hadn’t been touched, that I had done something to tick him off to be dismissed so quickly, for it to be so different,” the witness responded.
After her testimony concluded Wednesday, the Crown closed its case. The trial is expected to continue Thursday, with the defence having the opportunity to call evidence.
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