Doctor denies allegations in gang-rape trial, admits lying to police
Dr. Suganthan Kayilasanathan took the stand Thursday and admitted lying to police about having no sexual contact with the complainant.
June 5, 2014
Dr. Suganthan Kayilasanathan, seen leaving a Toronto court in 2011.
Richard Lautens / Toronto Star
By Alyshah Hasham City Hall Bureau
The second of two doctors to take the stand at a trial where they are accused of drugging and simultaneously sexually assaulting a 23-year-old woman denied the allegations Thursday.
Though he admitted lying to police in an interview after his arrest, Dr. Suganthan Kayilasanathan said that he is now telling the “absolute truth.”
“At no point did we drug or rape (the woman),” he said.
Kayilasanathan, 36, a family physician who was practising in Scarborough at the time, testified that he began dancing with the woman when they returned to the downtown Toronto hotel room after going to a club on Feb. 13, 2011.
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They kissed and he began licking her breasts, but then she moved away and went over to his childhood friend, Dr. Amitabh Chauhan, who was sleeping on one of the hotel beds.
“She was like: ‘Hey, where’s Amitabh, what’s Amitabh doing,’” he testified.
She woke him up, and they started dancing and kissing, he said.
“It was not what I expected to happen,” he said, adding that he felt awkward and a little hurt. Kayilasanathan testified that he turned away, had a cigarette and shortly after went to the bathroom to vomit.
When he came out to grab his toiletry bag, Chauhan and the woman were under the bedcovers, he told a Toronto court.
He later saw them on the bed, both fully clothed. When he got into bed, the woman came over to ask if he was OK, and he fell asleep shortly afterwards, he testified.
In the morning, before the woman left in a hurry, they had a brief conversation where she said she had been really drunk and he jokingly called her a “naughty girl,” he said.
However, in an interview with police shortly after his arrest, Kayilasanathan denied ever having any sexual contact with the woman — a medical student Chauhan was mentoring — and insisted that the DNA evidence would prove his innocence.
The court has heard that DNA of both doctors were found on the woman’s bra, pants and genitals, but that no drugs were found in tests of her blood and hair.
On Thursday, Kayilasanathan admitted lying to the police and apologized to the court.
He was “terrified, flabbergasted and confused” after being confronted with “absurd allegations” of gang rape, drugging, forcible confinement and drug trafficking related to the marijuana he smoked in the hotel room that night, he said. He was panicked about losing his career and family relationships, he said.
Crown prosecutor Cara Sweeny asked why, after hearing the allegations, his first question was “did you conduct a tox screen and rape kit?”
He replied that he thought that evidence from the tests would exonerate both him and Chauhan, but that if he’d been thinking rationally he would have realized his saliva would be found on her chest.
Sweeny suggested that he was thinking rationally, since during the interview he offered that his DNA may have come into contact with her in an innocuous way.
She also suggested that he was confident the DNA evidence would vindicate them because both men had used condoms while sexually assaulting the woman.
The trial continues. |
