A Mont-Saint-Hilaire massage therapist accused of sexual assault on seven clients scared away a woman who was consulting him for the very first time when he allegedly brushed his hands insistently near her genitals.
“Normally the movement doesn’t go that high. There is an insistence that surprises me. […] I am on my guard, I am not well, I do not feel any well-being, any relaxation,” the 58-year-old client told Monday morning at the trial of Yvon Poirier. The woman’s identity is protected by an order.
In the summer of 2019, she visited the 67-year-old massage therapist for treatment after seeing he was offering a promotion on Facebook. Yvon Poirier welcomed his clients in a room set up in the basement of his residence, in Montérégie.
Not normal
He was massaging the thighs of the lady, lying naked on her table, when his fingers brushed against her vagina several times. At first, she freezes and wonders what’s going on. Then, faced with the massage therapist’s insistence in this intimate area, she realized “that it wasn’t normal. »
“It’s like he’s waiting to see my reaction.” I didn’t go there for that. It’s an attack on my femininity, on my life,” she lamented in court.
When the professional asks her to turn over on her stomach, she rather ends the massage hastily by inventing a bogus excuse.
“I said to myself, that’s out of the question. [que ça continue]. I preferred to run away and seal my camp from there. My instinct was telling me to leave,” she said.
After making her pay, Poirier allegedly made her sign a letter which she found rather bizarre. “It said like what happens here, stays here. As if the care was under a confidential cover that we could not exchange the content of what had happened,” she described.
The woman left her appointment “outraged and angry.” »
He laughs in the room
The accused seated in the room let out a laugh while the complainant answered questions from the Crown prosecutor, Me Marie-Claude Morin. He was accompanied by half a dozen relatives for the first day of his trial, at the Longueuil courthouse.
Photo by Ben Pelosse
Between 2002 and 2021, he allegedly sexually assaulted seven of his clients, who will testify in the coming days.
Yvon Poirier was arrested for the first time in December 2022. After the media coverage of the case, other alleged victims came forward to the authorities.
“I decided to unite my voice with other women. I’m happy because someone got [le courage] to take a step that I have not taken. […] It’s a question of justice, we can’t let people act like that without consequences,” said the fifty-year-old.
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