Warning: this story contains graphic content
A 21-year-old woman says she was sexually abused while in foster care and decided to tell police because her former foster father’s wife had given birth to a baby girl.
She said she didn’t want what happened to her to happen to anyone else.
“It was eating at me,” said the woman, whose identity is protected by a mandatory publication ban.
She testified in Saskatoon Court of Queen’s Bench on Monday at the trial of her former foster father, who is charged with sexual assault and sexual interference.
The man is accused of sexually touching the woman while she was living at his home near Humboldt between 2000 and 2005.
The woman told a jury the abuse started when she was four-years-old and ended when she told her foster mother about it at the age of nine. She said the accused would instruct her not to tell his wife, who was always gone when it happened.
Breaking down in tears on the stand, she described her first memory of being abused on a couch — where she said most of the sexual assaults took place over the next six years.
She said the accused would pull down her pants and touch her vagina. He also made her rub his penis, sometimes until he ejaculated, she testified.
“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say,” the woman told jurors.
She recalled sitting at the kitchen table when she was nine-years-old and telling her former foster mother about the abuse. She said the woman dragged her outside to confront her husband, who denied the allegations and accused her of trying to ruin their family.
Later that night, she said the accused’s wife asked her not to “bring this up with anyone else.” From that point forward, the abuse stopped, the woman testified.
She remained in the home for five more years and was removed after getting in a fight with her foster mother, the jury heard.
When she was 16, she told a case worker that she had been sexually abused. Two years later, she reported it to police after finding out that the accused had a baby daughter.
The defence will cross-examine the complainant when the trial resumes on Tuesday.