Paul Haggis Found Liable On All Counts In New York Rape Civil Trial

deadline.com:

A New York jury today found filmmaker Paul Haggis liable on all three counts of rape and sexual abuse in his treatment of Haleigh Breest, who left a party in Manhattan with him in 2013 and then sued the Oscar winner in 2017 claiming he repeatedly forced sex on her in his apartment that night.  RELATED: Paul Haggis Sexual Assault Civil Trial: Deadline’s Complete Coverage The unanimous jury of four men and two women — whose makeup changed on the first day of deliberations — deliberated for nearly six hours before awarding Breest $7.5 million in compensation.

It also recommended punitive damages, the amount of which will be decided Monday. Seated between his lawyers, Haggis looked straight ahead as the verdicts were read.

It was the latest judgment in a spate of cases growing out of a #MeToo movement that has called out powerful men in the entertainment industry as sexual abusers.

The jury was asked to decide whether Haggis was one of them. Breest and her lawyers sought to prove that Haggis had forced her to submit to intercourse and to perform oral sex on him and pushed his fingers inside of her even as she said “no.”  She spent four days in total on the stand describing the encounter and defending her interpretation of it against a skeptical cross-examination by a lawyer for Haggis, Priya Chaudhry.