No charges in sexual assault complaint against RCMP

There will be no charges against a male RCMP police officer on P.E.I. accused of sexual assault, following an investigation by Nova Scotia's independent Serious Incident Response Team.

SiRT was asked on March 11 to investigate the accusation. A woman complained the officer forcibly sexually assaulted her on two occasions between February 2013 and March 2014.

"When she gave us the statement, it was clear that on the first occasion, she clearly had consented to the activity. So at the very outset, we had a reliability issue," said SiRT director Ron MacDonald in an interview with CBC.

"As we looked into it further, we were not satisfied with the reliability of her evidence, and concluded there was no grounds for charges," he said.

The officer was a friend of the complainant's husband, MacDonaldnoted, which was how the two were acquainted.

Officer admitted to sexual encounters

In particular, SiRT said some of her statements about important facts were shown to not be true.

They also had evidence from social media and the woman's phone, MacDonald noted.

""We do have some Facebook evidence and copies of text messages that were quite relevant, where some people were told one thing, and yet a different thing was told us in our interviews," he said.

In addition, at the time of the initial complaint the woman also made a complaint of sexual assault against another civilian male.

When that matter was investigated by the RCMP, her evidence made it clear that she had consented to those encounters, said the news release.

The woman also admitted to telling the SiRT investigator a deliberate falsehood, MacDonald said.

The accused RCMP officer gave a statement to SiRT, admitting to the encounters with the woman but saying they were consensual. SiRT found his evidence to be credible.

Victims should come forward

MacDonald hopes this finding will not deter those with legitimate complaints from coming forward.

"Sexual assault is an offence that must be looked at with a lens of understanding, and you must be prepared to consider that complainants present in a variety of ways," he said.

"But at the end of the day, you have to determine whether the evidence really can prove or does show that an offence occurred. And in this case, we determined an offence did not occur."

The SiRT report is now available to the public on the police commissioner's website.

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