Frank Stronach to be sentenced today for 1977 indecent assault - National Post

Canadian businessman Frank Stronach leaves the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto, on June 19, 2026. Photo by Nick Kozak for Postmedia NewsArticle contentAutoparts billionaire Frank Stronach, 94, is due in a Toronto courtroom Thursday morning for a sentencing hearing for the crime of indecently assaulting a woman in a Toronto apartment in 1977.

Justice Anne Molloy, who found Stronach guilty in June, is to hear Crown and defence arguments before sentencing him for a crime that technically no longer exists, as it was rewritten in 1983 into the broader Criminal Code offence of sexual assault.

An offender can only be charged with a crime that was in force at the time of the alleged offence. Today’s legal arguments will be based on the law of indecent assault as it then was for the substance of the offence, guided by more recent precedent and comparable sentences.

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The conviction is the only guilty finding out of 12 offences initially alleged involving seven women in a trial that went badly sideways over the course of the spring.

All were historic complaints, some older than the modern law of sexual assault itself, most in the 1980s. The charges were laid in 2024.

The trial started provocatively, as the Crown sought to use each case to bolster the credibility of the others. But by trial’s end, only three complainants remained. One woman had an emotional breakdown on the witness stand and gave evidence so garbled and disjointed the judge decided no conviction could flow from it. Another gave such self-contradictory evidence, especially over the year the alleged crime occurred, that Molloy decided she could not convict. One woman tried to apologize after lying on the witness stand about whether she had read another complainant’s account in the media. Another was revealed in cross-examination to have an extensive history of controversial business litigation involving what a judge described as her deceit and dishonesty, and a more recent instance of allegedly falsely reporting to police that a man she had a dispute with threatened to kill her. All those charges failed.

Two guilty findings were recorded in June involving two women. Then a few days later with the trial still in the hands of Molloy, a civil lawyer for one of them made an attempt to extract money through Stronach’s lawyer, but ended up sharing information that contradicted the woman’s testimony under oath. That led Molloy to declare a surprise mistrial over the woman’s charge, leaving only the indecent assault conviction involving the other woman. Chronologically, it was the first of the 12 crimes initially alleged.