The former mayor of Woodstock, the judge said upon convicting him on Wednesday of two counts of sexual assault, was playing fast and loose with the truth.
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“Bluntly,” Superior Court Justice Spencer Nicholson said of Trevor Birtch, “I found Mr. Birtch to be completely incredible and an obvious liar.
“I find that Mr. Birtch lied frequently and extravagantly during his testimony, frankly insulting the court’s intelligence.”
Those tough words were followed by a detailed analysis by Nicholson, who registered two convictions but an acquittal on a third charge, only because the troubled 39-year-old complainant with a history of addiction plus mental and physical health issues had a fuzzy memory.
Birtch, 49, was Woodstock’s two-term mayor until being convicted at the polls in 2022 amid his criminal woes. He had denied the allegations made by the woman, who had a relationship with him between 2017 and 2019.
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The case overlapped Birtch’s previous trial, involving a different woman, which was granted a mistrial last month.
The victim in the case before Nicholson testified to frequent sexual assaults, sometimes when she was asleep, during their time together. She also said the pair often drank and snorted cocaine and testified she saw Birtch snort cocaine during breaks in Zoom city council meetings amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Birtch denied the cocaine use and said he had coin bags of crushed-up over-the-counter pain killers for a shoulder injury. Nicholson didn’t buy Birtch’s explanation that the woman mistakenly thought he had cocaine.
“I also find it entirely unbelievable that anyone holding a public position of trust would keep coin bags of crushed-up white powder that was not cocaine on their person, appearing to anyone who might see it to be a drug addict,” Nicholson said.
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