Sarnia man appealing sex conviction guilty of unrelated assault

A Sarnia man out on lease pending appeal of a 2023 sexual assault conviction was recently convicted and sentenced for an unrelated assault involving a different woman.

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Zakri Vaillancourt, 26, drew a suspended sentence and 1 1/2 years of probation for striking the woman in the face with a ball cap and part of his right hand during an argument.

“Violence is never acceptable in society,” Justice Paul Kowalyshyn said.

The judge told Vaillancourt to use a ball cap only when playing baseball or as a fashion statement, “not to strike (a woman).”

Defense lawyer Ian Bruce and assistant Crown attorney Michael Donald both suggested the sentence Kowalyshyn agreed to impose.

“This is an entirely different of flavor circumstances,” Donald said, referring to the sexual assault case under appeal.

Vaillancourt pleaded not guilty to four charges at the start of a five-day trial last year, but was found guilty by Superior Court Justice Russell Raikes in June 2023 of two of them: sexual assault and attempting to choke with intent to enable him to commit a sexual assault.

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Vaillancourt was acquitted of assault and mischief under $5,000.

Raikes sentenced Vaillancourt in February to three years in prison.

“This was a serious, violent sexual assault,” the judge said at that time. “His degree of moral blameworthiness is high.”

But Vaillancourt was quickly released after his lawyer, Chris Rudnicki, got his client’s lease pending an appeal of the convictions. He’s under strict house arrest until the appeal is heard.

No hearing date has been set, an Ontario Court of Appeal prosecutor said.

At trial last year, the woman testified she consented to one sex act while they were in a parked car, but added Vaillancourt was very aggressive and forced one unwanted act on her and tried to do another. He also put both hands around her neck at one point, she testified.

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“It hurts. She could barely breathe. She felt dizzy,” Raikes said in his 12-page decision released in June 2023.

Vaillancourt, a former factory worker who was in a serious car crash in 2022, denied this happened.

But after hearing Vaillancourt’s testimony, the judge found him evasive, defensive and argumentative at times while giving evidence that wasn’t credible or reliable as it was rife with inconsistencies.

“Simply put, I do not believe his version of what happened,” he said at the time.

Raikes also noted inconsistencies in the woman’s evidence, but on peripheral matters. She was consistent on what happened, including what each of them did and how the sexual activity occurred, he said.

This made her a credible witness.

“I believe her,” he wrote.

The woman, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, wrote about how the sexual assault had affected her. Over the following years, she’s struggled with a long list of physical and mental-health issues, including panic attacks, night terrors, depression and loss of appetite.

Also last year, but in a different case, Vaillancourt was convicted of impaired driving linked to an incident where he crashed into a parked car in downtown Sarnia and fled on foot.

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