Testifying at the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador on Friday, a woman described being with four friends in downtown St. John’s in 2016, hopping into a cab home, where the driver then welcomed himself inside and subsequently assaulted her.
The woman was 19 at the time and told the court Lulzim (Leon) Jakupaj was with City Wide taxi and was their driver that night.
She is one of two people he is accused of sexually assaulting in separate incidents last spring.
She said her group arrived at the Mount Pearl address, where the driver inexplicitly followed them in, took off his shoes and joined the majority upstairs. He chatted the group up and offered them drugs, she said, namely marijuana.
When he went to get the drugs from his car, she headed downstairs with the intent of checking on a friend who had been upset.
Passing the driver as he returned, she said he grabbed at her breast, squeezed and laughed before continuing on.
She continued downstairs, where she found her friend in the bathroom crying. It was unrelated, tied to something earlier in the evening, and the two spent some time talking.
The door was open and she said the driver came down to the bathroom door, asking for a hug before he left the house.
“I told him no,” she said.
He asked again. She said no. He pressed. She explained she had a boyfriend and didn’t want to. He asked. She said no. He was insistent, she said, describing the continuing, uncomfortable situation.
“I said OK, fine, just to get him to leave,” she said. “So I went out and just put one arm around his back … that’s when he grabbed me.”
She testified he pushed her against the wall in the hallway, pinned her just below the shoulder. Her friend came out to help and he yelled at her to get “back in the f---ing bathroom!”
The testimony went on to describe an assault wherein he was pressed close enough to her to run his teeth down her cheek. “He kept trying to put his tongue in my mouth,” she said.
She squirmed, trying to get away. “I yelled at him to stop,” she said.
He moved her, forcing her against a nearby washer and dryer. That’s where, she said, he went from pushing a tongue at her face and a hand up her shirt to trying to pull her pants down, getting one side down “five or six inches.”
He never got them all the way down, she said; even when he moved her again, back against a wall.
“And he put his forearm against my throat,” she said. “It wasn’t enough to lose air, but it was definitely enough to feel scared.”
She described a loud bang in the upstairs abruptly ending the assault, as he ran out.
She provided her testimony from a separate room from the main courtroom, via video link, completing cross-examination in the afternoon.
Proceedings continue Monday.
