Filmmaker Paul Haggis Ordered To Pay USD 7.5 million In Rape Trial Suit

A jury ordered Academy Award-winning film-maker, Paul Haggis, to pay at least $7.5m to a woman who accused him of rape in one of several #MeToo-era cases that have put Hollywood notables’ behaviour on trial this fall.

Haggis lost his civil rape trial on Friday after a New York jury found the filmmaker liable on all three counts of rape and sexual abuse. The court trial pitted Haggis, known for writing best picture Oscar winners Million Dollar Baby and Crash, against Haleigh Breest, a publicist who met him while working at movie premieres in the early 2010s.

Paul Haggis rape trial suit

Haggis, 69, said the publicist was flirtatious and while sometimes seeming “conflicted”, initiated kisses and oral sex in an entirely consensual interaction. He said he couldn’t recall whether they had intercourse.

Jurors sided with Breest, who said she suffered psychological and professional consequences from her encounter with Haggis. She sued in late 2017. “I thought I was getting a ride home. I agreed to have a drink. What happened never should have happened. And it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with him and his actions,” she told jurors.

Breest, in particular, said she decided to sue Haggis because his public condemnations of Harvey Weinstein infuriated her: “This man raped me and he is presenting himself as a champion of women to the world,” she recalled thinking.

“The behaviour showed me that he was somebody who was never going to stop,” one woman testified, saying that Haggis repeatedly tried to kiss her against her will and even followed her into and out of a taxi to her apartment in Toronto in 2015.

The unanimous jury consisting of four men and two women deliberated for nearly six hours and awarded the plaintiff USD 7.5 million in compensation and recommended punitive damages, which will be decided on Monday, shared the outlet.

Four other women also testified that they experienced forceful, unwelcome passes and in one case, rape by Haggis in separate encounters going back to 1996. None of the four took legal action.

The verdict brings to an end the three-week trial that focused on the accusations. She sued Haggis in 2017 on the grounds that the director had forced her into having oral sex with him before raping her at his Soho apartment.

Following the verdict, as she exited, the plaintiff said she was “very grateful that I had the opportunity to seek justice and accountability in court — and that the jury chose to follow the facts — and believed me.”

She was working as a freelancer at the 2013 event, which Haggis attended as a guest. Though he doesn’t deny the encounter took place, Haggis maintains it was consensual.

Suggested Reading: Fourth Woman Alleges Oscar-Winner Director Paul Haggis Tried To Rape Her