Three women recount violent sex assaults while living with Michael Haaima

Editor's Note: This article contains graphic details of sexual violence which readers may find disturbing.

Three troubled young women thought moving in with Michael Haaima would solve their problems. They soon learned the alleged serial sex abuser was using them for more than shared rent money.

Justice Robyn M. Ryan Bell is presiding over the trial of Haaima, who has pleaded not guilty to 96 of the 98 charges against him. Since the trial began on Thursday, May 29, 2025, the Crown has called three witnesses who lived with Haaima as roommates in 2007. The three women, now in their late 30s, all described a life of heavy marijuana smoking and variously violent sexual encounters with Haaima during their time living with him.

A standard publication ban protects the identities of the victims who testify at the trial.

Roommate One testified on Friday, May 30, 2025, that she was 17 years old when she found herself living in a car with her relative and another young woman after her abusive father kicked her out of their family home. It was winter, and the three young women had jobs in Kingston.

After some days, the three moved in with Michael Haaima, a man Roommate One had never met. The court would learn that Haaima was known to her relative, identified as Roommate Two, and their friend, Roommate Three, who had purchased marijuana from him. According to the three witnesses, Haaima learned of their homelessness while selling two of them pot and told them his house would soon have open bedrooms once his roommates moved out. 

Roommate One described the home as a bungalow in Kingston with three bedrooms. The doors of two of the rooms were closed when the young women moved in; those rooms were considered off limits because the other people living there were still using them. All three women testified that they slept in a queen- or king-sized bed with Haaima for the first few days because their respective bedrooms were still occupied by a roommate.

The witness said Haaima was “hounding her for sex” from the day the women moved in. He would say things like “I'm going to have sex with you. It's going to happen today” daily for a week while she continually denied his advances.

She testified that about a week after she had moved in, Haaima grabbed her by the throat and forced himself on her, pushing her down onto a bed, “growling,” and digging his fingernails into her thighs. She said she was scared.

“If you don't say yes, it'll be worse,” she described him saying. "He clutched his hands on the inner thighs and dragged his hands down, and then I was, like, okay, fine.” She testified that she had suffered traumas before that time in her life and that she may have lost consciousness or dissociated as a trauma response. Still, she recalled him violently assaulting her by putting his whole hand inside her vagina up to the cervix, scraping her vaginal walls with his fingernails until she “felt destroyed inside.” Then “he ate” what he extracted, she alleged.

Roommate One broke down during cross-examination as defence attorney Natasha Calvinho had her re-enact Haaima’s hand movements during the alleged assault.

Roommate Two gave her evidence on Monday, Jun. 2, 2025. She is a relative of Roommate One and was 19 years old when she and the other two young women moved in with Haaima. 

She testified that she had purchased marijuana from Haaima, who later invited her over to watch a movie with him. She described having a consensual sexual encounter with Haaima during that date; however, she testified that he began “slapping” her and “biting” her so hard that she was left with bruises. 

“Were you expecting those things to happen?” asked Crown attorney Megan Williams.

“I was not,” Roommate Two answered.

“And I understand you've described it as consensual in your perspective at the time,” Williams continued. “Can you help us understand what you mean by that?”

“At the time, I was very inexperienced when it came to sex,” Roommate Two explained, “So… I was attracted to him and he was showing interest in me, so... I engaged.”

On another occasion, she described sleeping in the bed with Haaima and the other roommates when, she alleged, Haaima forced himself on her against her will. “I was laying on the edge of the bed [next to Haaima],” she said, explaining the other two young women were between Haaima and the wall, and that he began to touch her vagina.

“I said ‘No,’ and he was, like, ‘Yes, you are,’ and I told him I was on my period and I was wearing a tampon. And he told me [that] whether the tampon was in or out, he would be putting his dick in me.”

“And at that point I was, like, 'well, what am I supposed to do?'” she said. “He told me, ‘Take the tampon out and throw it under the bed.’ So that's what I did… I pretty much rolled on my side, and I think I dissociated.”

“I just remember thinking that I didn't have anywhere to go, and I needed to do what I needed to do to make sure that myself and [my relative] and [my friend] weren't chucked out into the cold and didn't have anywhere to stay,” she explained.

On Tuesday, Jun. 3, 2025, Assistant Crown Attorney Holly Chiavetti presented the third witness in the Crown's case, Roommate Three. She testified that Haaima raped her at a west-end pool hall and in the bathroom at the shared house. She was 20 years old at the time.

Haaima allegedly called the witness for a ride home from the pool hall. When she arrived at the bar, she testified, he was with another man. Haaima told the other man that Roommate Three was going to give him oral sex in public. She couldn't remember her exact words, the witness said, but “That wasn't happening… I wasn't comfortable with that.”

Haaima was seated in a chair and exposed himself to her, she said. 

“He had his penis hanging out… At first, it was like he was joking, but then the more I refused, the more frustrated he became, to the point where I remember him grabbing me and pulling me down towards him... and forcibly making me…” She testified he held her down by her head that way for 30 seconds to a minute, “before he was satisfied enough.”

“I feel like it was a game to him, how much he could get away with,” the witness said. 

She left after he released her, and the two men rode home to the house with her. 

“I remember yelling at him and telling him that was disgusting. And that wasn't who I was. I remember still yelling at him when he got out of the car,” Roomate Three recalled.

“Did he have any apparent reaction to you yelling at him?” Chiavetti asked.

“He just laughed it off like he didn't see that it was not appropriate…,” the witness said, adding that this made her feel "cheap and used... and it didn't matter what or how I felt about it. It was all about him and how he felt."

Roommate Three then alleged that minutes later, she was using the bathroom in the shared house when Haaima broke into the room while she was on the toilet and violently sexually assaulted her. Then he called the other man into the bathroom “to join in with him --- that it would be fun.”

The second man came into the room and molested her at Haaima’s urging. Roommate Three said she told them to stop multiple times, and that she was scared about what was happening and tried to escape. The second man eventually left the room.

The witness said that after Haaima had violently raped her in the bathroom for an unknown amount of time, he picked her up and carried her to his bedroom, where he threw her down hard on the bed and raped her until he ejaculated. The second man was in the bed and appeared to be passed out, the woman recalled.

After that incident, she said, she tried to stay away from Haaima as much as possible, going home only to sleep.

All three women testified that Haaima eventually spent most of his time away from the house, living with a 15-year-old girl who worked with them. The three female roommates left the house on July 1, 2007; two moved to the Niagara region, and one lived on the streets in Kingston.

In her cross-examination of the first two witnesses, defence attorney Calvinho relied heavily on suggesting that the encounters with Haaima were consensual sex. Under Calvinho's questioning, the women also agreed that their heavy marijuana use at the time was detrimental to memory and could even cause hallucinations.

Late Tuesday, Crown attorney Williams raised an objection to the fact that Calvinho used an Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) detective’s notes when cross-examining the women. Calvinho had put copies of the officer's notes in front of the first two women who testified, asking them to refer to them in order to refresh their memories at times. 

“I'm anticipating that my friend is going to do that with [witness number three],” she said.

Williams explained that she had let it slide twice, but that Calvinho was using the officer’s handwritten notes “to challenge the witness in relation to her court testimony as though it is the witness's statement… You can't cross-examine a witness based upon officers' notes because officers' notes are not a statement.” 

She went on to say that an officer’s notes are not a transcript of the conversation that occurred; further, it might be intimidating for a witness to challenge the veracity of a police officer’s notes because the officer is an authority figure --- so “therefore of course they agree with [Calvinho]” when she refers to the notes as though they are truth or fact.

“We have 26 more young women to go,” Williams said, “so I do object to my friend taking the notebook [and] putting the officer's notes in front of the witness.”

Justice Bell did not rule on the objection, leaving that for when the trial resumes on Wednesday, Jun. 4, 2025.

Kingstonist will continue to follow the trial as it unfolds.