The famous Fiori trial: wild Moments in Montreal journalism, 1999

  An article I penned in the last millennium caused some waves by recounting an ongoing criminal assault trial involving Quebecois icon Serge Fiori and the four young women accused of beating him and his girlfriend in a late-night rumble at 4177 St. Denis, corner Rachel. 

    One summer night in August 1997 four young female pals from Park Ex had exited the Jungle nightclub, now La Shop, previously known as Le Lezard (1987-98) Dogue and Cargo (1982-87) and outside 3:30 a.m. they bumped into Serge Fiori, his girlfriend and another female friend, leading to an unarmed brawl, resulting in no particularly grave injuries.

 The girls were charged with assault and after 18 months went to jury trial with a plea of not guilty.
 Photographer Caroline Hayeur got the four bored co-accused to pose for a dynamite photo outside the courthouse, which brought a lot of attention to my article, in which I present the case as evidence of the bloated justice system that wasted a ton of time and money on a trivial event.
  My editor called it the "finest piece" he had ever worked on, although it admittedly has some minor flaws, but hey, that's journalism baby.

  The article references the IVAC fund for victims of violence, so make sure to get to that section, as it presents some food for thought about the potential abuses of the government fund.

   Fiori, who was responsible for some great tunes as a 70s hippie tunesemith, doesn't come off too positively in this article and he went on TV to denounce it, but took particular aim at his psychologist Diane Thibodeau who described him and Dion as "narcissistic, hysterical, and lunatics" and she told the court that Fiori was upset not from the altercation but rather the recent death of his father.

   Fiori complained that the judge overruled the objections presented by his lawyer Nathalie Haccoun (named municipal court judge in 2010).
  The Quebecor media empire, which owned the Mirror at that point, proved typically oblivious to the paper they owned by expressing confusion and vague disapproval, as they couldn't understand why the paper was taking aim at a vedettes that they were in the business of hyping and cashing in on. 

   They changed their tune after La Presse columnist Nathalie Petrowski wrote a column on the article (18 Feb 1999, p. D9)  writing that "many were shocked when the paper put up a photo of the three lovely young cuties as if they were stars of a new rap group. People were even more shocked that it came out a week before the verdict. If the timing was dubious one thing is clear, Kristian Gravenor, the Mirror journalist is the only one who did his job. The only one who didn't succumb to laziness and complacency to one version of a story. He was only who met the girls, who listened to them and asked if this savage attack wasn't just a generic streetfight between overexcited nightowls."

   I had no connection to the four accused when I wrote the article but I've stayed in touch with a couple of them and their lives seem not to have been scarred. 

   This episode, like so much of those times just before the internet governed our every breath, fell into a black hole of oblivion. So Chimples suggested that Coolopolis move a rock or two to bring it back to life and revisit a sort of interesting moment in Montreal. 

  Oh, if you're curious, the jury found all four accused not guilty on all charges after a night of deliberation. 

Sweet young things that go bump in the night

Club kids vs hippies. Girls vs boys. Age vs youth. English vs french. How a late-night scuffle involving four young girls and a Quebecois rock god turned into a bizarre marathon court case.

Montreal Mirror January 28, 1999

by Kristian Gravenor.

   It was a scuffle. An altercation, a fight in the night. Just your everyday street battle pitting four foxy young English chicks against a Quebecois rock god and his two female friends.

    But unless you were outside the Jungle nightclub on St. Denis and Rachel on August 9, 1997, at 3:30 a.m., you'll have to choose between two radically different version of events.

    Following a year and a half in legal limbo, Haddi Doyle, 20, Suelynn Taylor, 21, Jennifer Holmes, 19, and Joanne Zergiotis, 23, long-time friends from Mile End, are hoping to be acquitted of charges that they assaulted Serge Fiori, 46, the former singer/songwriter of the '70s Quebecois supergroup Harmonium, and his girlfriend Marie-Jocelyne Dion.

    It's the tale about, well, pick your theme. It's Gen X club kids facing off against aging hippie boomers. It's the anatomy of the deluxe legal treatment afforded to a cultural icon. It's a classic old-time French-English street battle. It's a portrait of the legal system as a directionless and bloated cash cow. Oh, and yes there is the bizarre specter of streetfightin' chicks- yet wholesome, attractive young women – attacking and thrashing the opposite sex.

  But above all, it's the story of magnificent waste.

Vampire cloak and heavy lids

Dion and Fiori 1999

   Stumble into room 3.01 of the Montreal courthouse during the four-plus weeks of the trial and you'd never guess that all were assembled to discuss a scuffle. Dressed in black vampire cloaks are five $200-a-day defense lawyers, a crown prosecutor, a judge, a stenographer and a page fighting to keep her eyes open.

   Add a dozen scrunchy-head jurors, two eagle-eyed guards, simultaneous translators and so on, and you get up to 32 officials – most, perhaps all, on the government payroll.

   The four girls sit day after day in this courtroom, where mauve carpeting runs alongside begin burlap wallpaper to a ceiling covered in what looks like white spray-painted spaghetti. The witness stand face the judge, but is position so the audience gets to see only the back of whoever is getting grilled.

   The back of Serge Fiori's aging rock star head features a medium-length mane of black an gray hair.    The occasional glimpse of his face reveals a weathered, morose man, an impression reinforced by his sad, monotone voice.

Fiori King of the '70s rock pile

   If you demand your living-legend rock stars to lead a devil-may-care, life-of-the-party existence, convening with groups around guitar-shaped swimming pools, then Fiori would disappoint you.

   Little in this man's sullen presence

would indicate that he was the top dog on the '70s Quebecois rock pile. Fiori's band Harmonium is still considered superior to other top artists like Beau Dommage and Charlebois, with many feeling that his songs, which include the haunting, “Pour un instant,” have aced the test of time.

   Yet after three good albums and a world tour with Supertramp, bongs and bellbottoms went out of style and so did Harmonium. In recent years Fiori has done studio work and put out three albums of Indian mantras, which the consuming public seems to have successfully done without.

   Then again, Fiori might have the right to be crabby, having to answer four aggressive lawyers pounding away at him with annoying repetition, all the while peaking in that derisive tome perfect by Barry Sheck in the O.J. trial. A sample question: “Mr Fiori, have you ever used drugs?” Fiori answers “no,” so fast that a juror is forced to stifle a laugh.

   And there are new details, “not as a result of my therapy,” he explains which suddenly emerge. Other stuff he has forgotten, such as the claim in his police report that, during the altercation , the girls repeatedly yelled, “Bitch, bitch say you're sorry.”

Scenes of the crime

   Basically, Fiori says he tried to stop the four girls from senselessly attacking his girlfriend Marie-Jocelyne Dion. When the girls overpowered him, he lay down and formed a “cocoon,” atop her, until two of the girls dragged him off and beat him to the point he felt he was “going to die.”

   Yet no skulls were broken. Not a tooth chipped. A police report suggest that Dion lost a button from her blouse. Fiori says that his clothes, while not ruined, were soiled with white dust from the sidewalk.

   The inventory of physical damage is slight. Dion says she suffered bruises and a depression which her physician testifies was “definitely a result of the fight.” Fiori, for his part, complains of a mysterious ache in his thigh bone and a chronic swelling in a finger.

   Yet Fiori's pride is less delicate and his threshold of embarrassment is remarkably high. He sees no shame in being overpowered by Suelynn and Jennifer, girls more remarkable for their stunning outing lips and high cheekbone than any potential for physical damage. Dion, too, is not spared any humiliation, as she is forced to divulge details of her medical history, including an explanation of the Valium-type medication she uses to control her depression.

   The couple's sonata of shame reaches its crescendo when the fir former psychiatrist,Dr. Diane Thibodeau, testifying for the defence describes Fiori as a lunatic and “detached from reality.” she's equally unflattering to Dion, who she calls “hysterical” and “narcissistic.'

Vigilant victims of Violence

   So why would Fioro and Dion not simply claim amnesia, sleep through their alarms, or just generally avoid this unpleasantness and move on with their Quartlier Latin lives?

    Here's how the defence lawyers spin it: some time after the altercation, Dion, who had no income at the time, went to her doctor, who told her about a provincially-funded victims' compensation fund called imndemnisation des victimes d'actres criminels. IVAC was founded in 1972 and hands out over $30 million a year to about 2,000 victims of violence in Quebec, half of whom live in Montreal.

IVAC eventually granted Dion $1,000 a month for her injuries. Fiori, who claims that he was unaware that his girlfriend was awarded the money at the time, went to his doctor the next week and presto, viola, he too got awarded IVAC cash to the tune of $1,300 a month. A year and a half later the couple are still receiving a total of $27,600 a year from the board.

   After Fiori and Dion are done, a witness (and friend) Danielle Vincent, provides a florid account of the events, speaking of how she was “in a paralysis” and “a state of shock.” She explains, “we were all crying,” and “it felt like we were being beaten up for hours” until finally, “the police appeared like angels.”

Four on the floor

   Through all this, the four girls sit staring forward in four isolated seats on the left side of the room, watching witnesses come and go. One day it's a young prison guard from Bordeaux who

happened to be on the scene. The next days it' the arresting officer, a three-year veteran of the MUC police. Both witnesses appear to make mistakes under the ceaseless scrutiny of the cross-examining defense team.

   By this time, the girls sometimes smile furtively towards me from the box. Joanne, who managed to conceal the arrest form her Greek immigrant parents up until the trial, tells me during the break that she's happy the Mirror is here and even hopes people will call the Rant Line to comment on the case.

   Haddi is pale and thing and seems young and fragile; she sits upright, her sad eyes bright with stress.

  Jennifer smiles and spends her free time fiddling with a resume which she hopes to be her ticket to a job on an American cruise ship, or failing that, a post in the armed forces. Suelynn, who the police report refers to as the “Chinese one,” is tall and quiet.

 The girls, under orders from their lawyers, have refused to tell me their version of events. I wait three hours to hear it from the stand.

   Jennifer Holmes has waited three-quarter of her adult life to describe this scuffle. She testifies that the four friends were spending a quiet night at Doyle's home until deciding to go out around 2 a.m. They stayed at the Jungle for an hour and on the way back to their car, Doyle, who was walking slightly ahead, fell into a squabble with a passerby, Dion.

   Taylor poked her head in. Vincent pulled her by the arm. Dion swung at Doyle, Holmes stepped in but was pulled back by Fiori.

   Holmes testifies that Fiori threw Doyle onto the hood of a parked car. Then there was a pile-on; strangers entered the fray. Soon, says Holmes, it was all over but the shouting.

   One story. Two versions. The girls were arrested. Fiori, Dion and Vincent were not.

Maybe the girls deserve to be convicted. Maybe they don't. Unlike the jury, who deal with legal technicalities and cool-headed facts to reach a verdict, anybody watching from the sidelines has the luxury of their own passions and prejudices.

   After her testimony ends for the day, Holmes sits on a metal bench in the hallway outside the courtroom, looking quietly satisfied for having finally told her story. The scuffle, this long-lasting legal scuffle, will be over soon.