As the Crown described the “violent, invasive, degrading” sexual assault they argue an intoxicated and sometimes unconscious 24-year-old woman was subjected to by two men over six hours in a downtown Toronto bar, the victim’s mother listened, wiping away tears.

At the sentencing hearing on Wednesday she read out a victim impact statement to the court, directing the first lines to Gavin MacMillan and Enzo DeJesus Carrasco, both found guilty by a jury of gang sexual assault and drugging to facilitate sexual assault.

“How can anyone hurt another human being the way you did?” she said. “My daughter was such a happy, loving, creative and trusting individual and it was all taken away from her…crippling and immense physical and emotional damage.”

She described how her daughter wakes up screaming from nightmares and that when she tried to comfort her, she flinched at her touch. Her whole family felt useless, unable to help her.

“She would cry wondering what she did wrong to deserve this. The only way to she knew how to handle it was to shut down and sleep for hours, sometimes in bed for days,” she said. “To watch my baby, who was full of love and spirit, go to just existing and not treating herself as good as she should was heart-wrenching.”

She wasn’t the same person she had been for a long time, her mother said.

“She didn’t want to burden anyone with how she was feeling,” she said. “She didn’t want anyone to think she was weak, or that she couldn’t take care of herself.”

Her family has tried to reassure her that the opposite is true.

“She is truly our hero and one hell of a fighter,” her mother said.

Her words came amid the possibility of the convictions being overturned and a second trial, as a result of a Court of Appeal ruling that found new jury selection rules should have been used in cases that predated the change in law. Despite a request for a mistrial by the defence due to the jury verdicts stemming from an improperly chosen jury, Superior Court Justice Michael Dambrot said there was too much uncertainty not to leave it up to the appeal court to decide.

After deliberating for four days last year, a jury found College Street Bar owner Gavin MacMillan, 45, and bar manager Enzo DeJesus Carrasco, 34, guilty of gang sexual assault and drugging to facilitate a sexual assault.

The jury could not agree on whether the two men unlawfully confined the woman on the night of Dec. 14, 2016, and whether DeJesus Carrasco raped her the following morning at his apartment. The Crown dropped those charges after the jury verdict. DeJesus Carrasco was acquitted of a sexual assault charge from when he was alone at the bar with the victim earlier in the night.

Her identity is covered by a publication ban available to sexual assault complainants.

On Wednesday, the Crown and defence put forward vastly different explanations for how the jury reached its decision. Juries do not give reasons for their decisions and it is up to the trial judge to determine what happened from the evidence in accordance with the jury verdicts.

The Crown is seeking a sentence of 12 years. MacMillan’s lawyer said a sentence of 12 months is appropriate should the judge accept their version of what happened, and two years if he accepts the Crown’s. DeJesus Carrasco’s lawyer said a sentence just shy of six months would be fair on their version of what occurred, and two years on the Crown’s version.

Prosecutor Rick Nathanson said the evidence from the trial, primarily several hours of graphic video obtained from the College Street Bar’s security cameras, showed a vulnerable woman being repeatedly sexually assaulted while being either overpowered, incapable of consenting due to alcohol and cocaine or while unconscious.

“This was a violent, invasive and degrading sexual assault that went hour after hour, for almost six hours,” Nathanson said, adding that the men gave the victim cocaine to keep her both compliant and awake. He added that the two men, as owner and manager of a bar, had a responsibility to ensure the victim, as a patron, was safe.

In addition to her mother’s victim impact statement, the Crown noted the victim’s own testimony during the trial about her lasting physical injuries, the terrible emotional toll of telling her family and boyfriend what happened, and her inability to even leave the couch for months afterwards. There has been a “catastrophic” impact on the victim’s life, he said.

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Her daughter couldn’t bring herself to write her own statement, her mother said, but she said this: “I’m no longer available for the things that make me feel like s—t.”

The sexual assault was also deliberately captured on the bar’s security cameras, Nathanson said, with the two men clearly intending to watch the recordings at a later time for sexual gratification. The Crown submitted text messages predating the sexual assault, which they argue show the two men appearing to discuss watching footage of naked or partially naked women recorded from the security cameras at the bar.

Nathanson argued the text messages should also be considered for sentencing purposes because they show misogynist views and a different side to the men that may not have been known to the people in their lives who provided letters to the court about their good character.

MacMillan’s lawyer Sean Robichaud said text messages were presented without context or explanation of their content and they should not be considered.

MacMillan’s lawyer Sean Robichaud argued that, given the jury was hung on the count of unlawful confinement, the sexual assault finding should be limited only to the time before the victim was led from the main floor of the bar into the basement by MacMillan.

“Had they found a sexual assault was taking place when she went downstairs with Mr. MacMillan they would have also had no problem in finding him guilty of unlawful confinement during that time,” he said.

Robichaud said MacMillan, who owned a bartending school as well as the College Street Bar, “has now lost everything. The impact on his life has been catastrophic.” But he stressed that, with strong family and community support, he has strong prospects for rehabilitation.

DeJesus Carrasco’s lawyer Uma Kancharla said the sexual assault should only apply to one instance near the start of the sexual activity, where the victim appears to lose consciousness. She also noted that the victim said she willingly did two lines of cocaine. Dambrot said she did not have to be forced to take the cocaine.

While MacMillan is on bail pending sentence and is set to seek bail pending appeal, DeJesus Carrasco is now in custody. He faces trials on three more sexual assault charges involving three other women.

A date for MacMillan’s appeal, filed last week, has not yet been set.

A sentencing decision is set for Feb. 12.