TORONTO

She can’t move.

The medical student is hovering over her naked body in a Sheraton Centre hotel room and she is watching herself being raped and she can’t fight and she can’t make them stop. She can’t even process what has happened that night.

The last thing she clearly remembers is coming out of the washroom at C-Lounge, the bar where she had gone with her mentor, Dr. Amitabh Chauhan, and his childhood friend, Dr. Suganthan Kayilasanathan on Feb. 13, 2011 for a few drinks. The rest is a vacuum of inky black interspersed with split second flashes of harrowing recollection that she recounts in a downtown courtroom.

Flash: She is in a hotel room, the two doctors are smoking weed and she is so incredibly tired.

Flash: She is standing between the two men and she says their hands are all over her body. “I felt overwhelmed,” she testified, fighting back tears. “And tired and confused, so confused, and tired and all I wanted to do was lie down.”

Flash: She sees Chauhan on top of her and she doesn’t understand. He’s married, she tells him, and demands that he stop. But he doesn’t reply.

Flash: The man lying on her left — she believes it was Kayilasanathan — is touching the most intimate parts of her body and whispering in her ear, “Aren’t you a dirty girl. Doesn’t this feel good?”

“And I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything about it,” she said, crying. “I couldn’t analyze it. I couldn’t make a decision about it. All I could do was lie there. I’m so mad at myself that I couldn’t move, but I couldn’t.”

Chauhan and Kayilasanathan, both 35, have pleaded not guilty to gang sexual assault and administering a noxious substance. Chauhan has also pleaded not guilty to drugging and sexually assaulting a former girlfriend in 2003. They are being tried by judge alone.

The alleged victim of the gang rape, a 26-year-old physician whose identity is protected by a publication ban, knows that she’s the one under scrutiny. And she would run if she could, knowing the ugly cross-examination that lies ahead, except that she was raised to play by the rules and hard wired to do what’s right.

So she lays bare the horror of what she says befell her that night in all its shame and embarrassment.

It all began innocently enough.

She was a medical student at the time and Chauhan was a resident and a friend of a friend who’d agreed to help mentor her. He was coming in from Hamilton and they agreed to meet downtown for a drink at the Sheraton Centre where he and a friend were getting a room. She had cosmopolitan, he had a gin and tonic.

About midnight, she said his friend Kayilasanathan showed up with a cooler that contained a skull-shaped bottle of clear liquor and they decided to drink in Chauhan’s room.

Did she have any concern about going upstairs with them, asked Crown Cara Sweeny.

She knows the warning bells should have been shrill and loud. “There’s so many things that I look back on, that to the entire world must seem silly to do,” she acknowledged. “But you have to understand, I completely trusted Amitabh and that has been the hardest part of the whole case — the violation of that trust.”

He was a friend, a doctor, a graduate of the London School of Economics and the Royal Canadian Military College and he was also married — she never imagined he would become the monster that she alleges he became.

After two drinks mixed for her from the bottle of booze the men had brought back from a recent trip to Panama, they went to C-Lounge where Chauhan flashed his “military card” to get in. She had a drink when they arrived and a second later in the evening.

The allegation is that the doctors spiked her drink at the club, though the Crown’s theory is that the drugs were no longer in her system by the time she was tested the next day. The prosecutor has told the court that a rape kit will show that DNA from both men was found on her genitals, bra and underwear.

Her body was also covered in bruises and scratches.

She woke just before 7 a.m. and said Kayilasanathan tried to force her to perform oral sex. She managed to get away while he attempted to wake Chauhan, saying “Amitabh, she’s trying to leave.”

They almost destroyed her, she admitted. She floundered at first, even considered quitting medical school. But while those flashes haunt her every day, she is too driven and has worked too hard to abandon her dream of being a doctor.

“They will never take my soul,” she vowed. “They won’t take the best of me, and they haven’t.”