OTTAWA — Former call girl and dominatrix Darquise Johnson says she came back to Canada empty-handed after her abusive husband, Nolan, blew $800,000 of Doug Macklem’s money on cars, travel and gambling.
Testifying in her own defence, Johnson — she also uses her maiden name, L’Ecuyer — painted herself as the victim of a violent, controlling and spendthrift husband.
She claimed Nolan Johnson, a Jamaican-born drug dealer, was the puppet master behind the elaborate fraud. Johnson said she never agreed to take part in the scheme.
“The way I look at it, I was Nolan’s puppet,” Johnson, 31, told court in testimony regularly interrupted by tears. “I did as I was told. I did as I was told and I couldn’t do anything about it or I would get hit or pushed down the stairs.”
When she resisted, Johnson testified, she was threatened with being “disappeared” or she was beaten, kicked or choked.
Johnson said she returned to Canada from Jamaica with only a bag of clothes and was arrested as she stepped off the plane at Pearson International Airport near Toronto in June 2007.
She called her life in Jamaica “a living hell.”
Nolan, she said, had blown all of Macklem’s money and the couple was living with pirated water and electricity in a remote Jamaican town. Nolan only allowed her to come back to Canada, she said, because she promised to return to stripping and send money to Jamaica. In his cross-examination, Crown attorney Jason Neubauer accused Johnson of fabricating the story.
“It’s the next lie in a series of lies,” he suggested. Johnson denied it.
Testifying in her own defence, Johnson — she also uses her maiden name, L’Ecuyer — painted herself as the victim of a violent, controlling and spendthrift husband.
She claimed Nolan Johnson, a Jamaican-born drug dealer, was the puppet master behind the elaborate fraud. Johnson said she never agreed to take part in the scheme.
“The way I look at it, I was Nolan’s puppet,” Johnson, 31, told court in testimony regularly interrupted by tears. “I did as I was told. I did as I was told and I couldn’t do anything about it or I would get hit or pushed down the stairs.”
When she resisted, Johnson testified, she was threatened with being “disappeared” or she was beaten, kicked or choked.
Johnson said she returned to Canada from Jamaica with only a bag of clothes and was arrested as she stepped off the plane at Pearson International Airport near Toronto in June 2007.
She called her life in Jamaica “a living hell.”
Nolan, she said, had blown all of Macklem’s money and the couple was living with pirated water and electricity in a remote Jamaican town. Nolan only allowed her to come back to Canada, she said, because she promised to return to stripping and send money to Jamaica. In his cross-examination, Crown attorney Jason Neubauer accused Johnson of fabricating the story.
“It’s the next lie in a series of lies,” he suggested. Johnson denied it.
arty:
