I Was Sexually Assaulted By A Celebrity. Here’s Why I’m Going Public
Jessica Baker in a still from the CBC documentary “Breaking Idol.”
In 2016, Jessica Baker met Jacob Hoggard. The then–23-year-old college student had matched with the Hedley singer on Tinder, and after exchanging messages, the pair agreed to get together in person. During a November 2016 meeting at a Toronto hotel, Baker endured a brutal sexual assault at the hands of the singer—an experience that would mark the beginning of an agonizing years-long process during which she would have to relive her assault, both privately and publicly.
In 2018, when rumblings about members of the Canadian band Hedley’s allegedly inappropriate behaviour with fans began circulating on social media, Baker told her story to a CBC reporter. Known only as an “Ottawa woman,” she maintained her anonymity to protect herself from the band’s active and often-vicious online fandom.
Baker, and another young woman who claimed the singer raped her when she was 16, would later go to police. In 2018, Hoggard was charged with two counts of sexual assault causing bodily harm and one count of sexual interference.
After a four-week trial in 2022 that saw Baker on the stand for four gruelling days, Hoggard was found guilty on one count of sexual assault. (He was found not guilty of the second charge related to the other complainant.) He is currently serving a five-year prison sentence.
In November, Baker decided to tell her story publicly for the first time in the CBC documentary Breaking Idol. Her decision to talk about the trial was only made possible thanks to a 2023 amendment to the Criminal Code that granted survivors the ability to lift publication bans on their cases without fear of facing charges.
Here, Baker talks about the trial, what her life has been like post-verdict, and why the legal system needs to do a far better job supporting survivors.
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After the trial ended in 2022, it took me two years to want to leave my house again. I didn’t want to see anyone; I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to keep bringing the trial up because all my friends were getting married and having children, and I didn’t want to make it all about me. Some of my friends had to testify at the trial, and I felt guilty about that. I found it easier to just stay at home and not talk about it.
It took me a long time to learn how to live with the trial trauma. I needed a lot of help. I started taking more medication because I was so depressed and even suicidal. It took me a while to figure out how to feel normal again. The trial is still the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing I think about when I go to sleep. It’s like grief: You have to go through all the stages. If I could go back and do the trial again, I wouldn’t. If I had a friend that had this happen to them, I would encourage them not to go through the court process.
One moment that stands out was the day the defence [mistakenly] used a video clip that was not of me, but was presented in a way that suggested it was. [The video, which was part of a CBC news clip, featured both Baker and another woman, and the defence misidentified the other woman as Baker.] As I was leaving the courthouse that day and people were saying “see you tomorrow,” all I could think was that they wouldn’t because I genuinely didn’t know if I would make it through the night. The idea of having to return to court felt unbearable. Although the judge acknowledged the mistake that evening, I wasn’t told until Friday morning in court. That moment was compounded by how isolating cross-examination is. You’re not allowed to speak to anyone about the evidence—not the Crown, not your victim support worker, and in my case not even my closest friends, because they were also witnesses. You’re completely alone at the moment you’re most vulnerable, and there’s very little acknowledgment of how dangerous that isolation can be.
For a while, I thought, “OK, maybe I'm just being dramatic and maybe this is just how the court process works?” But when I listened to the Canadian True Crime podcast’s episodes about the trial, something changed. Kristi Lee, the podcaster behind CTC who is now a good friend, put words to things I was feeling but hadn’t yet been able to articulate: that there is no such thing as a perfect victim and no “right way” that a survivor will react. It was incredibly emotional for me.
The day the documentary [Breaking Idol] came out was hard. I didn’t feel good. There were so many people in my life who had no idea what had happened to me. The only people that really knew were my friends who had testified and my parents. My grandparents didn’t even know. So that’s what I was worried about most: people I hadn’t told finding out [about the assault]. I almost felt guilty about keeping it from [them]. During the court process, I had to essentially lie to everyone I know [about what I was doing]. I have a very demanding job and during the trial, I had a budget that I was working on at night after court. No one at work knew I was in court, and when they didn’t like my budget I wanted to be like, Well, I was very busy that week! My friends joked that I was like Hannah Montana and I lived this double life that no one knew about.
But I came to work [after the documentary aired] and so many people said so many kind things to me. It feels like people are finally seeing everything that I went through, and now I feel like they are giving me more respect. The kindness that I’ve been shown is overwhelming. Before the documentary, people were so cruel online; some of it came from Hedley supporters, but there is also the broader hostility that often emerges toward complainants in high-profile sexual assault cases. And that was the main point that I was trying to get across in the documentary: that these people online were destroying my mental health and they didn’t even realize it. I’ve had a lot of people apologize to me since. I feel like there’s been a weight lifted. In the last nine years, this is the first time that I’ve felt like I can take a breath.
But part of me knows that the only reason some people are being kind is because there was a guilty verdict, and they were told to believe me by the court. As a victim, you have to give your entire soul to the court. The amount of evidence that you need is so overwhelming, and so many people just don’t understand that. I feel like some people only believe women when they get a conviction. And I hate that.
I still feel so guilty because there was another [complainant] with me in the trial [whose charge did not receive a guilty verdict]. So that’s another reason why I did the documentary. I was like, “OK, I need to say something because she’s not allowed to speak. She didn't get to write a victim impact statement [because she did not get to participate in his sentencing hearing].”
Doing the documentary healed me in ways that I didn’t think it would. There were many women who have reached out to me since and have told me their stories. During the documentary-making process, I met Kelly Favro, who went through her own sexual-assault trial, and she’s the reason that I was able to remove my publication ban. [Favro helped lobby to amend Bill S-12, the law surrounding publication bans that allows survivors to opt out of publication bans.] Kelly and I bonded immediately over dealing with the court process and we started saying, What can we do? In June 2025, Kristi, Kelly and I started Beyond the Verdict, an advocacy group for survivors of the trial process. Kristi has a platform, Kelly has done lobbying work and I now have a high-profile name that we can use to draw attention to our group. We can lobby for changes to the court system, because after you’re done court no one talks to you, no one reaches out to you. That’s not the detective’s fault or the crown attorney’s fault—that’s just how the system works. There’s no aftercare. You’re just expected to go back to your normal life and to live with all this additional trauma that the court process has put on you. Trauma-informed aftercare, including access to therapy and medical support, and greater acknowledgment that harm doesn’t end with a verdict, would make a meaningful difference.
Beyond the Verdict is trying to start a conversation. Maybe by talking about it, something will change and people will realize how traumatizing the whole court experience is for survivors. I haven’t yet figured out how to live with what happened in court and I’ve had a lot of support. I’m hoping people will see that Beyond the Verdict is recognizing the trauma of the court process and talking about what happens after.
The assault and the trial have shaped my entire life, and it continues to shape it every single day. Now I can turn that into something positive. I can take that energy and put it toward something that makes me feel better. I’d love to help in any way that I can, so that no one else is treated the same way that I was treated.
