TORONTO (CelebrityAccess) Canadian band Hedley’s career problems just deepened with a specific claim of sexual misconduct.
An Ottawa woman has told Canada’s national broadcaster CBC that Hedley’s lead singer Jacob Hoggard brutally raped her after the pair met up in November 2016.
The relationship between the 24-year-old woman and Hoggard apparently began in the fall of 2016 with a Tinder swipe in Canada’s capital city of Ottawa.
According to CBC’s report, the woman said it developed into daily Snapchat flirtations before ending two weeks later that in the five hours she was in a Thompson Hotel room in Toronto, Hoggard raped her several times—vaginally and anally
The woman said she did not file a police report out of fear of being publicly shamed. “I didn’t want people to know who I was and associate myself with being the girl that was raped by the singer of Hedley,” she said. “I didn’t want to be that person. And I also thought that because I went there [to see him] nothing would come of it because it was my own fault.
“Even if I agreed to have sex before I got there doesn’t mean when I’m there he can do whatever he wants to me. I feel up until the moment you’re about to have sex with someone, you’re allowed to say no and change your mind.”
She accused Hoggard of calling her a “dirty little pig” and making pig noises during the sexual encounter. “I can still to this day picture his face and how scary he looked and how scared I was,” she added. “He was choking me, and my face went so red.”
According to CBC’s report, the woman was motivated to share her story “after drawing courage from the dozens of mainly anonymous women who have spoken out on social media about alleged negative experiences with the B.C. band.”
A statement from Hoggard’s lawyer said the singer is very sorry the woman is upset, “but that does not change the fact that they made a mutual plan to get together to have sex and they did just that.”
It said they spent the afternoon together and had consensual sex, and she went back to Ottawa that same day.
“At no time did Jacob act badly or do anything without [her] consent,” the statement said.
The attention of recent anonymous allegations on social media prompted Hedley’s management (Watchdog Management) and booking agency (The Feldman Agency), both in Vancouver, to drop the group late last week. The band has been blacklisted by both CBC and Bell Media. Last week, Hedley also withdrew from a scheduled Juno Award appearance on CBC on March 25th.
