Nicole Leger at her court martial last year. Photo: Supplied / NZME
The New Zealand Defence Force has done a U-turn on its decision not to charge a soldier who allegedly drunkenly assaulted his colleague, but his victim still wants an apology for the way they handled her complaint.
Air Force member Nicole Leger complained in December 2020 about her sergeant after he groped her multiple times while he was intoxicated and she was sober driving colleagues to a function.
At the time the unit's warrant officer recommended a summary trial take place. However, it never went ahead.
Soon after Leger was court-martialled for taking MDMA at a party and then touching the shoulders of a sleeping colleague. She claimed she unknowingly took the drug, commonly known as ecstasy.
She received a severe reprimand and left the military but used the final day of her trial to expose what she called the hypocrisy of the complaints system within the armed forces saying she was dragged through "two years of hell" while the subject of her own complaint received no punishment.
"Due to the dramatic differences in how these incidents were handled by my unit I am left with major questions about how I was treated by the NZDF as a victim of a sexual assault, [compared] with how I've been treated as a person about whom a complaint was made," Leger told the court.
After Leger's trial, Chief Judge Kevin Riordan asked the chief of the Defence Force, Air Marshall Kevin Short, to consider reinvestigating Leger's complaint against the sergeant.
Short found that the officer who had investigated Leger's complaint hadn't done a good enough job and ordered it be looked at again.
Open Justice has learned that the sergeant involved has been charged with common assault and will be subject to a summary trial - which is the military version of a judge-alone trial.
Leger said the trial was a step in the right direction but she still wants an apology from the NZDF for taking two years to take her complaint seriously.
"It's definitely an acknowledgement but when I first heard about it I was pissed off," she told Open Justice.
"It's not that I think he deserves to be court-martialled for what he did, but if they're going to set a precedent by taking me to one, well then they need to either take everyone who does something similar that far … or no one."
She said the fact that trial was happening at all was an admission by NZDF that something hadn't gone right.
"It's still a big win, don't get me wrong. But he would have gotten away with it if I hadn't spoken up so often and gone to the media about it. That concerns me to the core."
She said her concern was never about her. It was about the inconsistency in the way the two complaints were handled, and that it seemed as if the military was punishing her after she'd spoken out against a superior officer.
Her lawyer Michael Bott said at Leger's trial her offence was "far more vanilla in nature" than what had been done to her.
"The fundamental thing that jars in this case is the disparity in treatment between Ms Leger as a complainant in terms of being the recipient of repeated, insistent and unwanted touching by a senior officer, with the way that she was treated with a one-off incident that was nowhere near as intrusive or indecent as that she was subjected to," Bott told the court-martial.
A date for the sergeant's trial is yet to be set but Leger won't be here to witness it. She has plans to travel home to Canada.
However, her victim impact statement will be read at the trial and she has one final message for her former sergeant.
"I owned what I did. It's his turn now."
* This story originally appeared in the New Zealand Herald.