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06 Sept 2025
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06 Sept 2025
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Jurors began deliberating on Thursday in a civil trial involving Academy Award-winning filmmaker Paul Haggis and a publicist who accused him of rape.
The jury in New York heard three weeks of testimony.
Haggis and his accuser Haleigh Breest spent days giving their divergent accounts of what happened between them on January 31 2013.
Both agree he invited her to his apartment for a drink after they crossed paths at a film premiere.
Breest, 36, says Haggis quickly became sexually aggressive and, though she told him she was not willing, forced her to perform oral sex and raped her.
Haggis, 69, says that the encounter was consensual and that Breest initiated parts of it.
Breest is seeking unspecified damages from the screenwriter-director.
He was a longtime TV writer before he wrote early-2000s best picture Oscar winners Million Dollar Baby and Crash, and directed the latter.
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