Women Say Top Canadian Radio Promoter Is a Longtime Sexual Predator; He Denies Accusations and Says Relationships Were Consensual
Noire, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and immigrated with her family to Toronto in 1986, met Strong — who goes by his middle name, Adrian, not his first, Nicholas — in Toronto at the Canadian Music Week conference and festival in March 2009. “I had just completed a 10-song album and was at CMW to make connections with people in music who could help me with my next steps,” she says. “I hadn’t released any music but was already playing little shows out in Toronto with two backup dancers.
During the call, Noire also learned that Hilton Head was three hours away, which she hadn’t realized. “That upset me so much I was screaming at him,” she says. “He told me to spend the night at a nearby Marriott and he would be there to pick me up in the morning. He assured me it would be worth it when I was meeting with these label people.”
At the Marriott, they checked into separate rooms. Soon after, Strong knocked on her door. He was eating a chocolate chip cookie from a plastic bag and offered her the last one, which she accepted and ate. She says she began to hallucinate and suspected she’d been drugged. She imagined vampires whispering in her ears; being stuck to the ceiling; and at one point, being on a surfboard in a body of water.
“When I woke up there was a needle sticking out of my chest,” Noire says. “It never healed.” She showedthis scar as well, which she calls “the hole,” along with one on her head, which she says was where Strong cut away a section of her hair and scalp. Noire says she awoke the morning of May 19, 2009, to find Strong acting like everything was fine. He asked what she wanted to do that day and suggested an outing to the Charleston Tea Plantation . She recalls he “made her” shower while “in the bathroom with me the entire time,” then helped her dry off and get dressed, even laying out her makeup on the counter. Strong, she says, continued to watch her, “and commented I was being too slow.
While reviewing her correspondence with Strong for this story, Noire also discovered a direct message she’d previously missed that Strong sent via Facebook Messenger at 4:24 p.m. on May 18, 2009, when she says they were at the restaurant in Charleston. The message read: “How can I submit an obituary for publication,” followed by the contact information and deadlines to publish a death notice in The New York Times.
At the hospital, though, Noire says she was treated rudely by the nurse who saw her. “I showed [the nurse] my embarrassingly gross cut and oozing scalp and puncture marks and asked her to make note of them after she completed my vaginal rape exam,” Noire says. “She refused and told me she wasn’t going to participate in my ‘drama.’” The medical report refers to scratches on Noire’s body; no photos were taken.
Noire also contacted the Charleston Police Department and spoke to Officer Michael Lyczany by phone on June 26, 2009, according to the report she shared with. Lyczany asked Noire why she agreed to fly to Charleston to meet with Strong. “She advised that he was an informal business manager. The trip was for professional reasons, and she was hoping that Strong would connect her with business contacts, which he did not do.
Priya says that weeks after Noire confided in her, a Charleston police officer called while they were in Noire’s car, and she put him on speaker phone. “She was trying to file a report, but they were being really difficult because [Noire and Strong] had left [the United States],” Priya recalls. “They weren’t being very understanding as to her state of mind at the time because she felt like she was drugged, and her mind was scattered. They basically told her to ‘Shush.
After reviewing one of the photos depicting her with the laptop, Noire says she does not remember them being taken. “And upon closer inspection of the photo, it appears that I’m staring at a screen that is completely blank so that computer’s not on,” she says. “I also do not, never owned a Mac computer, so that’s not my computer. What I’m trying to understand is why I’m wearing sunglasses inside while I’m supposedly working on a laptop. It just doesn’t make sense to me.
“He dropped the name Characters [Talent Agency] because they were in [DMD’s building at the time] and his friend has a sound booth [there],” Mindy says. “He wanted to keep the conversation going and said, ‘Let’s go have a drink at my place.’” Instead, she suggested the since defunct all-night diner at the Thompson hotel, where he used a napkin to map out a potential career trajectory and offered to set her up with a demo session the next day at Characters.
“One morning I woke up to him taking a picture of the back of me,” she says. She grabbed the phone and deleted it, saying that she always worried he had a camera. Their encounters ended when she started dating someone. She estimates he had given her close to 2,000 Canadian dollars . “We would talk about work and my dreams,” she explained in a lengthy email. “We talked about the artists he worked with, and how I was talented enough to be as famous as them if I were in the right hands.”
Margaret says Strong’s reply was, “‘Well, actually, I did want to have sex with you. And I liked having sex with you. And if you’re not able to do that, then I don’t think that we can work together.’”Margaret says Strong threatened to derail her career, so she agreed to have sex with him again. “The first time was the worst,” she writes. “I cried the entire time, but he didn’t care. The second time was the same, eventually I became more numb to it.
Much like Mindy’s experience, Margaret also says Strong asked her to “dress in fetish outfits, weird socks, or sometimes gymnastics outfits. He took photos of me and videos of me while masturbating.” She says, “There were no limits. He literally never took no for an answer.”
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