The woman said she was expecting to be interviewed for a job.

After listening to the former Speaker of the Yukon legislature talk about his personal life for nearly two hours, however, she began to wonder the real reason David Laxton had invited her to his office.

“I’m feeling like I was being interviewed not for a job,” she told territorial court Monday, during Laxton’s trial on a charge of sexual assault.

“I felt like it was leading to kind of, sexual innuendo.”

Judge John Faulkner is hearing the case.

In May 2016, Laxton suddenly resigned his role as Speaker and left the Yukon Party caucus to sit as an independent after being accused of sexual harassment.

It was alleged he had sexually harassed a woman at the Yukon government’s main administrative building during office hours in February of that year.

The complainant alleged that Laxton, then a Yukon Party MLA for Porter Creek Centre and Speaker of the Yukon Legislative Assembly, hugged and kissed her on the mouth twice following a meeting she believed was related to employment.

The physical contact, she said, was neither appropriate nor wanted.

Crown prosecutor Amy Porteous is arguing that Laxton’s behaviour constitutes sexual assault.

The Star is protecting the complainant’s identity even though there is no publication ban on her name.

On Day 1 of Laxton’s trial, the woman testified that she knew Laxton from her time as a server at Pandas, a restaurant in Whitehorse that closed about a decade ago.

Laxton had eaten there, and his partner, Leslie, frequented the restaurant.

The woman described her relationship with Laxton then as “friendly” and “casual.”

In cross-examination, Laxton’s defence lawyer, André Roothman, asked if their relationship was flirtatious.

“You had a thing for Mr. Laxton when you were serving him?” he asked.

“Did you give him extra attention when you served him?”

Roothman also asked whether the woman had social drinks with Laxton.

The woman denied flirting with Laxton and couldn’t recall drinking with him socially.

“Is it possible it’s a blur?” asked Roothman, pointing to alcohol’s effect on memory.

“Alcoholism was not a factor in not remembering,” the woman responded.

“Whatever meetings would have been in a social situation with lots of people. Nothing jumps out.”

The woman said she lives with alcoholism and no longer drinks.

She testified that she went to Laxton’s office at the Yukon government’s main administrative building in late February 2016 because Laxton had suggested that there was a job opportunity for her.

Earlier that month, she had quit her job as a cashier at the Independant Grocer in Whitehorse. Laxton had been in her check-out line the day she gave her notice, she recounted Monday.

As he approached her till, Laxton said, “How are you?” and the woman replied, candidly, that she had just quit her job, she said.

“He said, ‘I have something for you,’” and to call his office, the woman told the courtroom.

She was “excited” at the prospect of a new, government job, and the salary and benefits that would come along with that.

Roothman disputed the woman’s interpretation of the interaction with Laxton that led her to be in his office in late February, 2016.

He argued that Laxton did not indicate he had a job for the woman during their encounter at the grocery store.

Rather, said Roothman, Laxton told her to call him if there was anything he could do to help, and handed her his business card.

“Do you deny that?” he asked.

The woman said she couldn’t recall receiving a business card from Laxton.

“He said to me that he thought he had something for me. That’s what I heard,” she said.

“Would you consider that that was in your head?” asked Roothman.

The woman said no, because after Laxton spoke to her, she said, “Really?” and asked if he meant it.

Laxton’s lawyer pressed on: “Doesn’t it happen that things happen in your head and it’s not what happened?...

“You sometimes interpret things that are being said to you in your own way, how you perceive it was not what was said?”

Roothman went down this road a number of times during cross-examination. He suggested the woman misread interactions and distorted events in her mind.

He repeatedly described the woman’s memory as “murky” and once referred to her recollection of dates as “horrible.”

Roothman asked if the woman had filed a sexual harassment complaint with her union before quitting her job at the grocery store.

The woman said she did file a compliant with the union, but that it was related to language barriers with co-workers, and not about harassment.

She still works at the Independent because she could not find another job, she said.

Roothman also asked about a tenancy dispute with a former landlord that led the woman to being in arrears and evicted.

The woman said she wants to appeal the decision on the tenancy case, which made it to the Yukon Supreme Court.

Shortly after the encounter at the Independent, the woman made an appointment to see Laxton at his office at the government’s main administrative building.

“I dressed, I felt, in professional business attire for the occasion,” she said. “I brought a handbag and my résumé.”

The woman testified that she didn’t know what kind of job she may be offered before meeting Laxton, nor did she know what position he held in government.

In Laxton’s office, she said the Speaker talked at length about his life, his son, his partner, and drinking at different bars in town.

“It felt like a lot of personal things were being shared,” said the woman.

She said Laxton did not ask her about her three children, but she did tell him she had quit drinking.

Eventually, it became clear that this meeting wasn’t leading anywhere and the woman made a gesture to leave, she said.

At that point, Laxton invited Helen Fitzsimmons, director of administration, finance and systems, in the legislative assembly, into his office.

Fitzsimmons, who also oversees security of the legislative assembly and human resources, testified Monday morning as well.

She and the woman remembered each other from Pandas. Fitzsimmons used to visit the restaurant with an older woman.

The woman recalled the elderly woman when she met Fitzsimmons in Laxton’s office, saying she had made a “huge impression” on her.

The older woman would kiss the woman on the mouth at Pandas, and the woman would let it happen because she was elderly and “a sweet lady.”

The woman said she told Fitzsimmons this in front of Laxton. She added the kiss was “very unusual.”

The woman said normally, she would take offence to a kiss on the mouth from an acquaintance, but that “it was safe,” with the older woman.

Fitzsimmons said Laxton asked her to look at the woman’s résumé. She was under the impression the two were friends.

“I said the résumé needed some work; there was not enough information in it,” said Fitzsimmons.

“I gave her my business card and offered to help her with her résumé.”

There was no talk of kissing while she was in the room, said Fitzsimmons.

After Fitzsimmons left, the woman said she stood to leave, and Laxton gave her a bear hug and a kiss on the lips that lasted about three seconds.

“I was shocked,” she said.

“I remember looking at the door and wanting immediately to leave the room.... I didn’t go there to be touched.”

The woman said she had never had that kind of physical contact with Laxton previously.

After that, they walked to the lobby of the building and Laxton hugged and kissed her on the mouth again before they parted ways.

The woman wiped tears from her eyes as she recalled the kisses and hugs.

“I got to my car and I lost it,” she said.

Later in her cross-examination, the woman said she was sexually abused by her father when she was a child, and that she has been in counselling since she was 14 years old.

Her trauma compounds her aversion to being touched by other people, she said, and Laxton’s hugs and kisses triggered her.

“His actions made me feel like he was above it, above me, above any kind of standard respect,” she said.

Later, she noted, “We’re not in a society where kissing is a greeting.”

It came out in cross-examination that it was Fitzsimmons who alerted then-premier Darrell Pasloski and his chief of staff to the sexual harassment complaint against Laxton in the spring of 2016.

In May, Fitzsimmons said, the woman asked to meet with her.

“In person, she was crying and was very upset,” Fitzsimmons said of the meeting in which the woman told her about the kisses and hugs from Laxton.

Fitzsimmons testified that she had seen Laxton hug people at work, but never kiss anyone, and that such a move would have been unusual.

The woman said she waited about two months before talking about the incident because she was nervous about going to the RCMP.

“I feel there is internal harassment, sexually, in the RCMP,” she said. “They may not look at my situation as important enough.”

Eventually, she did go to police, she said, “because I think it’s criminal what he did and my fear of going to the RCMP had to be put away.”

David Laxton took the stand today (see coverage of his testimony in tomorrow’s edition).