A former employee of a Mackenzie restaurant testified Thursday, Feb. 6 in Prince George provincial court that the proprietor kissed her and touched her private parts without consent at work.
Before Judge David Simpkin, the woman described herself as a “bubbly and happy” person who would greet a friend with a hug, kiss on the cheek or even give a back massage. She said she never considered it sexual.
However, she quit her job in early 2023 because she no longer felt safe working for Sotirios “Sam” Tourloukis, who has been charged with sexual assault.
On one occasion, while Tourloukis was working in the kitchen and she was walking towards the dish area, she said he walked up to her and said “hey, give us a kiss.”
“I went to give him a kiss on the cheek, and the man turned, and he kissed my mouth,” she told the court. “I was so shocked by it, and I was like, what are you doing? You're not allowed to do that and he thought it was hilarious.”
She said he proceeded to tell some of the customers, who were his friends, about what happened. “They all had a pretty good laugh about it.”
Despite often expressing her disapproval to Tourloukis, she said he would sometimes smack her rear end or joke about leaving her boyfriend on Vancouver Island.
“‘We will have a Big Fat Greek Wedding, and you can be my wife’ and I kind of sloughed it off as, you know, whatever, a lonely old man, right?”
On another occasion in January 2023, while she was on a break, he asked her to scratch his back.
“I went to go scratch his back, right? Because everybody likes a back scratch. And he reached behind him with both of his hands and grabbed my vagina,” she said.
She said he thought it was funny and said “it’s not a big deal.”
“Then he told me a story about how he did that to his friend, one of his guy friends, and grabbed his male friend by the balls, and his male friend thought it was funny,” she testified. “So he didn't really understand why I didn’t.”
She said she went to the bathroom and cried, before finishing work as quickly as she could and leaving at the end of her shift. The woman said she eventually quit the job, though did not remember the precise date near the end of January 2023.
Under cross-examination, Tourloukis’s lawyer, Connor Carleton, accused her of fabricating the incidents and suggested she wanted to take over the restaurant and manipulate Tourloukis into providing her with housing.
“That's absolutely rubbish,” she said emphatically. “This all happened. Why would I go through this for the last two years? Why would I quit the job that I liked? Why would I accuse somebody of doing this If none of this happened?”
She said she had a place to live, had been helping Tourloukis find workers and that he had asked her for $20,000.
The trial continues Friday, Feb. 7.
