Romeo Cormier was sentenced Thursday to 18 years for abducting a New Brunswick woman, sexually assaulting her and keeping her captive for nearly a month.
"It is necessary to separate Mr. Cormier from society," Judge Zoel Dionne of the Court of Queen's Bench said.
"These crimes were horrendous."
Cormier, 63, was found guilty by a jury earlier this summer of kidnapping, forcible confinement, sexual assault, assault with a weapon, robbery and uttering death threats.
The 55-year-old woman, who cannot be identified, delivered a victim-impact statement Thursday in a Moncton courtroom before Cormier's sentence was delivered.
Crown attorney Annie St. Jacques sought a life sentence for the man, saying the victim will have to deal with the psychological effects of her ordeal for some time.
Cormier's lawyer sought a sentence of 10 to 12 years, minus 17 months already served awaiting trial and sentencing.
Dionne suggested it was unlikely Cormier could be rehabilitated.
"The chances of his rehabilitation -- never say never -- are small," Dionne said.
The jury found Cormier guilty after deliberating for just six hours. Cormier had pleaded not guilty to all six charges against him.
The woman, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, testified that she was abducted at knifepoint on Feb. 26, 2010 outside the shopping mall where she worked.
She said she was then held in Cormier's one-room basement apartment, where she was gagged and sexually assaulted until she finally had a chance to escape on March 24, 2010.
She said Cormier had left her alone while he visited a food bank, and she was able to run outside where she was spotted by a neighbour and a courier truck driver.
Throughout the trial Cormier testified that the woman was an acquaintance who chose to stay with him for the month, and that she enlisted him in a plot to murder her husband.
He said they first met when he was a courier working in Newfoundland in 1993. He said they were "acquaintances" who had run into each other several times in Moncton.
On Feb. 26, he said, they actually went to her home and peered into the windows with the intention of murdering her husband. However they called off the plan and went back to his apartment where they engaged in consensual sex.
The woman rejected Cormier's version of events, saying he sexually assaulted her repeatedly and kept her imprisoned against her will.
After the trial she said she wanted to testify because it gave her the chance "to show (Cormier) that he never had control of me, not for one minute. I controlled him and he didn't even know it."
The woman's husband, who sat by his wife for each day of the trial, called the ordeal "pure hell."
