Mate Guilty of Beating Emigre Wife 9 Days After Her Arrival

TORONTO —  An advertising executive who spent thousands of dollars to get his Russian wife and 1-year-old son out of the Soviet Union was convicted today of assaulting them nine days after they arrived in Canada.

Kirby Inwood was found guilty of causing bodily harm to his wife and of common assault on the boy. Assault carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in Canada.

Provincial Court Judge Gordon Hachborn rendered his verdict after a sensational trial that involved tales of sex, greed and violence.

Inwood, 44, of Toronto, maintained throughout the trial that his wife, Tanya Sidorova, was a money-hungry “Russian yuppie” who lured him into marriage to get out of the Soviet Union. He said she fabricated a story of the assault as a way to end their marriage.

Sidorova, 32, told of a vicious beating in which she was punched, kicked, choked and thrown barely conscious from her Toronto home. She said her son, Misha, was also assaulted by a drunken Inwood.

Inwood testified that he and Sidorova slept together the day they met in Leningrad in 1986. But he questioned whether Misha was his child, testifying that he was often impotent.

The couple married soon after Christmas, 1986, and Misha was born in September of 1987. But the Soviet government refused to let Sidorova emigrate to Canada, claiming that she was a security risk.

That began a yearlong campaign by Inwood to get them released. When Moscow relented, Inwood said he was “deliriously happy.”

“I felt like the white knight rescuing the fairy princess,” he said at his trial. But the fairy tale turned into a horror story.

Inwood said Sidorova changed as soon as she arrived in Canada. He said that she criticized his home and an emerald ring he gave her, and that she pressured him to buy her a Corvette and a fur coat.