He was the victim of torture so intense, severe, ritualistic and secretive that his own family was unaware it was happening until his near-lifeless body was dropped off in front of a Regina hospital.
The event, and the horrific abuse leading up to it, captured the country's attention in 2010 and, earlier this year, the man behind the torture, Dustin Paxton, was convicted of aggravated and sexual assault.
The victim of the abuse – which left the now-30-year-old with broken ribs, limbs, eye sockets, missing lips, partially missing tongue, crushed face and brain injury – broke his long-held silence and provided an exclusive interview Monday to the CBC's The Current with Anna Maria Tremonti.
The victim, who cannot be named due to a court-ordered publication ban, now wants what happened to him to be recognized properly by the law and is asking for non-state torture to be recognized by the Criminal Code.
"People who get in a bar fight are charged with aggravated assault," he says in his phone interview with Tremonti.
"It doesn't fit. I didn't get into a bar fight. Aggravated assault is not what happened to me."
The man, who now lives in B.C., recalled how the abuse started the day he and Paxton moved in together after moving to Calgary from Winnipeg to start their own business.
"Well it was horrible right from the very first day. That's when it all started, was the first day I got to Calgary," he recalls.
"I knocked over a chair on an extension cord on the floor by accident. He got mad at me and started hurting me with his steel toe boot on his hand.
"The beatings continued and continued to get harsh over like the smallest things.
"And then he started to lean on the other sexual part."
Listen to the first part of the interview below
How he says what he says is as telling as the facts the man tries to convey when he speaks. He slurs his speech, he has problems putting his thoughts together, more than a few times loses his train of thought and asks for the questions posed to him to be repeated.
Paxton and the victim moved to Calgary in 2008 to take advantage of a booming energy economy. But instead of getting ahead in life in a land thriving from an oil boom bonanza, the victim says his life has been irreversibly changed.
The physical, psychological and sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of Paxton reached its first zenith in 2009, when the victim was first taken to hospital and put in a drug-induced coma due to the severe body and brain trauma he had received.
Because he could not speak, Paxton did all the talking and blamed his business partner's massive injuries on a falling fridge, he told Tremonti.
And the abuse continued.
"Choked every day, punched every day, I was hit with a cane," he tells Tremonti.
"I had to sit there and let him whip me with an extension cord and so on.
"I'd be in a lot of pain... I just wanted the pain to end, that's all."
Listen to the second part of the interview here
And the pain finally ended when, close to death and with doctors predicting his imminent death, the man, who normally fluctuated in weight between 200 and 250 lbs, was dumped in front of a Regina emergency room, weighing 87 lbs, by his own torturer in 2010.
For two years, the 30-year-old father of one endured cyclical and constant torture that has now left him in paralyzing fear of everyday, household items such as walking canes, power cords and sticks. Apart from brain damage, he has also been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
And for two years he remained silent.
"I didn't even want to explain it to anybody because I didn't want anybody to think I was a sissy," he says.
"But... I received brain injury very early, and I think that one of the decision-making centres in my brain was damaged... once that was all damaged I think I wasn't making rational choices."
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