OTTAWA - A judge convicted an admitted bigamist Friday of assaulting, sexually abusing and threatening to kill the woman he'd brought from an Algerian village to be his bride.

All the while the 41-year-old man -- who can't be named to protect his victim -- told her that no one in Canada would help or believe her.

"Your body belongs to me because I'm your husband and you must do as I say," she testified he told her.

"By Canadian law you must do as I say and no one will believe you because you are an immigrant and I am Canadian."

But Judge Kent Kirkland did believe her.

"The main issue before me is one of credibility," Kirkland said, concluding that the woman was "credible and consistent" and the man's denials not believable.

The woman testified that she was raised in a sheltered and religious family but earned a university degree through sheer determination.

She'd never had a boyfriend until she met her husband, an Algerian-born Canadian, on the Internet in 2009.

She knew nothing about Canadian life.

He was a decade older and still married to another woman when they wed in Algeria in January 2011.

When he brought her to Canada the following July after divorcing his previous wife, she testified that because of her religion and culture she expected him to be more dominant while she was more submissive.

She testified that in the six weeks they lived together he hit her, spat in her face, pulled her hair and told her she was stupid and ugly.

He forced sex on her.

He covered her face with a pillow to silence her during an argument and pressed a stitched and bound wound on her wrist to inflict pain on her. The wife said her husband cut her wrist while he maintained the wound was self-inflicted.

The relationship ended with a fight in the parking lot last August.

A witness testified he saw a woman with "scared eyes" running towards him crying for help and begging him not to leave her alone with her husband because he would hurt her.
Her husband told the Good Samaritan that she was crazy.

"I am going to kill you," the woman testified her husband had just told her in their own language.

A sentencing hearing is set for Oct. 4.