OTTAWA — Joshua Boyle, a Canadian held hostage with his American wife in Afghanistan for five years, was cleared on Thursday of charges that he repeatedly abused and assaulted her after their rescue.

In the three hours it took Justice Peter K. Doody of the Ontario Court of Justice to dismiss 19 charges against Mr. Boyle, which included sexual assault, the judge repeatedly said that he did not believe the testimony of either Mr. Boyle or the woman, Caitlan Coleman, who is no longer his wife.

While Justice Doody said the evidence showed that Mr. Boyle had been “cruel, demeaning and controlling” of Ms. Coleman, the judge found her to be a generally unreliable witness partly because of her testimony that she had memory problems and, as she testified, “difficulty seeing reality quite right.”

Ms. Coleman said at the trial that her memory issues were caused by mental health problems she began to suffer over a decade ago.

“Unless her evidence is independently confirmed, I do not believe it, just as I do not believe Mr. Boyle,” the judge told an Ottawa courtroom.

Ian Carter, a lawyer who represents Ms. Coleman, said his client was “devastated” by the ruling.

“This case is an example of the challenges that a complainant faces coming forward with allegations of sexual assault or domestic violence,” he told reporters.

The couple were seized by the Haqqani network, a faction of the Taliban, in 2012 while backpacking in Wardak Province, a Taliban stronghold near Kabul. Five years later they were rescued, along with their three children who were born in captivity, in a daring raid by Pakistani troops.

Because the criminal case only involved the first few weeks after the couple returned to Canada, it shed relatively little new light on why Mr. Boyle and Ms. Coleman decided to enter an unstable region in Afghanistan for a hiking trip.

Ms. Coleman, who is originally from Stewartstown, Penn., was pregnant at the time of their capture.

At the trial, Mr. Boyle faced 18 charges including sexual assault, forceable confinement, assault, assault with a weapon, administering a drug and public mischief. There was also one charge of assault of a person who cannot be identified by a court order.

Mr. Boyle denied the charges, saying they never happened.

Ms. Coleman described a series of assaults, some of which she said had been punishments for not following Mr. Boyle’s orders once they were back in Canada.

Mr. Boyle and Ms. Coleman both testified that he prepared “a list of rules” for her that included weight-loss goals, planning “interesting sex minimum twice a week” and only taking cold showers. “You must ask for chastising every time you think you have failed,” Mr. Boyle wrote on his list, which was presented at trial.

Ms. Coleman moved to the United States in 2018 and now lives with the couple’s four children.

The case was the first to be tried under a new law in Canada that allows sexual assault victims to be represented by a lawyer at the trial. But Dawn Moore, a professor of law and legal studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, said that it did not change the fact that “sexual assault cases almost always come down to, ‘He said, she said.’”

Professor Moore said that Justice Doody’s decision would further discourage victims from going to the police.

Lawrence Greenspon, Mr. Boyle’s lawyer, sharply rejected suggestions that the verdict would discourage victims of sexual assault from coming forward.

“It doesn’t send any kind of a message, in my view, other than when you come to court, tell the truth,” he said after Mr. Boyle walked away from reporters without comment. “And if you don’t tell the truth, then you may not be believed.”

Mr. Greenspon said Mr. Boyle would return to court to try to gain access to his children and ultimately custody. Mr. Boyle has never seen their fourth child, who was born after his arrest two years ago.

“This is not a credibility contest,” Mr. Greenspon said. “Had it been a credibility contest, I think it was a tie — they both lost.”

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