A 36-year-old man who posed as Justin Bieber on Facebook has been sentenced to four years in prison for coercing an 11-year-old girl into performing sexual acts on a webcam.

After a preliminary inquiry earlier this year, Lee Moir pleaded guilty to charges including child-luring, invitation to sexual touching and extortion.

During his sentencing hearing Moir’s lawyer Sylvia Verkerk told the court that Moir became “a very bored and lonely man” after separating from his common-law wife and child and moving from New Brunswick to Toronto in 2008.

Verkerk said a friend set up a Facebook page for Moir as Justin Bieber as a way for Moir to connect with his child. Instead, in 2010, Moir began Facebook chatting with a 10-year-old girl in the U.S. who believed he was the pop superstar from Stratford, Ont., according to the agreed statement of facts.

After months of chatting, he convinced the girl to appear topless on a webcam then told her he had taped it and threatened to show the video to her friends and family if she didn’t do as he told her. Among his sexual demands were that she wear white socks — a fetish that recurred with 22 other young girls he was found to be chatting with, according to the agreed statement of facts.

Finally, in March 2012, after Moir told the girl he had posted an explicit video of her online, the girl told her mother, and went to the police.

(Verkerk told the court that Moir denies making any recordings of the girl, and would like to reassure her that no videos will turn up on the Internet.)

The IP address was tracked back to Toronto and an undercover police officer began chatting with Moir on Facebook pretending to be a 14-year-old girl.

Weeks later, Moir was arrested in a subway station where he had arranged to meet his supposed Facebook friend in person.

A victim impact statement submitted by the girl, now 13, says her grades and attendance have been suffering.

“I was always upset with myself about what happened,” she said. She adds that she has learned “what people do on the Internet so now I warn my friends about what can happen to them.”

Verkerk told the court that Moir’s “drinking, loneliness, depression and in his words, just not giving a d--n about life” contributed to his actions.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Moir is remorseful, she said, adding that he says he did care for the girl “as a friend” and it was not “just a strictly sexual offender thing.”

Justice Bigelow sentenced Moir to four years in prison, taking into account 15 days of pretrial custody during which he was assaulted and his restrictive bail conditions for the past 18 months.

Read more about: