On a recent Monday morning inside the studio of the Dean Blundell shock-jock radio show, giggles and guffaws filled the airwaves as the host and his sidekicks ridiculed several gay men involved in a criminal trial.

A jury had just convicted a man for sexually assaulting three men he met in a Carlton St. bathhouse. The show’s producer and on-air personality, Derek Welsman, was the foreman.

The radio personalities chortled as they mocked gay men who visit bathhouses and the intelligence of the sex assault victims. They snickered as they imagined the perpetrator’s excitement for prison showers.

“If anyone wants to get into the backdoor business, I can give you some tips,” said foreman Welsman, prompting more laughter from his on-air colleagues.

In a courtroom just weeks before the Sept. 30 broadcast on 102.1 The Edge, Welsman swore on a Bible that he had no bias towards homosexuals.

His on-air commentary may have jeopardized the conviction of the accused, Joshua Dowholis, whom the jury unanimously decided was guilty on nearly all counts.

















Dowholis’s lawyer is seeking a judicial inquiry into the juror’s conduct, saying Welsman’s comments show that he’s biased against gay men and prejudged the case.

If the judge orders an inquiry, depending on its result, the lawyer may then seek a mistrial.

Welsman ignored the judge’s instructions not to discuss the case with friends, family or colleagues during the trial.

On the radio program, which has been repeatedly sanctioned for homophobic and other discriminatory views, Welsman jawed about the case with the show’s hosts while the trial was ongoing. The hosts spluttered with laughter as they asked whether “butt love” and “tearage” came up at the ongoing trial.

“Are there any man-whores?” Blundell asked.

“Oh yeah. They’re all over the place, and that’s just in the courthouse,” Welsman said.

Then, three days after the Sept. 27 verdict, Welsman talked on-air about what jurors had to decide before making their guilty finding. It is against the law for jurors to disclose details of their deliberations.

Welsman has not been charged.

Instead, he was warned by the trial’s Crown prosecutor and lead detective that continuing the on-air jokes could have negative consequences for the case. The prosecutor, though, did not tell Dowholis’s defence lawyer, Kathryn Wells, about the conversation.

Wells is now asking the court to order the prosecutor to release more details of how she learned of the juror’s on-air comments and what she did about them.

Welsman, who is now being represented by a top criminal lawyer, and Blundell refused to discuss the case with the Star. The prosecutor’s office would not answer most questions, but said there was no prosecutorial misconduct.

A few days after the verdict, Blundell asked Welsman on air how the accused responded to the verdict.

“When you said guilty, was he like, ‘Hot diggity dog! Everybody dance now?’ When he phoned home, ‘Good news, Mom . . . I’m going straight to the showers.’”

The entrance to Spa Excess is marked by two large wooden doors that look like they belong to a cathedral, each adorned by a simple sign that reads “Excess.”

The bathhouse, tucked in the corner of Carlton and Jarvis Sts., sees more than 9,000 men pass through those doors each month.

Around noon on a recent Tuesday, a bartender shelved glasses as a television played CNN. A man in his late 20s, towel wrapped around his waist, sat at the bar. A few stools down sat a man in a crisp Bay St. suit.

It was lunchtime and many of the 85 rooms upstairs had already been rented out for eight or 12 hours.

It was in this bathhouse, over the course of 10 days in the fall of 2011, where Joshua Dowholis met the four men he would be accused of sexually assaulting. He was convicted of sexually assaulting three of them as well as two counts of confinement.

The assaults occurred on three separate nights, though the details of each are similar.

The men smoked crystal meth, a drug they said permeates the bathhouse scene, according to trial testimony. On a binge, the men could party for hours or even days. Spa Excess’s president, Robert Knight, said the spa has zero tolerance for illicit drugs, and has kicked out users and barred dealers.

The men then drifted back to Dowholis’s downtown apartment, where, the jury found, he sexually assaulted them. Two of the accusers testified that Dowholis never disclosed he was HIV-positive.

Sitting in an orange jumpsuit at the Toronto West Detention Centre, Dowholis told the Star he is innocent. He said he had sex with only two of his accusers, and both times it was consensual.

“I always disclose my status,” he said. “I acquired HIV through someone who didn’t disclose to me.”

Dowholis said a daily pill suppresses the virus, and recent HIV tests have come up negative. He said he tells prospective partners he has the virus and said he only has sex with men who are also HIV-positive.

“I have reason to believe they colluded and made up this story together,” he said of his accusers, all of whom testified for the prosecution.

Dowholis’s crimes were not the sole focus of the trial. His lawyer raised questions about his accusers’ credibility.

One of the accusers — who cannot be identified because of a court-ordered publication ban protecting the identity of sex assault victims — made three panicked calls to police the night before he was to testify.

The Star obtained recordings of the calls, which were filed in court as an exhibit.

The man first told the operator he had just been drugged and demanded to be put in touch with the case’s lead investigator, Det. Const. Kim Percival.

Then he quickly recanted. “You know what, I haven’t been drugged, I want to tell the truth,” he told the operator. “I took it myself.”

As he paced outside the downtown hotel where the government paid for him to stay as a witness, he then claimed his room had been overrun by a drug dealer and people smoking meth.

During the bizarre calls, he also told the operator that he was in violation of a judge’s order. (He and another witness were partying together in the hotel room and talked about the trial, the defence lawyer told the Star. Judges typically forbid witnesses from discussing evidence.)

“I’ve been instructed to tell the truth and I can no longer stand by and sit here and do nothing about s--- that’s been going on,” the hysterical man told the operator.

The 911 calls became more fodder for the radio wits in a broadcast days after the verdict.

“Were they porking?” Blundell said.

“I don’t believe they were porking,” Welsman said.

Less than two months before they joked about the Dowholis sex assault trial, The Dean Blundell Show was sanctioned for broadcasting homophobic content.

It was the fourth time the show had been reprimanded for discriminatory content by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council since September 2009.

The most recent censure stemmed from a January broadcast in which Blundell, Welsman and then co-host Todd Shapiro riffed on a news story of a U.S. teen dying after getting stuck inside a rolled-up wrestling mat in his high school gym.

“Proving once again, kids, wrestling is incredibly gay,” Blundell said.

“You start on all fours, the guy gets right behind you like he’s getting ready to give you the old ram-rod,” he continued. “The ref goes, ‘Go!’ and then you just jump on him and smother him with your privates.”

In its response to two complaints to the standards council, the radio station called the show a “satirical, sarcastic and hopefully comedic perspective on ordinary and significant aspects of daily life.”

“Dean’s comments that the sport is gay was more akin to saying that the sport is ‘silly’ or ‘not serious’ rather than homophobic,” the station said.

The council disagreed.

“What should have simply been a news item about an unfortunate incident, and remained so, was transformed into a flat-out attack against homosexuality,” the council said in its August decision.

Because of the show’s history of broadcasting discriminatory content, the council took the rare step of requiring the radio station to submit a plan outlining how “it will ensure that no other breaches” occur in its broadcasts.

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

The station’s plan “satisfied” the standards council, said executive director John MacNab, though he would not release the plan to the Star. He said never in the council’s 23-year history has a station re-offended after submitting an action plan.

Despite the council’s reprimand, and the judge’s instructions to jurors not to discuss the ongoing Dowholis case, the show’s hosts repeatedly joked about the trial in three separate broadcasts — one before the verdict and two after.

The Star reviewed the broadcasts and found many of the comments homophobic and vile. In one instance, host Blundell summed up some evidence and said it included “a few guys, some aggravated sexual assault, a couple of bathhouses … some lube, four Dutch clogs, a stuffed Buffalo … a metre stick. Stigmata of the anus.”

Welsman responded: “Well put, well put.”

On Sept. 20, Dowholis’s future still undecided, the verdict still a week away, Welsman stopped by the radio studio during a day off from his jury duty.

“I just can’t” talk about it, Welsman said on air. “It’s just wrong. I don’t want to jeopardize anything.”

Though Blundell assured listeners Welsman had repeatedly refused to say a word to colleagues about the trial while it was going on, he goaded and pressed Welsman, his questions targeted, suggesting he and his co-hosts already knew details.

“You’re ready to hang up the towel, aren’t you?” said a female co-host, an apparent reference to the bathhouse. Welsman had not mentioned the bathhouse on air.

Blundell immediately said, “I get it.”

A few beats passed before Welsman burst out in laughter.

“I just got that. You’re good.”

Had one of Dowholis’s fellow prisoners not heard the case being discussed on the radio, Dowholis’ lawyer might never have known about the juror’s on-air conduct.

The inmate was returning from court in a police wagon driven by a court officer listening to the Blundell show. Once back at jail, the prisoner told Dowholis, and eventually word was passed to his lawyer, Wells, on Oct. 10, nearly two weeks after the verdict.

The discovery spurred an email exchange between Wells and Crown prosecutor Meghan Scott, who said she was already aware of one of the broadcasts, which aired just days after the verdict. She said she and Det. Const. Percival visited Welsman at the station to remind him it was a criminal offence to discuss jury deliberations.

Welsman was “very apologetic — thought he was permitted to speak about the case, portions on the public record,” the investigator’s notes say from the meeting.

More at thestar.com

Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island jailer grieves for ‘friend’

Star Christmas Carol Concert celebrates 35th anniversary

Don Cherry tees off on world junior selections

The police notes also say Welsman was “advised that it may have neg. consequences for the case as well if he were to continue.”

This email exchange was the first time defence lawyer Wells had heard of the meeting between prosecutor, officer and juror, which occurred 10 days earlier. The radio station has quietly removed the broadcasts from its online archive.

In her email response to Wells, prosecutor Scott said none of Welsman’s on-air comments constituted juror misconduct. She also said that since the jury had delivered its verdict and been dismissed, the matter was closed.

Wells disagrees. She has since asked the judge to order an inquiry into Welsman’s conduct, arguing that the juror has a “bias against homosexuals” and prejudged the case.

“Just because he’s gay, just because he lived that lifestyle, does not disentitle him to a fair trial,” Wells told the Star.

She said Welsman “willfully engaged in misconduct” that violated the instructions he received from the judge, including discussing the jury’s deliberations.

Welsman, the foreman, repeatedly talked on-air about the jury’s decision-making process.

“We had to decide whether they were credible witnesses at all because they were boneheads,” he said during a Sept. 30 broadcast, days after the verdict. “We kind of determined that though these people are not the smartest individuals in the world … they probably couldn’t hold up a fake story.”

When approached by the Star, Welsman refused to comment, saying, “I’ve been instructed I can’t say anything to anybody.”

Toronto police would not comment on why Welsman has not been charged for disclosing jury deliberations.

There is nothing wrong with the prosecutor advising Welsman of the consequences of violating the law prohibiting jurors from talking about deliberations, said John Pearson, another prosecutor involved in the case.

“There is not a scintilla of evidence of prosecutorial misconduct,” he said.

For Wells, though, questions remain. Why did the radio station remove the broadcasts from its website? Who made that decision? And on whose advice?

So Wells is asking the court to order the prosecutor to release more details of how she learned of the juror’s on-air comments and how she responded.

“There are so many unanswered questions here regarding the juror’s behaviour and his interaction with the Crown and police that it begs judicial examination,” she said.

Meanwhile, as the lawyers argue about whether the court should conduct an inquiry, Dowholis’s sentencing is on hold.

He has spent the last 26 months behind bars, filling his time by reading nearly 400 books. He has not heard the broadcasts of Welsman, Blundell and others discussing his case.

“I’m familiar with the (show) and its homophobic content,” said Dowholis, who did not testify at his trial. “I don’t harbour bad feelings about it because they’re appealing to their audience.”

But the justice system should not ignore the juror’s conduct, he said.

On Sept. 30, just three days after he read out the verdict as jury foreman, Welsman joked with his colleagues about sending Dowholis to prison.

“All I know is that you have damned a man to five of the greatest years of his life,” Blundell said.

“True,” Welsman said. “I have done my job, my civic duty.”











