Warning: Graphic content.

For years Douglas Whaley snuck into his co-worker’s office when no one was around, ejaculated into her coffee cup and on her desk and rubbed his penis on her phone.

He filmed himself doing so — 25 videos were discovered by police when they searched his phone and computer during a voyeurism investigation, a judge said at his sentencing hearing in Newmarket in February.

“It is disgusting and extremely disturbing. I feel violated,” said his co-worker, who had no idea this was going on until the videos were discovered.

The woman, whose identity is under a publication ban, believes she ingested his semen without her consent or knowledge, and that he intended for her to ingest it.

But Whaley, 41, was charged with, and pleaded guilty to, mischief to property.

“This does not describe the gravity of the crime that was committed against me,” she said in her victim-impact statement of the mischief charge.

In an interview she said she does not want to minimize sexual assault in any way, but she feels like she was forced into oral sex. She says she knows the current definition of sexual assault would not capture what happened to her, but she hopes that could change.

“I am a victim of sexual assault,” she told the court in her victim impact statement, adding in an interview later: “We need to make the charge and punishment fit the crime.”

An assault requires touching or some kind of threat related to the application of force, University of Ottawa law professor Carissima Mathen says.

“This is clearly a kind of violation, but I think it falls into a grey zone (in the criminal law).”

(The Court of Appeal recently upheld a sexual-assault conviction where a man overpowered a woman, forced his way into her apartment and made her watch him masturbate.)

It also wouldn’t fall under a charge of criminal harassment because it was done secretly and the victim didn’t know — one of the requirements of harassment is that the victim feel fear.

There are lots of ways for a person’s sexual integrity to be violated without an assault, Mathen says, and some of them, such as voyeurism and the non-consensual dissemination of sexual images, have been inserted into the Criminal Code fairly recently.

“It’s difficult for the Criminal Code to cover every variation of human evil and pathology. People have infinite ways to be horrible to each other . . . the criminal law is always in a necessary mode of catch-up, unfortunately,” Mathen says.

Nneka MacGregor, executive director of WomenattheCentrE, says the lack of an appropriate charge reflects a narrow understanding from both society and the law about the scope of sexual assault.

“Setting light to a garbage can is mischief to property,” says MacGregor. “Ejaculating in your co-worker’s drinking cup, not once but on multiple occasions, is not the same thing. But what the law does when it categorizes everything under this mischief to property, it loses sight of the real seriousness and the type of danger of that type of assault on women.”

In addition to the mischief charge, Whaley also pleaded guilty to four counts of voyeurism and one count of illegally entering a dwelling to commit an offence. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison, with six months credit for pre-sentence custody. He was also banned from using a camera, video recorder or a smartphone or computer equipped with a camera for 10 years.

In his ruling, Ontario Court Justice Peter West said Whaley videotaped unsuspecting victims in the shower and sneaked into a home and videotaped himself “masturbating and ejaculating” into the victim’s underwear.

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“There are many words which come to mind to describe Mr. Whaley’s conduct: despicable, demeaning, vile, appalling, horrendous, horrific, inexcusable, unforgivable. I know that there are many others,” West said.

West compared Whaley’s actions — particularly entering a home and masturbating with the resident’s panties in hand — to the early behaviour of sex killer Russell Williams.

“You shake your head at me, sir,” West told Whaley in court, “but the kind of breaking into houses . . . and doing what you did and videotaping is exactly what that individual did. That’s where it started.”

Whaley, a technician, had a previous conviction from 2011, where a security guard spotted him in a Walmart taking up-skirt pictures of a 16-year-old girl. He was caught by the same security guard in 2013, two months after his probation ended, taking photos of a woman’s “buttocks area,” the judge said, leading to police obtaining a search warrant for his phone, computer and data storage.

According to the ruling, he bragged to his probation officer and a psychiatrist that he collected about 14,000 spy-cam-type photos between 2005 and 2014.

He hasn’t fully admitted to the “gravity of his behaviour,” West said, noting Whaley told his probation officer and a psychiatrist that he was “fine now.”

Prior to being sentenced Whaley stood up in court, his jaw tight.

“I’d like to have them know how truly sorry I am,” he said. “I need to apologize for any fear or anxiety they still have. I really hope they can overcome these obstacles, and I pray that one day down the road they might just be able to forgive me.”

Whaley declined to comment when approached at the hearing.

Whaley was initially charged with administering a noxious substance with the intent to annoy or aggrieve, but that charge was dropped or withdrawn at the time of his guilty plea. Experts say it is unclear whether semen could be considered a noxious substance by the court and whether the appropriate intent could be established in such a case.

Whaley’s co-worker says she was shocked by the numerous delays and postponements during the case — Whaley made his guilty plea in February 2015 but was only sentenced a year later. Even more disillusioning, she says, is the feeling that her case fell through the cracks.

“I am convinced if he wasn’t a repeat offender and there weren’t other victims in this case, he would have only received a probation term for only my charge.”