“This is the day I get my voice back.”

CityNews reporter Cynthia Mulligan read a brief, emotional victim impact statement in a downtown courtroom Friday after ex-boyfriend Mike Bullard pleaded guilty to one count of making harassing phone calls. She blasted the Toronto comedian and talk-show host for his obsessive behaviour.

“Harassment is an ugly thing, It seeps into your mind and destroys your sense of peace and security,” Mulligan said, in a calm and steady voice. “I’m going to call it what it is — it is abuse.”

The two year litigation process ended with Bullard’s plea Friday. In addition to one count of harassing phone calls, Bullard also plead guilty to two breaches of a court order — one of which required him to have no contact, direct or indirect, with Mulligan.

Bullard was discharged from court with a clean criminal record and six months of probation.

The charges were placed in late 2016. By then Bullard and Mulligan had ended an eight month relationship, during which they had broken up at least three times.

The harassment started in July 2016, when Mulligan reported Bullard to Toronto police for a barrage of text messages she continued to receive from him despite their relationship being over.

Police gave Bullard a warning. But, a month later, in August 2016, she started receiving text messages from Bullard and anonymous phone calls from a Bell pay phone. Surveillance video later showed the calls were coming from Bullard.

In her statement to the court, Mulligan said Bullard would drive by her work, send her texts and phone calls while she was reporting on air, and even threatened to talk negatively about her on his radio show.

“Your irrational behaviour was escalating,” she told the court. “I was scared.”

Mulligan, a mother of two girls, said she was fearful for her family too — one of her daughters asked to sell their house to feel safe.

“When a man abuses a mother, he abuses her children as well,” she said in court. “They become collateral damage . . . No woman should ever have to go through this simply because she ended a relationship.”

Police warned Bullard twice more. He voluntarily turned himself in in September 2016, and was released with the condition that he would make no contact with Mulligan.

But Bullard broke the conditions a month later. In October, he contacted her through a mutual friend, asking her to drop all the charges against him in text messages.

“It was wilful blindness,” Calvin Barry, Bullard’s lawyer, said in court. “He fell in love and dealt with it inappropriately.”

Since the court process started, Bullard, 60, has had no contact with Mulligan, Barry said — a fact Howard Borenstein, the presiding judge, noting in accepting Bullard’s plea.

Before arraigning the case, Borenstein noted both Bullard and Mulligan were “impressive” personalities in their own right. The persistence of Bullard’s behaviour, he said, was because of “the breakdown of their relationship,” and “his reputation.”

“You can now move forward without this hanging over your head,” Borenstein said. “You’ve already paid a heavy price.”

Bullard sat in front of the judge with his head in his hands. He slouched back in his chair as he listened to Mulligan make her statement and speak about the victim-blaming she said she has faced during the legal process.

“I’ve done stories about the courts before, but now I have seen first hand that when you stand up for yourself it takes an excruciating amount of time for a case to slowly make its way through the courts,” she said.

When it was his turn to speak, Bullard kept it brief: “I want to try and rebuild my life,” he said. “I have no intention of contacting her in any shape or form.”

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“It won’t happen again Your Honour,” he said.

Friday evening, Bullard tweeted about the case, referring to the #MeToo movement against sexual assault and harassment.

“Ps not a me too thing,” he wrote.