TORONTO

A sexual predator who falsely claimed to be transgender and preyed on women at two Toronto shelters was jailed indefinitely on Wednesday.

Justice John McMahon declared Christopher Hambrook — who claimed to be a transgender woman named Jessica — was a dangerous offender.

The judge said he imposed the indefinite prison sentence because there’s a great risk that Hambrook will commit more sex crimes and require strict supervision if he returns to the community.

“I am satisfied there is no reasonable expectation that a lesser measure would adequately protect the public from Christopher Hambrook,” said McMahon.

He noted the Montreal man, 37, attacked four vulnerable females between the ages of five and 53 in Montreal and Toronto over the past 12 years.

“He has demonstrated from the age of 12 until the present an inability to control his sexual impulses,” said McMahon.

Hambrook served four years in prison for sexually abusing a five-year-old girl and while on bail for that crime, raping a 27-year-old intellectually-challenged woman in Montreal.

The prosecution asserted Hambrook, a former stripper and escort from Quebec, simply cannot control his deviant sexual urges and that locking him up indefinitely is the best way to protect the public.

Hambrook pleaded guilty in February 2013 to two counts of sexual assault and one count of criminal harassment involving two women — a deaf and homeless Quebec woman and a Toronto survivor of domestic violence — while he was living at a Dundas St. W. shelter and the Fred Victor women’s shelter in January and February 2012.

All of the victims’ names are covered by a publication ban.

Psychiatric and court records portrayed Hambrook as “hypersexual” and a sexual predator.

He couldn’t control his deviant urges, inside or outside of jail, sharing his sick sexual fantasies and irritating other inmates during a four-year prison sentence served in Quebec and Kingston.

After moving to Toronto in 2009, he boasted that he had received more than 800 e-mails from old Montreal friends “begging him to come home” for sex and shopping sprees.

Defence lawyer Stephanie Heyens said Hambrook has “gone down from committing egregious crimes to touching people without their consent.”

While she conceded his actions were “disgusting and criminal,” Heyens questioned whether his behaviour merited “spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars to jail him for the rest of his life.”