Dear Justin,

I tried writing to you first, as the Rt. Hon. Prime Minister of Canada, but you ignored it. So I’m trying again now, as your cousin-in-law instead. I’m hopeful that addressing you personally will help us overcome the communication barrier that’s been erected to insulate you from some deeply troubling developments. I regret that professional attempts to resolve this were unsuccessful and I had to resort to a family intervention to get your attention. This is about a brewing child sex scandal and the kids are still in danger, ‘under a Trudeau roof‘. We need to speak about this frankly and immediately, before any more damage can be done.

I appreciate you wouldn’t recognize me in a crowd, because my part of the family happens to change about every four years. They’re a raucous bunch of enormously huge egos who can’t seem to get along for the good of anyone. Every four years like clockwork, there’s a slew of vicious divorces. You would think that after 150 years they could learn to communicate instead of tearing each other down. If nobody else warned about what you were joining, then I’m sorry to be the messenger.

But as things stand you are the patriarch of this family and I must bring these concerns directly to you. I grew up as a Crown Ward and I’m choosing to approach you in that capacity, as a sidebar from both our jobs that are politically interfering. This is a graphic and extremely difficult issue that requires we drop our defences, if anything is to be resolved. With you as the prime minister and me as a journalist, it’s created a standoff that imperils more complainants.

It’s not an internet myth and several criminal charges are laid, into the double-digits. Some of them were even against your flatmate, but that’s the part you did know. What I need to discuss is the growing number of child sex victims since he pleaded guilty, and the family looked away to cleanse its Liberal soul. Because everyone closed their eyes in an effort to shield you from that scandal, the abuses continued and kids are presently being harmed by additional members of our family. The thing about predation is that it’s an illness and it can’t be controlled by ignoring it. All that secrecy did was let the disease flourish within our own family.

You and I come from disparate places and the most valuable purpose I can serve is to share my insight, plus hard evidence. This seedy cadre of inlaws will be your demise if you don’t listen up and take corrective action now. Children are being exploited either in your name or on your watch, and you’re the only one who can stop this. The Trudeau stamp is on these crimes, through and through. It’s just that you’re blinded to how.

I know you believe that your part of the family is more civilized than mine and that sexual abuse can’t infect the silver spoon; but in this example the privileged members of our clan are preying on the most vulnerable, precisely because they have no resources to defend themselves. The abuse of power in your image is so great that it’s upsetting. Watching them use your money and power to scare, brutalize, and/or silence the kids is nearly paralyzing. This relates to stalking women in our family too.

This is going to be a long letter because I was cursed with the ability to tie things together. My vantage point is unique as a family member who remained constant through all the divorces, and as a witness to a particular set of criminal allegations that now involve you directly. Your branch of the family has gone to great lengths to silence these children, but I can’t let them succeed like they did with your roommate in Vancouver. If I let them silence me, more women and children will be violated.

Ultimately we’re going to discuss a serial problem with sexual predation in the Liberal Party of Canada and its provincial counterparts. We will also explore the ‘Look Away Disease’ that has infected all legislatures and parliament, that continues to fuel new allegations in nearly every news cycle. I will attempt to bridge the cases of Jared Nolan, Luke Strimbold, Christopher Ingvaldson, and Tina Fontaine, through my experience and holistic viewpoint. Although they appear to be disconnected examples, I can explain why they’re not and how they were all enabled by our family. That includes all political parties, law enforcement, and media, in their various roles in the family compact, and the way you have abused Canadians’ data to make them vulnerable to criminal exploitation.

I apologize for the lengthy preamble and please accept it as an indication of my trepidation. Exposing heinous crimes takes a tremendous amount of courage, especially when the establishment becomes complicit. I’m trying to inform you in a way that doesn’t weaponize our women and children, and turn this into little more than political ammunition against you. These issues are so much greater than partisan hit-points. They transcend race and class relations, as the foundation for all systemic #MeToo dysfunction.

I know Tina Fontaine isn’t considered part of the #MeToo catastrophe, but hopefully she will be when I’m finished connecting the dots. In fact, your entire relationship with First Nations should be viewed through the Look Away lens. I don’t mean to steal their voices and my information doesn’t replace their own stories, but hopefully my experience can penetrate the walls around your brain-trust. Hopefully it will give you a new avenue to analyze your behaviour and to become accountable for it. Hopefully I will enable my government family to do better, replacing the false promises on prenuptial bumper stickers that inevitably lead to collapse in the fourth year of this abuse and election cycle.

Addressing an issue that is all-encompassing requires perseverance. Please be patient as I weave these details to reveal the larger picture that’s been missing from the #MeToo and data privacy discussions.

Regarding Jared Nolan

I mention Jared Nolan first, because the political obstruction surrounding his case is current and ongoing. He is/was an LPC riding executive who was charged with multiple counts of child luring and child pornography in Ontario. He’s the reason I began writing you letters and why the party threatened to silence me as a witness. Here is documentation of that event:

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The investigation has gone sideways because of the evidence I reported and its liability implications to the Liberal Party of Canada. I’m a peripheral witness in that matter and after intervention by the LPC, the police obstructed my report and refused to receive the evidence.

My documentation relates to tampering with evidence in the Nolan case, to conceal his relationship with the Liberal apparatus. During the time of these heinous allegations made by children, he was also working directly with partisan youths in the riding. Another riding executive is the principal of a high school and Nolan may have had access to those children through the Liberal Party of Canada as well. He definitely had access to thousands of youths, with the ability to stalk them in real-time through the party’s Liberalist database.

The PMO and party brass were aware of this danger but continued to permit Nolan’s access to the database, even as he was under house arrest. You refused to notify the youth volunteers and parents in our riding, so they could speak with their children to ensure they weren’t sexually abused. The Liberal Party of Canada continues to withhold this information and it’s created a public safety emergency. No one will investigate if these child complainants were in contact with the party to fulfill their volunteer requirements, or if Nolan downloaded a copy of the Liberalist database with all women and children’s sensitive information. They will not ensure it hasn’t been distributed to a criminal child pornography network.

The LPC’s threats and interference have created so much harm that the Ontario Provincial Police are blocking all forms of communication to receive evidence in the Nolan case. They denied phone calls and a physical meeting. They ‘lost’ my original 2-hour statement. They ‘lost’ the original officer who took my report. When that wasn’t enough to deter me from reporting, the lead investigator aggressively intimidated me and directly obstructed the evidence.

Instead of describing all the details and re-issuing the evidence, please visit the following hyperlinks.

According to analytics, more than 125,000 people have seen my Twitter essay that describes these events. The 82-post entry further addresses the media’s complicity and political negligence by all parties. It provides access to a synopsis of allegations, as well as the actual evidence. Please begin here:

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1 of 80) Please bear with me, because the following is filled with plenty of foul language & I'm taking off the professional mask to speak with you as a human being. I've had enough & I've hit my limit, putting up with all the #MeToo bullshit in #CDNpoli, #ONpoli, & #CDNmedia — Amy MacPherson (@MsAmyMacPherson) February 22, 2018

Although a number of government officials were alerted from provincial and federal levels, they did not respond. No one from the Liberal Party of Canada responded. The only response I did receive is the Ontario Provincial Police blocking my communication from this last avenue. I now cannot report in person, by phone, or online.

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I’m concerned this presents a rare example of a section 7 Charter breach, that is directly endangering children. My security of person has been revoked by the police and both levels of government. All children in the affected community have also lost their security of person, when each of you refuses to receive a report that affects them and the public safety. Police services are being entirely denied in the Nolan matter.

As stated in the allegation synopsis, I became aware of another girl who may be in danger from the Nolan situation. But due to political interference and a conflict-of-interest between the LPC and police detachment, a report was declined and her safety was never investigated.

All evidence concerning these allegations can be obtained through the Twitter essay or statement synopsis links. It’s important you read that preliminary context before jumping into the documents, text messages, and phone records.

The Liberal Party of Canada was further captured on video, obstructing the riding and parents from knowing about these criminal charges against our vice president. The LPC official can be heard saying he was ‘directed by the party’ to prevent anyone from discussing Nolan and that he would ‘fall on his sword’ to enforce this censorship, even if it was against the rules and a detriment to public safety. Moreover, the party obstructed Vulnerable Sector background checks from being implemented, to prevent alleged predators from gaining access to the party’s powerful software that can surveil women and children. Instead they took an aggressive stance against me, to silence the witness.

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Additional information was withheld from my evidentiary statement, because I believed I needed to protect the legal sensitivity of these issues. I believed my Twitter essay, or allegation synopsis, or the evidence itself, would lead to police and/or government and/or party contact, where I could disclose financial evidence confidentially.

Because everyone in the family compact obstructed this communication, I can only forewarn that more trouble may be coming and you need to demand records from the Simcoe-Grey Federal Liberal Riding Association (SGFLRA). While Nolan has been under house arrest and forbidden from the internet, it appears he may have gotten involved with selling forged Canadian passports online.

Nolan’s history with counterfeit documents allegedly begins in 2010, when complaints were lodged against him and his SuperiorFakeDegrees.com operation (see page 1 and note his full legal name is Jared Connor Nolan).

When Nolan became involved with hospital work he may have departed from the forgery business, for a time (see page 2 and notice no entries about Nolan).

But in 2017 when Nolan was under house arrest for child luring and child porn, the complaints against him resumed. One woman went so far as to publish an address and partial bank account number (see page 3 and note these fake passports and financial crimes are an international issue, involving the US and UK).

The most recent complaints indicate Nolan’s bail conditions may have been breached and his alleged criminal associates may extend beyond Canada. The riding association possesses more evidence to support this concern that arrived from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), but the party is obstructing police from receiving it.

CIBC contacted the riding association to warn its account would be closed, if they didn’t remove Jared Nolan’s name from signing privileges immediately. He maintained these powers over party finances for much of his time under house arrest, further proving his executive access was never revoked by the LPC. Whether the party wished to remain associated with Nolan, it didn’t matter to the bank. They wouldn’t disclose their allegations, but they made it exceptionally clear they were prohibiting Nolan’s business through their establishment and anyone connected with him would see their accounts closed as well.

We now have a situation where a riding executive accused of child luring and child pornography may be connected to counterfeit passports and possibly human trafficking. But the police won’t pursue this evidence due to political interference and threats from Nolan’s colleague in the Liberal Party of Canada.

The only thing your part of the family wants to know is if I’m going to commence civil action; but it wasn’t me who was molested in this scenario and I can’t bankroll a Charter complaint against the police, the party, and two governments. The rest of your kin are just refusing to do their jobs and that includes the Attorneys General for Ontario and Canada. If you don’t intervene with an independent commission to investigate these conflicts now, you’ll end up being the one who wears it in the next divorce/election cycle.

At this point and frankly, you’re lucky I’m a staple inlaw who gets how all the moving parts work. You really need to stop ‘kicking me in the teeth’ for speaking up, because children are still in danger and it’s the Trudeau name presiding over it.

So you can stop imagining me as a militant femi-nazi, with some kind of flamethrower hidden in my lady parts, please listen to a 2-hour interview I recorded with a Canadian political podcast. The mainstream media might have blacked this out, but everyone else is still talking about Jared Nolan. I swear I’m not a mean or aggressive person and I’m not even loud. Just listen, before you form an opinion.

Regarding Luke Strimbold

As I tried to tell you and Katie, as well as the RCMP, the Luke Strimbold case from British Columbia is related to the Jared Nolan case in Ontario.

The Liberalist database is a national problem. I discuss it at length in the audio clip above, and it’s imperative the RCMP accepts this information. It’s also become imperative for the privacy commissioner to investigate and for you to take executive action.

This partisan software may be one of the most powerful surveillance operations in the country, even though it was intended for less intrusive political use. It works on mobile, updates in real-time, and contains especially sensitive personal data about women and children. It contains their contact information, work and school information, schedule of events, income, family relations, as well as everyone’s hopes and fears and character labels the party might have added, in their own opinion.

I accept this information was sought to be more effective with voters and more sensitive toward volunteers, but when you package that data together, it also creates a veritable victim profile. It would be the most effective way for a predator to track targets and one of the ironic applications within the Liberalist is called Quick Mark.

Can you please consider now how that translates to the criminally ill. As another Liberal riding executive, Luke Strimbold may have gained access to the same database as Jared Nolan. I’m told the software is shared between provincial and federal parties in Ontario. The RCMP will need to inquire if the same is true in BC, because technically speaking, that database can be used to identify gay teens in the click of a button. (A party tutorial for selecting ‘marks’ is included in the previous audio clip.)

Regarding Anna Gainey And The Liberalist

Surely you already knew that Anna Gainey was in a conflict-of-interest. Without campaigning for herself at the convention, she was elected as party president. Her husband, Tom Pitfield, is your childhood friend, and your families vacation together.

So you also knew that Tom manages the Liberalist database, and Anna promised to recuse herself from any issues between his business and the party. You knew there was a conflict-of-interest between the Liberalist operation and his think-tank, Canada2020. You knew there were incestuous overtones because several Liberal executives pulled double-duty for Anna and Tom. You even knew this involved a conflict between the Young Liberals of Canada and Tom’s data mining operation.

Then I informed you that Anna didn’t recuse herself from the dispute about police obstruction, the Liberalist, and the case of Jared Nolan. I warned the party her actions were leaving the LPC exposed to potential lawsuits, but you let that slide for your nearest and dearest. What can I say? I don’t even get a Christmas card and she gets to vacation with the Aga Khan. It just hurts that you’d do this to the rest of the family while you were all getting suntans:

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In related legal quagmires, you might not have realized the Liberalist is hosted in the United States and therefore it’s subject to the US Patriot Act. Technically speaking, President Trump can access this database to deny Canadians entry. The labels you append to constituent profiles (ie: environmental activist, marijuana activist, Idle No More activist, Black Lives Matter activist, union activist, LGBTQ2S, veteran, hostile, likely Conservative, likely NDP, likely Liberal, Indigenous, Islamic, Jewish, Christian, immigrant) can be obtained by just about anyone, including the US government. All you need to do is spend some time with the Liberalist manual (at bottom), or listen to my audio interview to get the picture. Only recently could we add concerns about Russian election interference.

Complicating this situation is the fact that the Liberalist is non-consensual. No one signs a waiver or receives terms of service when their information is uploaded to the database by party volunteers (like Jared Nolan or Luke Strimbold). Citizens have no idea what data you’re collecting when the party visits door-to-door or holds events. There is no ability for constituents or youth volunteers to challenge, correct, or suppress the data, because they don’t know this database exists. They don’t know their online petitions and surveys are compiled by the LPC to build a political-psyche profile. They also don’t know the party will give their profile to anyone who wants it, including criminals.

This is where we really fell out with one another. Given there is a real threat to children’s safety, I asked Anna to implement Vulnerable Sector background checks for those who access the data (see last document), but she denied it. That’s what led to the video I posted, where the party abused its power to block a motion for criminal clearance to operate the Liberalist database and mentor youth volunteers.

There is nothing in the world that could justify that obstruction. It was a no-brainer, to protect kids in a riding where the vice president is accused of making child pornography. You can love Tom and Anna all you please, but it doesn’t mean you have to condone what they did. The party actually intervened to preserve criminal access to women and children. There must be discipline. If you look away, I won’t forgive you.

Then there’s the matter of Elections Canada and its questionable relationship to the Liberalist database. While they’re keen to get with the times and join the digital revolution, they also have a murky privacy policy that’s decided on a case-by-case basis. That means there are no hard rules for privacy and what a party can do with everyone’s legal voter identification, voting history, and home address. No one is monitoring what happens with our information once it’s distributed, and Elections Canada hasn’t done a privacy risk assessment.

Essentially Elections Canada has allowed political parties to append psych profiles and real-time tracking to their legal voter registration files for every adult in the country. That data is then hardwired to robocalls that can be conducted by any volunteer with access to the Liberalist, even if they’re under house arrest for child pornography. That’s definitely a worst-case scenario, but these people are criminally charged and they’ve had access to these powerful tools.

This is a bitter pill to swallow and no one will take responsibility, or stop it from happening. The LPC created Liberalist and the Conservatives created CIMS, but no one established regulations to guide how the data could be manipulated. All anyone needs to do is join a local riding association to get their hands on it and they can do whatever they please.

Moreover, you will likely be in the same hot water as Cambridge Analytica. It was disheartening to see Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale spinning the information, as if Liberals have nothing to do with data mining or electoral privacy breaches. It was disingenuous in the utmost and he darn well knew it, as a user of the Liberalist software. He even knew the party’s data was breached to those charged with making child pornography, as a recipient of my evidentiary statement that was submitted last year.

You and Tom and Anna have sunk so low with this non-consensual surveillance of Canadians and Canadian children, that your behaviour is no different from Donald Trump anymore. I can only surmise that you’ve obstructed the criminal investigation into Jared Nolan because it would have uncovered these greater issues. The writing was always on the wall and the government’s attorney general may have brought disrepute to the justice system by quietly protecting this.

Regarding Christopher Ingvaldson

Chris is your ex-roommate from Vancouver that no one is allowed to talk about. His story is compelling to this pattern of sexual predators, but it’s also how you might have been infected with the Look Away Disease. I’m sorry we have to go there, but it’s necessary to wake you up and I say this from the bottom of my heart.

So your bestie from the west coast was a fellow teacher at private school. You shared what sounds like a rockin’ apartment and you were reported to be quite the ladies’ man. Althea Raj from the Huffington Post wrote a free e-book to promote your bid for leadership and she detailed these high times in BC. It seems you lived together, worked together, and partied together, with the accused.

But it appears Althea wasn’t aware of your roommate’s conviction for child pornography. When she was fawning about the popularity of your apartment, did she know that Chris pleaded guilty to exploiting children at your home and shared workplace? The details of his case were upsetting and included a breach of trust. It’s no wonder you didn’t want to talk about it, but you must. At least accept that you and I are experiencing the same feelings. You about Christopher Ingvaldson, and me about Jared Nolan.

In the world of Canadian politics someone always knows something and it likely didn’t help that Chris was pursuing a federal Liberal nomination. Had he not been caught by international law enforcement he might have gained access to the Liberalist database, just like Jared Nolan and Luke Strimbold.

They say one is an example, two is an anomaly, and three is a pattern.

In any event, your relationship with a pedophile put you on the defensive. According to blood-brother, Gerry Butts, your roommate was the impetus for Vic Toews’ famous C-51 assertion, that ‘you’re either with us or the child pornographers’. Your brother then used this media opportunity to threaten the other parties into silence about the indiscretion. This is a major symptom of the Look Away Disease, not to mention ethically disturbing from a journalism perspective. It’s even reminiscent of the silencing campaign that’s been unleashed to erase our memories of Jared Nolan.

These details are important because they actually relate to you and me and the loss of faith in Canadian media. What you probably didn’t know is that Althea played dirty to steal your story from me.

If you recall from my Twitter essay, I mentioned that I interviewed you in Midland, Ontario. What I didn’t bother to say is that our meeting went terribly. You weren’t allowing access to any reporters at the time and I used my connections with Rana Bokhari‘s brother and Maryanne Kampouris to talk you into letting your guard down. It was going to be the scoop of the year and I was so excited. They convinced you that I was trustworthy and determined to help the public get acquainted.

But Ezra Levant’s Sun News Network also attended the event. They were viciously harassing you and I had to be doubly vetted to ensure I wasn’t part of a set-up. When that was confirmed we retired to a protected area in the basement and I had you alone to pick your brain for a full hour. I asked question after question about various policies, and you responded with no comment every time. You were nervous and became agitated, insisting I was only supposed to speak with you about the local news.

There was little I could do to salvage the interview and the entire hour with you amounted to ‘no comment’. I felt terrible that Ezra’s hooligans really knocked you off your game and I believe one of them was accused of physically assaulting you. It’s not that you didn’t have my empathy and I tried making small talk to put you at ease before leaving. I had a first edition of your dad’s book, Two Innocents In Red China, and I had you autograph because I knew China would figure strongly in your political future.

But that didn’t quell your fears from an incredibly manic day and your kin were worried that I would represent you poorly. I believe it was Katie Telford who got in touch with the Huff Post, because that’s where I was slated to publish. I was sad that day that Ezra killed my opportunity, then pissed-right-off that Althea stabbed me in the back with it.

Ms. Raj informed your people that I wasn’t authorized to interview you on behalf of the Huffington Post – only she was. Althea was on staff and I was only a contributor. She had no authority over what I was allowed to publish though. I was accused of misrepresenting myself and I never did. It’s just that you were spooked and Althea let her envy become destructive.

So that’s how the Huffington Post became your publicist during the leadership campaign and how you got someone covering your story that didn’t know the first thing about you, to be cautious around Christopher Ingvaldson. Althea abused my trust and connections to get her foot through your door and the outcome was the difference between public relations and journalism. By the way, I wasn’t going to publish anything because it would have made me look bad for failing to get your answers. I chalked it up to a personal experience and bearing witness to the collapse of media ethics, all around.

Regarding Benjamin Levin

The example of Mr. Levin will serve as a bridge between us. You come from an affluent gated community, and I was raised by impoverished institutional confinement. We were both disconnected from the commonality that binds the middle together and had to find ways to relate for the purpose of acceptance.

Our shared cousin-in-law, Benjamin Levin, operated on both sides of the track. He was considered one of the world’s most esteemed educators and his longstanding career in the public service proved he could lead a double life through numerous government departments. He was the deputy minister of education for the Manitoba (NDP) and Ontario (Liberal) administrations.

He also preyed on the vulnerable, as a sadistic director of child sexual abuse and purveyor of child pornography. He sought to cause violent, incestuous harm to young girls and wipe the slate clean with his unimpeachable reputation.

His story is significant in a few ways, in that he wasn’t a partisan executive or political candidate, where anyone can apply and the backgrounds are random. He was integral to the establishment from inner ranks and he exploited the Look Away Disease within the aristocracy for decades. He ate from a silver spoon and was still driven to feed his hunger with the weakest women and children among us. Mr. Levin solidly proves that criminal illness isn’t confined by socio-economic class. This does happen in your circles and it often persists for longer, because the affluent introduced the Look Away Disease and they’re the most susceptible to it.

Another indicator of this phenomenon is the judge in Ben’s case. As a female justice from the same class, she actually wished the perpetrator good luck upon delivering the sentence. She also believed the daughters who denied being abused, even though their father bragged about raping them.

To me it says the justice system doesn’t understand sexual abuse and incest. Wishing the criminal ‘good luck’ is like hoping the affliction can be cured, without being honest about the problem and what compels the person to be a predator. The internet is often blamed for child pornography as an excuse for the silver spoons to understand. But people aren’t turned into predators because of what they saw online. It’s the other way around, as any victim of the crime could tell you. This material appears on the internet because the Look Away Disease permits it to flourish and it’s consumed by individuals are who were already ill.

Likewise, incest is a learned behaviour that nobody will admit. These victims (and victims-turned-predators) are the least likely to come forward because they’re desperately confused about loving the person who harmed them. It involves stealing someone’s innocence and the mentee will be confused about coming of age, how that happens, and what their role is supposed to be.

You’ve heard a lot of adult rape victims question what they might have done to cause the attack. We know that self-blame and victim-shaming are common responses to this domination and we work hard to correct those behaviours. Well, the dynamic between kids and parents makes that question difficult to resolve in the mind of a dependent child.

In part, this is why we must refer to the accused as criminally ill, because illness of the mind is the only way to describe that type of predation. It’s about more than power and control, that we understand to be the motivation for adult sex crimes and domestic violence. Preying on children, whether related or not, is complicated by romantic overtones that undulate between loving and discipline. This is why it’s so disgusting and why society looks away.

But when everyone averts their eyes it leaves the victim isolated with nowhere to turn for help. When they see society respond this way, they will question even harder if this is the way life really works. They’ll know the abuse is demoralizing, but the community’s consensus to ignore it will make them wonder if they’re defective. Through our actions and the Look Away Disease, we’re actually messaging to the children that they’re the ones not fitting in.

On the flip side, predators from the other side of the tracks are met with moral outrage, or no response at all. The family compact is loathe to waste its resources on the scourge beyond its gates. If you aren’t the establishment, or paying the establishment’s bills, whatever happens to your children was outside that social construct. It’s only when so-called ‘low-lifes’ threaten kids from the aristocracy that everyone gets out the pitchforks and torches.

That too will harm the victims because it excessively vilifies the perpetrator. It’s excessively hard to say those words and yet I know them to be true, as well. It’s because the exploited child will have to absorb your anger and rejection. They’re the ones who remain in the community even after their predator goes to jail. They have to wear their predator’s illness as you will continue to look away from them, as if they are damaged goods.

I’m not a psychologist so I don’t know if the term already exists, but addressing child predators as criminally ill is the safest way we can support the victims. It allows them to see the predator as something different from their own identity. It helps them make peace with the confusion, knowing an illness is responsible for the violence perpetrated against them and that they couldn’t have done anything to deserve it. It says the community will not shun them because we know it’s not their fault. And in the case of family incest, it says they’re not broken for loving a parent who hurt them.

The ‘criminal’ part of criminal illness is equally important, because that tells child victims the abuse is wrong and they deserve to be protected from it. It’s one of few ways to empower children to come forward, because they don’t yet have the words to describe what they’re going through.

But at the end of the day all roads lead to the same place. Whether you seek to ignore or discipline with justice, you want this to happen quickly so everyone can go back to looking away. That brutalized little girl or boy will be left to navigate the rest of their life in isolation. It doesn’t matter if they came from a ghetto, a mansion, or a private school. They’ll wonder why you harboured their predator in silence. They’ll wonder why, if the crime was bad, that you only sentenced the attacker akin to a petty theft artist. They’ll wonder why destruction of their entire life was worth so little, and they won’t know where to look to begin the rebuilding process as a newly-minted social orphan.

Benjamin Levin is remarkable for occupying both hemispheres at the same time. He spanned through two political parties, two provinces, the global stage, and opposite socio-economic classes. As part of the Wynne transition team, it’s also possible he might have gained access to the Liberalist database.

Regarding Donald Phillip Jarvis

Here we go with the quid pro quo and why I have any right to speak about these matters. In my evidentiary statement about Jared Nolan, I indicated one day you might hear my own story. It’s not that I want to do this, but it’s the only thing I’ve got left to offer these kids some leadership. I’m confident in my identity and their immediate safety is worth it.

You’re probably feeling like I’ve beat the shit out of you in getting to this point, so I recognize that it is important to qualify where I’m coming from. I will bear my soul so you know my advocacy is not a ploy or a personal attack. You should also understand why I can’t Look Away from the Nolan case; because I am a witness, I’m made from this fabric, and potential victims are still in danger.

***Trigger warning***

My #MeToo story begins as young as I can remember.

My mom was adopted by an affluent family through the Children’s Aid Society. It was 1956 and the records stated that she was the product of an extra-marital affair with a prominent businessman. But before she hit adolescence, it became apparent that she suffered from extreme mental illness.

I was physically abused by my mom, born to her at the age of 18. I was whipped in the face with metal chains, hung by my ankles outside a third-storey window, kicked with boots, abandoned for stretches, and nearly every day a scalding teacup or teapot was smashed over my head. At 5-years-old she would make me stand on a chair to do the dishes and forcefully hold my arms in the pure hot water to toughen up my whiny-bitch-ass. I had to stay up all night to ensure she didn’t burn the apartment down in a drugged stupor, because she had a habit of burning all the blankets, pillows, and furniture. Every night of my young life, I was convinced it might be the last one.

Sometimes my mom would bring men home and sometimes she’d take off with them for days. One of the young men in our building would check in when she abandoned me, and I paid for his dinner-making services by letting him masturbate and ejaculate on me. I didn’t even know what sex was yet, or why he had different parts than me.

Life continued this way for some time. My grandparents loved me and I can tell you now, they struggled with the guilt of raising her into what she had become. When they learned I was being left alone they tried to make sure I had quarters for a payphone, to use in an emergency. They bought us much of what we needed, but they had no idea about what to do with my mom’s escalating mental illness. They would take me for extended visits as long as they were allowed, but my mom was also brutally intelligent. She knew how to manipulate the legal system and if she decided to keep me prisoner, I wouldn’t be visiting anyone. If she was in a violent mania, she would also resort to breaking everything in my grandparent’s house and threatening them with weapons. On the good days, she’d be willing to check herself into the hospital for a ‘nervous breakdown’.

Much of the time I wasn’t allowed to attend school. I missed half the grade in most elementary years. She would lock me in with barricades so I couldn’t run away and demanded it was my job to take care of her. I loved her and I still do (RIP), but I was petrified on a daily basis and her illness was so severe that it warranted institutionalization. She was a beautiful woman though, who screwed her way out of a lot of difficult predicaments. A few of those bedfellows were cops.

For a time she worked hard at getting better and she went to college for social work. I was also a smart child and in the bizarre 1980’s, she would take me to classes with her. Deep inside my mom was a beautiful heart that wanted desperately to learn how to fix herself. Hours after beating me she would often break down crying and apologize profusely. It wasn’t a show. I knew she hated herself for being ill.

I found it odd that I wasn’t allowed to attend my school, but I was allowed to attend college to help with hers. I would help my mom take notes when she’d relapse and I have no idea what she told the professor to make it kosher. In her dystopian way of making up for the abuse, she would tell me I was too smart to attend public school.

In these young years I became acquainted with the Look Away Disease. Her professor looked away, her classmates looked away, and so did every phys-ed teacher I ever had. I couldn’t participate in gym for most of elementary school because I was covered in bruises up my front and backside. My mom explained my absences from school and inability to participate, were due to debilitating headaches (I never had) as a child. The education system believed that I missed half years and couldn’t kick a soccer ball because I was sick. They were comfortable enough to look away, because I still sailed through as an A+ student.

So I discovered the disease in my classroom first and then I began to see it everywhere. We’d be stopped at an intersection for a red light and she’d beat me in the face because I complained about having to light her cigarettes. The jackasses in the vehicles beside us would actually look away. All the men she dated would look away. The cops would eventually stop sleeping with her when they discovered she was a nightmare and they would look away by actually going away. Everywhere we lived, our neighbours would look away. I went to 15 different schools by the time I was 15-years-old and entire school boards would look away. I began to hate all the people who would look away. Sometimes I would grieve their ignorance, but mostly I was angry with the cowardice.

My mom often dated strangers from newspaper ads and by the time I was 10-years-old, she met Donald Phillip Jarvis. He was twenty years older and we moved into his place in Hamilton. I’ve lived in nearly every city and mid-sized town in the Niagara Region growing up and this was another transplant.

Eighty-eight Tunbridge Crescent. I will never forget that place and it makes me sick to say it. But if I thought my life was frightening before, I was about to get a re-education. Unspeakable horrors happened there. I’ll do my best to recap this without too many details. I swear I’ve never seen a horror movie that came close to resembling my own life yet.

Donald (he went by Don but I can’t bring myself to call him that), was as criminally ill as it gets. He had a fake minister’s degree from the Universal Life Church in California and he was intent on brainwashing my mother. He got her pregnant right away and took away her psych meds. He wouldn’t let me see my grandparents and forbade any outside contact. He kept repeating like torture that he was her biological father and my mom was now pregnant with an incest baby. Her mental health went into the worst tailspin imaginable. (Just to be clear, this wasn’t true and he was psychologically abusing my mom with her worst fear because she was adopted.)

In the meantime he was grooming me to service his sexual needs when my mom was too out-of-her-mind to do it. He would take me to dingy motel taverns and feed me pickled herring with red wine. It was part of his disgusting mentorship to help me grow up and be a woman. By the way, the waitresses always looked away.

Donald also got me familiarized with the ginormous video camera (circa 1985 complete with tripod). At first I didn’t understand why it was always pointed at the bed and I wish I never had to learn that answer. Some nights the house was in chaos with blood flying from domestic knife fights, and some nights it was quiet when I appeased him.

Donald liked to masturbate on me and at least I was familiar with that, from the other guy at the apartment. But what he wanted most was fellatio and he would jam my head down on his penis until I was choking and the tears poured from my eyes. I would get in trouble for being useless if I didn’t do it right and sometimes food was withheld for days as punishment. I could never do that part right because the smell of his ejaculate always made me severely nauseous. Sometimes that meant choking me harder and sometimes he would let me off with a hand-job, but all of this was done on camera. Once he introduced something worse but I don’t want to talk about it.

There were a handful of occasions that we visited his friend, Terry. I didn’t like it there either. Terry was part of the child pornography scheme and once I had to pleasure him too. I was still 10-years-old at this point and I hadn’t begun menstruating.

Back at home my mom was melting down and I was trying to save her life. She tried to kill herself once a week at the very least. Christmas was the absolute worst though. It is permanently imprinted on my memory.

It was in the kitchen where my mom grabbed a butcher knife and raised it over her head, with the other arm extended and the intent to chop it off. I was right in front of her crying and pleading not to do it. My knees were shaking. My whole body was shaking. And I was hesitating with trying to grab the knife because she might cut off my arm in the scuffle.

I let her down and I chose myself over my mom for the very first time that day. It felt like slow-mo and replays in my mind with a frame-by-frame type of n-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o effect. The knife came down and went straight through her wrist. It sliced to the bone and her hand was dangling from her body. The blood splattered everywhere, even on me, and she dropped to the ground where it began pooling.

It’s the most violent act I’ve ever had to witness and I pray you never do. The moment I could recover my senses I ran for the telephone to call 911. I’m getting a lump in my throat just writing this and things were about to get worse. My mom was four months pregnant.

Donald ripped the phone out of the wall and ran for the one upstairs so I couldn’t use it either. He said the hospital would take the baby away if I called for help and I would never see my mom again if I turned her in. I didn’t want to be stuck with him alone for the rest of my miserable existence.

He made me help him carry Mom upstairs and lay her on the bed where we normally filmed the pornography. I was told to grab the sewing kit and various things like towels. He did exactly what you’re thinking and I had to soothe her through the makeshift surgery. That fucker, pardon my language, sewed my mom up with a needle and thread. The carpet was ruined from all the blood she lost and I didn’t know if she’d make it through the night. I nursed her as best I could and kept swabbing the wound.

Thankfully she made it and I stayed by her side through the rest of the entire pregnancy. I felt so guilty like this was my fault, because I didn’t grab the knife away. It was always my job to save her life and I did it a hundred times before. Why did I have to decide this time that I didn’t want to get hurt too?

Through the next months Donald regularly drugged my mom. Keeping her asleep until she had the baby was his way of keeping her alive. We spent a lot of time together and he worked extra hard in an effort to brainwash me too. He wanted me to believe that he was my biological grandfather and mom’s adoptive parents stole her away. In retrospect, I would have to say that I sunk into a depression.

We had a copy of the movie Splash and I re-watched it every day. I didn’t feel pretty like the mermaid, but I could sure relate to being held captive like an animal. I would hide with my movie and I would hide sometimes in the basement. But Donald was truly mean and he recorded abusing me over top of that flick. I found he did that to all the movies I watched, so when I put them in the VCR it was me staring back instead.

You should probably take a break here to preserve your emotions because the nightmare isn’t done yet. Grab a cup of tea and take a few breaths. At least that’s what I do.

My brother was born at the end of May and my mom basically had to run away from the hospital with him. They were trying to keep her for psych evaluation and she broke out in a hysterical fit. We hid for a while at Terry’s house and sometime in that period, my mom and Donald attended my grandparents to hold them up at gunpoint. They paid $25,000 to buy our safety. This was also the first time I heard about a gun.

This was the first time Grandma and Grandpa got the nerve to call the police as well. A restraining order was placed against my mom and Donald, but it didn’t matter because they departed out west with the money. They left me at Donald’s house with my baby brother and I was barely 11-years-old. I didn’t know they were abandoning us when it happened. They just never returned from an errand.

After a few days of no one coming home and not knowing what to do with this baby, I called my grandparents because I decided it was an emergency. I had no more formula and there was no food for me. They came and got us right away.

It must have been a year since I’d seen them and they just endured a home invasion. Grandma had my mother located through the Alberta police and offered to pay for a trip back. My mom refused to return and said she didn’t want us anymore, so we floated through the summer tentatively.

When September arrived everyone hoped she would be better and my grandparents demanded that I attend school. They told Mom if she didn’t come back we would have to go into foster care. They were too old to be able to raise children and I had to take the baby to school for the first couple weeks of class. It was a tiny town where Grandpa built the schoolhouse and the principal didn’t want to call Children’s Aid on a prominent family in the community. I was warned they would have no choice if I continued to bring my brother to class. The teachers tried to show me how to care for him and do delicate things like wipe his ears. I always felt stupid when they needed to correct me because it was my job to keep him alive.

Please take note that in that example there was complicity in looking away. We all did it together, totally motivated by fear and shame.

The threat of Children’s Aid was enough to get Mom home, but she also returned with Donald. They arrived at my grandparents and Mom smashed every dish in the cupboards. She was going to smash the Royal Doultons if they didn’t hand us over and Donald said he had the gun with him. A taxi was waiting to take the four of us (Donald, Mom, me and my brother) and my grandparents called the police as we were whisked away.

I didn’t know where we were going and I was scared as hell. I had to keep the baby from crying so no one would get more agitated and eventually we arrived at the Husky Truck Stop between St. Catharines and Niagara Falls. We lived in one of the decrepit rooms with cockroaches and prostitutes for the next few months. It was possibly the worst part of my existence.

My mom and Donald were more mentally unstable than ever before. And I was now menstruating, so the type of abuse expanded. My mom would be passed out from drugs on the bed beside me, with him on top piercing through me with ice-cold frenzied eyes. The baby was screaming in a carrier on the floor. I’d lock myself in the bathroom for as long as I could, but there wasn’t even running water in the tub to clean myself up afterward. These rooms weren’t meant for renting and Donald earned our keep by helping in the greasy spoon restaurant.

We didn’t have much food and mostly survived on cans of tuna. You could never make me eat it again. There was one day a prostitute taught me how to look for better leftovers in the restaurant garbage and I was so grateful to her. It was the first bit of kindness I’d received in a while and she managed to lift my spirits. I’m sincerely not disparaging working women when I speak about them. They are my sisters-in-law and they tried to save my life when no one else would. They were the first people I met who didn’t look away.

I would have to return to that hellhole of a room again and it had plenty more experiences. I will only describe two more of these events to assist with your awakening. The first is my introduction to the gun. I finally saw it and it was a silver handgun that was viciously jammed in me sexually. You do not know a fear like that and nobody ever should.

My mom was also beating me off and on, because she was so out-of-it that she thought I was trying to steal her husband. It’s like an animal that will eat its young. Some mental illnesses can be so depraved that they steal the soul of the person you love. They gave her many different diagnoses, but all anyone tried to do was put her to sleep. All the while a teething, hungry baby was wailing in the foreground. I think I might have been grieving for all of us.

To explain the amount of fear being wielded, I never hit my mom back. All I could do was cower and I was so on-edge that I’d flinch whenever someone raised their hand. I wasn’t as bad as Reek from Game of Thrones, but it wasn’t far off. It took a number of years for me to recover from that reflex.

My last story at the Husky Truck Stop is the one that would set another series of events in motion. I had to go to the hospital for an injury to my vagina. It required medical attention and couldn’t be ignored. I was examined, treated, medicated, and released, but I believe a doctor from L’Hotel Dieu Hospital must have called the Children’s Aid. I thank them, if they did.

A social worker showed up at the truck stop and asked to check on our welfare. My mom and Donald blocked the door and wouldn’t let her in. She settled for being able to peek at us through the door, as I stood holding the baby several feet away. It ended with an order that they had to find permanent housing for us within a short time, or CAS would apprehend.

I got a thorough beating for that because it was my fault the Children’s Aid came. But they went to a welfare office and got some money for rent. We then moved to a farmhouse on Hwy. 55 in Virgil. And things didn’t get any better there.

Donald met up with his friend Terry from Hamilton, to get a new video camera. The only peace I had to myself was the 5am news with the fellas from Buffalo and Rochester (RIP Irv Weinstein). That’s when I became a newshound, because it saved my sanity to examine problems larger than my own, protected by a sliver on the clock when no one could put their hands on me.

When I say that I wasn’t allowed out, what I mean is every knife in the house was jammed around the door frame for extra barricades. That way if either of them fell asleep, it would take me too long to rip them all out and cause me to make a bunch of noise. Kind of like a boobie trap that should impress upon you visually, to ensure I wouldn’t run away.

The violence got so bad at this place that Donald beat my mother up and she called for police assistance. He kidnapped me and ran out the door, to be AWOL if an officer came. He was dragging me while running through the farm fields and eventually we stopped at someone’s house. It didn’t look like they were home and they had a thick row of hedges under their bay window. Donald took me into those bushes and made me give him a hand-job, because he was titillated by the violence and drama. It always felt terrible being abused, but this time made me feel especially weird. Lately it seemed like he was escalating.

And sure enough he was, because after we went home, he handcuffed my mom to a pole in the basement. He threatened her with the gun. And I had to play the role of his wife while my mom was incapacitated. That included tending to my baby brother, who was really cranky from drug withdrawal because sometimes they dosed his bottles to make him sleep. They rotted all his new teeth.

Videos were made in Virgil too. I have to live the rest of my life not knowing if that material is still out there. I didn’t want to replace my mother’s job because my role was bad enough. I would sneak to the basement to feed her and bring cigarettes. But she hated my guts when she was held captive because she blamed me for not setting her free. (I fear for kids who are exploited today. I’m almost lucky that I only have to worry about VHS tapes, when now there is the world wide web.)

One day in captivity, my mom requested a pen and paper. I always had to wait for Donald to fall asleep to bring her anything. I’m pretty sure he would have left her there to die. So I did my loyal duty and retrieved the supplies, as my mom scratched a rambling SOS about torture, a gun, and being held prisoner. She ordered me to run down the highway to the school and give it to the principal.

I didn’t know if I could do that, even though I knew it needed to be done. If Donald caught me, I would be locked up just like her and there would be no one able to feed the baby. Donald never touched the baby. He would have been happy to throw him in the river. I swear to god that kid wouldn’t be alive if I didn’t sell my soul to the devil.

Whatever my experiences might have been before, it was this day that I came to know courage. I couldn’t let Mom down, not again, like I did the time she nearly cut her hand off. They say bravery isn’t the absence of fear, but rather the triumph over it, and off I went down the shoulder of the highway, unable to breathe with my feet still moving anyway.

That run down the highway was another slow-mo scene, like I was trying to get away through quicksand. I was scared his hand would grab me from behind and I kept looking over my shoulder on the journey. It was a few miles that normally required a bus and a lot of opportunity for Donald to catch me.

When I got to the school that I hardly attended, I ran straight into the office and nearly threw Mom’s letter at the secretary. I pleaded with them to please help. They got a paper bag to calm me down from hyperventilating and I sat in a chair waiting, as everyone stared at me like an alien.

I know my mom’s letter requested police assistance but I never saw an officer once. Instead the school called the Children’s Aid Society and a social worker arrived swiftly to apprehend me. I babbled on and on about my mom and baby brother. They couldn’t take just me away and my brother could die if no one checked on him.

I was still just 11-years-old and I don’t know what happened to everyone else. I only know that I was placed in foster care and my brother wasn’t removed from the home. My mom was ordered to ensure Donald didn’t attend the property and once she proved that was done (I assume by restraining order), I would be allowed to return. To the best of my understanding, Donald was never criminally charged for forcibly confining my mother, or the gun. This would have been 1986, when police minimized domestic violence even more than they do today.

Regarding Foster Care

The Donald narrative continues throughout my story in foster care. I spent 3 months in the emergency placement and I was returned to my mother’s care. In that time with foster parents no one ever asked if I was abused. I hid in my bedroom for the entire stay. I basically didn’t talk for those three months and nobody tried to engage me. I was confused why the agency would return me, without knowing my mom beat the bloody hell out of me. In this way the child welfare system also looked away.

I was supposed to be going home to a house with no Donald, but sure enough that monster was there and my mom lied to the authorities. It’s not that I hold my mom responsible and without a doubt he was still threatening us. But the point I’m making is the police looked away and we had to do a midnight move to harbour the person who was torturing us.

Off we went to a townhouse in St. Catharines in the middle of the night. I stayed with them for a couple months, but my mom’s mental health was still deteriorating and Donald didn’t change his ways either. I couldn’t take it anymore and I felt like I would die if I stayed there.

One day my mom was beating me with shoes, a lamp, and anything else she could find. She cut up any nice clothes my grandparents gave me and made me watch because I didn’t deserve gifts. It was when she wouldn’t stop beating me in the head that I was afraid she would knock me unconscious. In a split second that felt like an hour, I contemplated leaving my little brother. The guilt was paralyzing because I honestly believed that if I abandoned him he could die.

But the metal base of the lamp was bashing me so hard that I knew if I didn’t live, I couldn’t save him either. In my second act of bravery that felt more like treason, I bolted for the patio doors to run away. I went straight to a neighbour’s house and asked them to call the Children’s Aid. Although my first stint in foster care didn’t do anything to resolve the situation, at least I got to know what it was like to be unharmed for a while. That’s what I always thought life should be like and I ran toward it with the intention of pulling my baby brother to safety too.

That was one of the hardest things I ever did because for all intents and purposes, I was my brother’s figurative parent. I would go through years of psychological counseling in my teens to deal with the guilt of abandoning him. I believed if I talked to social workers to explain the abuse, they would have to apprehend him as well. But due to complications between social education, misogyny, prejudice, access to justice, and conflicting enforcement, that isn’t how everything went down.

A social worker came to retrieve me from the neighbour and I was placed in another foster home. My mom refused to relinquish my clothes and personal belongings, so I arrived with only the shirt on my back and no shoes. I was legally categorized as signing myself into care and the agency grabbed me a $5 pair of Keds. The senior citizen foster lady loaned me some of her clothes for the time being. If I wanted my brother apprehended, I would have to file a complaint to open an investigation that was independent of my circumstances.

So my mom was investigated but my brother wasn’t removed. He didn’t have bruises when they attended and the agency vowed that she broke up with Donald. Mom then denied me any visits with my brother while I was in foster care, in retribution. I was devastated and had to learn that CAS required physical evidence to apprehend a baby. My report and our family’s clashes with the law would not be enough to stand up in court. They needed bruises.

Despite looking away from my brother, it became clear that I would need to become a Crown Ward and my stay in foster care wouldn’t be temporary. I’m skipping a lot of details for the sake of brevity, but many events happened in this time frame. Eventually I was allowed to visit at home, but one of those times my mom kept me prisoner. There was another episode with knives, a cracked skull, and police intervention. Another time I was locked on a balcony in the winter and I had to scream for help. My mom also had a habit of threatening the foster parents with violence. She refused to attend court-ordered counseling too.

The procedure began for you to adopt me into the government family. I was assessed by doctors and psychologists and moved around various foster homes, because there was a bed shortage epidemic and they only had emergency placements. That problem persists still today, for kids to find a forever home. I could write a whole book about what it’s like to live as a stranger in somebody else’s home. Some of the homes don’t even like kids and they do it for free domestic labour. Some of them don’t let you eat dinner at the same table with their family. I’ve heard there are good homes and I’m happy for the kids who find them, but I wasn’t one of the lucky ones. Not many people will accept teenagers for permanent placements.

This precarious situation with foster homes led to a stint with couch-surfing. At 13-years-old I spent a bit of time on the streets and I spent the odd night in a stairwell. This would be the next stage of losing my innocence, if I had any left by now.

You see, couch-surfing isn’t just a set of words that appear in reports about poverty. It has unspoken street rules and a rate of billing, especially for females. On the street, the female body is a currency. And if the couch belongs to a male, you have to pay with sex to be allowed to stay. If the food is provided by a male, the cost is sex to partake. Nothing in life is free, even in the ghetto. They just have alternate forms of free trade.

In the meantime I received my psychological assessment from CAS. The interesting thing about being a foster kid, is it launches you into immediate adulthood. Your autonomy is granted and that’s a great thing, but it also has no protective filters for children. You become the owner of all your data. You become the primary entity for consent. You become the ultimate director of your own plan of care. You get a lawyer to consult with alone, and devise your own legal strategy. Basically you become responsible for yourself, while living at a stranger’s house and earning your keep. You also get to analyze legal and psych reports without any real guidance.

I never told the psychologist about the sexual abuse. I didn’t have those words yet and everyone kept insisting that Donald was out of the picture. They only sought information about my mom for the court case to revoke her custody. Interestingly, my psych evaluation still had strong sexual overtones and I had to absorb the blow from this truth hammer all alone.

The assessment was done when I was still 12-years-old, soon after I went into care. By the time we were going to court to finalize my Crown Wardship, I was 13-years-old and all the paperwork was given to me as a party to the application. It said my EQ (emotional intelligence) was equivalent to a 30-year-old. In the dysfunctional family unit, I’m the ‘fixer’. I was my mother’s emotional crutch and we had an inappropriate relationship with no boundaries. I was at risk of self harm. It also said that in my teens I would have multiple sex partners. I was staring at papers that predicted I’d be a slut, shortly before I was due to talk with the judge. I guess it hurt so much because I wondered if they made me sick and I didn’t know how to fix it. Part of being autonomous means learning the system and how to help yourself, even if you’re a kid.

On the day of the hearing, I would know bravery a third time. My mom took me to the bathroom alone, right before we were called, to threaten that she’d kill herself if I went through with it. She said my brother would be alone and crawling over her rotting body if I did this to both of them. It was a significant threat, because the last time I visited her house she also tried to kill herself and I had to fight to get the pills and razor blades from her hands. I also had to keep my brother from swallowing what she spilled.

We entered the courtroom and my social worker sat with me. My knees were shaking like Mexican jumping beans and the thoughts were racing through my mind. I was accused of being a future slut. I was accused of being a future murderer (cause of Mom’s death). I was accused of abandoning my brother, who I loved more than anyone.

The lawyers spoke and it was my turn to stand up. The judge asked if this is what I want, and I said yes.

I couldn’t look at my mom after I did this. We both cried and I was petrified she might jump off the roof of the building. Not in an internet joking kind of way, but for real. The courthouse has Plexiglas barriers because many distraught parents have tried it before. The last time I chose my safety over hers, my mom cut off her hand. She was never able to use it again, even after proper surgeries. I just knew in that moment that I needed to leave to save my own life and maybe I was beginning to develop cynicism.

I was absolutely determined to keep my brother safe, even though the law is callous and no one was listening. At that point in our societal development it was considered impossible to prove emotional abuse in court and its detrimental effect on toddlers. Until I could prove my mom was beating him like she did to me, there were no grounds to move on. I also couldn’t prove she was drugging him sometimes, because a child’s word isn’t good enough to subpoena blood tests.

I stayed in touch with my mom for the sake of my brother. I endured her killing my pets, wishing I was dead, hitting me on visits, stealing what little I had, ruining all my special days, and getting me kicked out of foster homes for threatening to maim my keepers. I kept persevering until I could get the necessary evidence.

As that part of my life was developing I was moved into a group home. It was the only place with an open bed and they bent the rules to put me there. I was 13-years-old and you’re supposed to be at least 15-years-old, to live in a facility that was meant to prepare girls for independent living upon exiting care. I roomed with Indigenous girls, recovering teen prostitutes, the odd drug addict, and a few more like me, but older.

There was one day the house was locked because my home visit was cut short and the foster parents were away when I needed to return early. I waited on the doorstep for hours with no luck, until I saw a few of the other girls passing by. They said we couldn’t get in until later that night and they offered to take me with them.

We landed at a motel party with a room full of men in their twenties. The girls knew them and this is where they were getting a drug hookup. They wanted to stay and party, and they tried to get me to do cocaine. I was afraid and declined, but I relented to drinking beer so I wasn’t such a stick-in-the-mud. I had never consumed alcohol before and everyone thought it was funny to get a 13-year-old drunk for the first time.

The girls were making out with some of the guys and everyone chanted when the others took my clothes off. I was placed in the jacuzzi with Darryl and even though I was afraid, I said I didn’t want to do this. He berated me and called me a ‘little bitch’. Then he grabbed me by the back of the head and jammed my face down on his penis. Water from the jacuzzi was going up my nose and I started choking because I couldn’t breathe. He didn’t care though. He just kept pushing.

Then there was a pounding on the door and our foster mom arrived with the police. They busted in and she grabbed me out of the hottub. She dressed me in the bathroom and I was immediately taken to do a rape kit. That examination was demoralizing and they wouldn’t believe that I didn’t have sexual intercourse. They even checked my anus to see if anything happened. I didn’t have a support person with me and I went through that alone.

I had to testify in court and Darryl was convicted for sexual assault on a minor. I would be kicked out of the foster home if I didn’t press charges and it was thoroughly embarrassing for a 13-year-old to describe sexual violation to a courtroom of strangers, with the accused staring right at me. The other girls were mad at me for being underage, like that was the problem. But Darryl was their friend and I was some little girl who wasn’t supposed to be there.

My double identity would also come to haunt me in this rough-and-tumble group home. Part of me was from the deranged ghetto just like them, but part of me came from an affluent adoptive family too.

I was placed in a program for gifted students that didn’t interact with the general population. I mentored under a member of parliament during an election campaign, and I interned with a lawyer through a different government program to advance my studies. I was going to school to be a lawyer, and I was luckier than some of the kids to have any family to visit.

Sometimes I was invited to Toronto for special occasions. My Great Aunt was the merchandise buyer for Hudson’s Bay. Her husband was a senior executive at Levi’s Canada. Another uncle had a huge stake in Petro Canada. Another was part owner of the Royal York Hotel and Clifton Hill. A different aunt lived on a luxury yacht in the Toronto harbour. My grandma was one of those ‘old stock Canadians’ with ‘old money’ that’s always surrounded you.

I’ve had to receive lessons in etiquette before attending a Christmas party on Bridle Path. I had no idea what that meant when I was young, but mom’s adoptive family was fascinated with my intelligence and they liked to show me off like a humanitarian token. When I was in their favour they would gift me expensive jewelry and as soon as I got back to foster care, it’d be stolen. The nice clothes were stolen. The rings were stolen. The fancy wool blankets were stolen. The strand of pearls to make me presentable was stolen. The porcelain dolls were stolen.

The disparity in my identity was nearly surreal and made it difficult to go from one extreme to the other. Once my treasures from the out-of-touch philanthropic community were stolen at knife point by another foster kid. That Indigenous girl hated my white-privilege guts, and really, who could blame her? Her parents locked her in a closet and tried to burn the house down. No matter my suffering, I still had more than she did.

With much love to another struggling sister-in-law, the knife point issue was too intense and I asked to be moved to another home. I didn’t become a Crown Ward and leave my brother to repeat the same lifestyle in protective care. I was already scarred by rape and butchering. But I was informed there was nothing available and I would have to move out on my own. The problem is you need to be sixteen and I had a handful of months to go.

It’s important that I explain I don’t hate the Children’s Aid. I could write another book regarding the conflicts in legislation, political agendas, and lack of government understanding, that have contributed to make child welfare dysfunctional. I had the best social worker on earth and this agency saved my life. I had access to amazing educational opportunities and this is the place that helped me find my voice. But I only got to see my worker for one hour every month (12 hours per year), and the only reason good enough to place a child in care is if it’s absolutely required to save a life. When you place a bunch of abused kids together, it creates an institutional effect that is hardly different from prison. And goodness knows the foster parents aren’t trained to deal with it.

So, I went to live with my boyfriend’s sister at the age of fifteen. It was a stop-gap approved by CAS until I was old enough for independent living. There’s a reason my story is dragging on and I need you to trust there’s a relevant point to it.

At 16-years-old I moved into my first apartment, on $350 per month. The Children’s Aid paid even less than welfare for kids who didn’t live in foster homes. It wasn’t enough to buy any groceries after the rent was covered, and although I had my own place, it still resembled couch-surfing. I was made dependent on the community to support me and this is a huge but deliberate flaw in the government’s austerity funding model.

I slept with one fellow who was ten years older than me, to get protection from the local junkies. I could only afford to live in the cheapest part of Port Colborne, in the tavern district where the rowdiness happens. They would hide in my basement hallway to shoot up and the one guy was eventually charged with murder. A young, abused girl gives off the scent of prey and it was my lifelong mission to find safety. At this point in my development, I became fairly disassociated from my body as just the vessel that had to carry me in it.

I had to sleep with another guy for dinners. Another with a car who could drive me to appointments out of town. Another was in trade for telephone service. Another to find a place in this new social hierarchy. In a nutshell, I was making the psych evaluation true and I hated myself for not being able to prove them wrong. But it was either that or starve, and there was nowhere to go for help. I went on a waiting list for subsidized housing but I was looking at a 2-year backlog. I asked CAS for a counselor to help me transition, and that was a yearlong waiting list as well.

In the meantime my mom went into another tailspin and I began smoking to cope with my existence. At 16-years-old I was drinking in the bars. There was no one to watch over me. But I still had to watch over my little brother and that’s when I got the physical evidence. She started beating him like she did to me and the kid had a bruised face from being kicked with cowboy boots. She face-stomped him… and CAS finally apprehended.

My brother was placed at an institution to assist with all his learning disabilities and trauma. The drugs he ingested in utero and as a baby had a significant impact on his development. They put him on a lot of medication (no comment). I on the other hand had earned a scholarship and I was determined to build a better life for us with it.

At 17-years-old and still with CAS, I cohabitated with a steady boyfriend to pool our resources. He was a few years older and an NRA type. He was a licensed gun collector and we had many of them in our apartment. A rocket launcher, 50 caliber Desert Eagle, 44 Smith and Wesson, 357 Magnum, Luger 9mm, a few more handguns, and nearly every size of rifle going. This wasn’t exactly okay by the rules, but CAS had a policy of don’t-ask-don’t-tell, for kids to survive the lack of funding and foster homes. And I, as a silly young girl, thought this made me safer than living with junkies in my hallway and trading sex for dinner.

On February 3, 1993, I was accidentally shot with the 357 Magnum. The bullet went through my left shoulder at point-blank range and I happen to be a southpaw. The gun was being passed from one person to another and it had a hair-trigger. No one was charged, but I was in the intensive care unit.

When I got out of the hospital the people who were present as I got shot took me out drinking to celebrate my recovery. On February 26, 1993, I didn’t make it home. I was in a car accident due to a drunk driver (who also didn’t have insurance) and I had to be airlifted to a trauma hospital on life support. They lost me a few times. I wasn’t supposed to make it and they were planning for my funeral.

But I fought my way back from a coma a month later, with six blood transfusions, completely shattered arms, a broken neck, skull fractures, hematomas, neurological damage from the waist up, and my back destroyed. One of Mom’s former husbands got me a lawyer (she married 7 times) because CAS didn’t represent my legal interests and the accident left me permanently disabled. I had to spend my eighteenth year learning how to use my arms again and giving depositions. I became an adult by dying temporarily twice in the same month, under the care of protective services. There wasn’t even a foster home to care for me as an invalid and nurses came to my apartment each day to help me recover alone.

It took five years of physical therapy to get functional enough to return to school. I lost my scholarship and couldn’t handle the workload for law anymore, so I was re-adjusted to journalism. I interned with the Mayor of Welland as a public relations specialist and I became a foster parent to my brother, because he kept running away from everywhere. I became a mom, and ceased contact with my own mother to protect my baby. One way or another, I had to break the cycle.

This fall from grace was too much for my mom’s adoptive family and to summarize a complex chapter, we’ll say they un-adopted us. It was a super-deluxe case of the Look Away Disease and after my grandparents passed away, we didn’t have anyone. Ultimately we were raised by a village.

I’ve chosen to tell you my story because it’s the human face of child pornography, that usually gets tucked into a sanitized soundbite for fragile ears. You see it as an unfortunate event that passes after a newscast, but the repercussions are society-wide and last a lifetime for more than the victim. It’s not merely a line in an article like the Jared Nolan story and you need to take that situation seriously.

I speak because the children aren’t allowed to, and you never hear about the damage from their perspective. All you can do is imagine what it must be like and no one spends time daydreaming about the effects of child pornography. While publication bans are necessary to protect exploited kids, they have the unintended consequence of advancing the Look Away Disease. When you look away, you perpetuate more abuse and you need to understand the consequence of your actions for these children.

Regarding Prosecutorial Discretion

The recent Colten Boushie case opened your eyes to an issue with peremptory challenges in jury selection, but I need to draw your attention to another problem that may be even greater, regarding prosecutorial discretion. Both these factors are impacting our access to justice.

At 19-years-old in 1994, I attended the Niagara Regional Police detachment in St. Catharines. There came a day when I was finally brave enough to find my words. They say foster kids have a 50/50 chance of repeating the abuse, or becoming the opposite to break the cycle. They don’t know what causes victims to go one way or the other and I was doing everything possible to turn a new page. I didn’t like wearing the abuse as my identity and I needed to create my own future without any of the predators in it. Plus I was starting to feel responsible to keep other children safe. If Donald Phillip Jarvis was allowed to roam free, I knew he couldn’t control himself.

The Niagara officers were nice enough, as I gave a preliminary report about his sexual abuse. They were prepared to lay charges and have me detail a sworn statement, but the meeting was adjourned so they could consult with the crown attorney because I didn’t know where the perpetrator was located anymore.

When we reconvened I was educated about prosecutorial discretion. They were very sorry but the crown attorney’s office didn’t feel it was in the public interest to pursue this. I was provided with faxes from Alberta media and the justice department, to detail that he was already sentenced.

A couple of years before I came forward, it seems his biological daughters from his other family made similar allegations. Donald operated between Alberta and Ontario claiming victims wherever he went, and by the time he got to me it appears his deviant behaviour had escalated. None of their claims addressed child pornography. But they were depraved examples that warranted a sentencing precedent.

Donald received 16 years in prison for what he did to them. It was the longest sentence ever given to a child predator at the time. This is why the crown attorney denied my case, because he didn’t believe the government could justify spending thousands of dollars to transport the accused between provinces to stand trial again. They believed any sentencing for crimes against me would be less than the time he already had and therefore there was no purpose. The police consoled me by saying that I would get my justice through karma, because Donald would likely get beaten by inmates, or die in prison as a senior citizen.

A few years later I became acquainted with the internet and that’s where I learned he was number fifty-five in a book about Canada’s sickest criminals. When I began writing this letter to you, I didn’t anticipate it would lead to another Look Away allegation.

It used to be that you could find information about Donald Phillip Jarvis’ history as a child predator, but Googling his name today proves the internet has been cleansed to erase the public’s memory of his violence. I went to search for this link to support my explanation, but no text appears with his name anymore and this is all that’s left mentioning the book .

Thankfully I’m a reporter and I archive everything I read, so I still have a copy of his information before it was ‘politely’ suppressed from the internet. Please see what Google didn’t want the world to know, because it could make people uncomfortable that predators actually exist. This is what that same search result used to look like before the Look Away Disease intervened.

What’s really brutal is the biological daughters ensured there would be no publication ban, in their effort to protect other girls and women. Someone in the patriarchy felt they knew better and I’m about to show you why they couldn’t be more mistaken. (Please note that all his victims are adamant about making their stories public because we feel he’s such a danger to others. That in itself is rare, to give you some perspective about the severity of his abuse.)

Also missing from searches is the record of Donald’s appeal. Three Alberta judges felt he was a menace and didn’t deserve representation. They ruled it was an abuse of government funds to let him keep denying his guilt. This decision used to appear when searching Donald’s name but it doesn’t anymore.

I’m curious and concerned this suppression occurred during the Notley NDP government. This can be confirmed by my date of archiving, compared to the fact that it’s missing from searches now. If anyone becomes Donald’s neighbour or he offers to babysit, they can’t discover his threat to children.

This may have even occurred due to a political scandal, because it turns out that everyone was wrong since the day I reported to police. Donald Phillip Jarvis was released from prison after completing his sentence. The Alberta government had him shipped to British Columbia to reintegrate through a halfway program in a different province. Residents in BC were then terrorized , because he couldn’t be rehabilitated and no one warned them about the danger they were living with. A community association questioned the government, why was BC accepting criminals from Alberta?

I also learned that Donald had more convictions than we ever knew . Before he set a precedent for sentencing pedophiles, he was convicted for a violent rape in Ontario and served 5 years. Immediately upon release from the 16-year stint in Alberta, he re-offended while on parole. Despite this, he wasn’t thrown back in jail and it doesn’t make any sense.

We were never made aware of his Ontario crimes when my mom was held at gunpoint, and he was never labeled a ‘dangerous offender’ for those three convictions altogether. He was never labeled a dangerous offender because the crown attorney didn’t see the need to press charges on my behalf, in the government’s prosecutorial discretion. Basically your part of the family is playing Moneyball to decide if you’ll protect my kin. It’s like we’re a wager at your poker table based on political odds, far less than human beings.

This is exactly the type of problem you’re causing by harbouring Jared Nolan and threatening everyone to shut up about your roommate, Christopher Ingvaldson. This is why I can’t give up and let you turn your back on us. It’s why I need you to discover humanity in your own experience with criminal illness. It has nothing to do with partisanship, fame, or vengeance. This is a public safety nightmare that you must amend immediately. Our ‘feminist prime minister’ is presiding over a country where police are refusing to take reports, the Crown is refusing to press charges, the media is erasing proof, and the child pornography industry has its hands on everyone’s sensitive records from the Liberalist. With real-time tracking, no less.

If you think I’m attacking you for political gain, then consider I’m reporting my own industry for being complicit. This is harming my professional reputation and I just became the most disgusting woman in Canada for disclosing what was done to me. No one will ever look at me the same and they’ll probably say hurtful things to defend you. I may not be able to work in the Canadian media anymore, just to get you to listen. How do you think that feels?

Regarding Our Data

In case you needed any more proof that the Look Away Disease is dangerous, I must finish the example of Donald Phillip Jarvis.

Because the Crown has discretionary powers, provinces have discretionary powers, political parties have discretionary powers, police assumed discretionary powers, and the media exercises discretionary powers, they’ve all created a conflict that is putting children’s lives in danger. Right now and because of everyone’s actions, my little brother’s life is in actual danger. Even I might still be in danger. Certainly the children in Abbotsford, BC are in actual and exigent danger.

When Donald Phillip Jarvis got out of prison, he stalked my little brother. They now live 20 minutes apart and my brother is spending time with him. I have a very young nephew and my brother is married to a young woman. He’s not equipped to understand everything because he’s psychologically younger than his age, due to the drug damage in his childhood. He also doesn’t have support and doesn’t want to believe that he’s the offspring of a violent pedophile.

We always tried to protect him from that realization and love for my brother had to be greater than my fear of Donald Phillip Jarvis. This is why it’s important to adopt the term, criminally ill, now that you have some context. My brother is still grappling with that shame and it’s making him vulnerable to abuse, even though he shouldn’t have to carry this weight and he’s ill-prepared to know how. Since Google erased most info about his father, Donald was able to brainwash him that none of it was true. It’s like we have to live this nightmare all over again, but now he’s targeting my brother in place of our mom.

My brother defended him as innocent and returned with evidence to support that claim. After a visit with Donald he sent me a copy of some paperwork from CAS that his father possessed, thinking it was proof of his good name (my brother only has basic reading skills that make him functionally illiterate).

It turns out that while Donald was incarcerated, the Hamilton Children’s Aid Society supplied him with our records. He was getting regular updates about us in prison, during the period that I was my brother’s foster parent. He wasn’t entitled to this information and had no legal claim as a parent. There is no reason in the world that he should have received information about me.

Even when an inmate does have parental rights, the Children’s Aid has a policy to address these cases. No information about children in care can be provided to an inmate, unless a committee is struck to evaluate the claim, the person is physically interviewed, and the panel can decide that safety is not an issue. This did not happen in my brother’s case. The Children’s Aid sent Donald everything he asked for, without vetting him or the situation.

The Hamilton CAS that controlled my brother’s file isn’t connected to the St. Catharines CAS that had possession of mine. Each Children’s Aid Society is a separate non-profit organization. The only thing that binds them together is the government family. Therefore my brother’s file lacked the information that Donald Phillip Jarvis had an extensively violent history. Hamilton didn’t know that he raped me in St. Catharines and there were no court records to search, because the crown attorney declined to press charges. (Note that riding associations and political parties present the same disjointed risk. A criminal can bounce from one EDA to another, to stay under the radar and continue their exploitation of children.)

(continued below…)

My security of person has been destroyed in the most cruel and unusual way. My brother stopped talking and I can’t confirm his safety since he began visiting with his father. Donald hunted my brother down upon being released from prison and there was no way to protect ourselves when the establishment exercised its discretions. He should have already been designated a dangerous offender if anyone did their jobs, instead of looking away.

With respect, you’re doing the same thing right now in the cases of Jared Nolan and Luke Strimbold. Our records were breached to a pedophile by the Children’s Aid Society, and you’re breaching all the records in the Liberalist to others accused of child pornography. Where these examples differ, is that CAS broke its own policy and the Liberal Party of Canada refuses to implement one. I believe the same is true of the Conservatives and CIMS.

Now I have to decide if I need justice more than peace. So far I can only decide that everyone needs safety and that some things are bigger than partisanship.

I was working on a book titled, The Government Is My Parents, to raise the money I would need to commence legal action regarding Jarvis. But right now I’m willing to trade that in, to tell my story in this way and inspire all-party co-operation for legislation to amend this quicker. Vulnerable Sector background checks must also be mandatory to work with children and children’s data. Partisan databases must be formally regulated to achieve privacy, security, and informed consent. Any arguments against this are morally reprehensible.

And if you think this story is chaotic, please remember it was our government family that engineered it.

Regarding Canadian News Media

A serious part of the Look Away Disease manifests in the news media.

The case of Jared Nolan identified questionable ethics at CTV News and the Globe and Mail, as mentioned in my Twitter essay. The case of Christopher Ingvaldson exposed the Huffington Post’s willingness to participate in a #MeToo silencing exercise. The Patrick Brown story revealed a muzzled complainant and a dissenting witness. My story presents an issue with Google suppressing records. Even as far back as the Jian Ghomeshi case, the Toronto Star’s reporting was dishonest in a way that harmed the complainants. All the systemic problems of sexual violence can be observed in the behaviour of our media. And that media informs the opinion of our entire population.

I’m not trying to single anyone out exactly, because I know I can dig and find examples in every source. My point is that we must do better and it starts by calling out the culture. Our citizens are being endangered by these agendas and oversights. With respect to male colleagues, they just can’t mansplain sexual assault on behalf of females. The issue is too complex to take liberties or silence what they don’t understand, and girls are getting hurt because of this. If you’ve never been through it, you can’t recognize the consequence of missteps.

I’m not insulting men and I respect them as equals. I’m in a loving relationship and it’s healthy. My trauma was a lifetime ago and I chose to learn from it, to become the woman I am today and advocate for others who haven’t found their voice yet. I don’t even resent women who’ve been spared the experience. Anyone who can’t relate to what I’m saying should rejoice, but please don’t look away and harm more children.

Then there’s the issue of your popularity and the Liberal machine. You’ve sought to romance the media at home and abroad. It’s a significant part of your image and you’ve been greatly successful at wooing them. But that also gives you a greater responsibility to support a free press, even when it hurts. A healthy democracy requires a Fourth Estate to help the government family stay in check. When you use the media to threaten people into silence about child predators, it sets an example that your supporters follow and repeat.

You’re looking so great because your clan hired most of the moderate voices in political journalism, but that left us with greater extremes dominating the airwaves to report about things like sexual violence. We have the option to see nothing at all or burn people at the stake, but little in a realistic, factual middle. The reporters who now craft your public relations were taken out of circulation to debate and inform the public opinion. That’s not a good thing, if you think about it.

If you want a litmus test to check the effect, consider several of your supporters blocked me after I made the report about Jared Nolan. So did the police. They actively and forcefully refused to hear about him. How does that make you feel and is it the effect you intended to have? You need to recognize that everyone is ‘protecting the king’ and you’re the only one who can change their priorities.

Regarding The Labour Left

You’ve attempted to make inroads with labour unions and this is one of the places you can signal priorities. The left prides itself in being a feminist champion, but it suffers from the Look Away Disease too.

Many of the reporters who are inexperienced at telling sexual violence stories are unionized, but they’re not getting professional training to help them do it responsibly. The same is true for professors of journalism.

The public school teachers who are looking away from serious abuses are unionized, as are the ones who overreact to the slightest provocation. This group is one of the greatest conduits between children and protective services, but they’re not professionally trained regarding what’s appropriate.

Telecom workers are unionized, but they have no protocol to deal with client requests related to records and violence. Children in exigent danger can’t even warrant expedited files.

Police are strongly unionized, but they use that protection as a Look Away shield instead of advancing professional development to better protect women and children. They even rely on that job support to block reporting and requests for service, in a backwards interpretation of privilege that amounts to insubordination.

Social workers are unionized, as the first responders who interact with child victims of violence and sexual violence. But due to decades of cuts and political agendas, these agencies are so underfunded that much of the staff isn’t licensed in social work anymore. Many agencies only require a high school diploma to protect and guide the lives of our most damaged children, because that’s all the government family will let them afford. Inexperienced and unqualified child workers can only harm these complex situations in the long run, as my brother’s example identifies. Good social workers can change a life for the better and you all have a fiduciary duty to provide that to your ‘adopted’ kids. Their unions also haven’t done much to provide workers with support for burnout, due to the extreme stress.

NDP staffers are unionized, but even they don’t know how to approach sexual exploitation in the workplace. They purport to train everyone else without knowing their own way, and looking away whenever it suits them (example, Adam Giambrone).

I know the PMO isn’t part of a union, but your office represents leadership for the entire country and it has no protocol for sexual violence either. I applaud Katie Telford for her commitment to feminism, yet I hope my letter will assist her naive viewpoint. The culture she plans to overcome can’t be changed with a hashtag or a few tweaks. It requires tremendous honesty, like I’m attempting to demonstrate.

I don’t know how many more ways to say that no one is immune to this. They only think they are, because they look away.

Regarding The Alt-Right

If you don’t take serious action the alt-right narrative will prevail and gain momentum. A biased media feeds that cause and so does tolerance for child pornography. You need to show everyone that you mean business. You also owe it to Canadian women to come through. You chose feminism as your cause and if extreme elements can discredit you, it will set us back even further. Please don’t allow us to be used as pawns. That’s exactly what we were trying to stop and there’s nothing sexy about it.

Regarding Tina Fontaine

I mention Tina with great compassion and I’m sorry to her family. I heard she was in foster care. I heard she had to stay in a motel because there were no available beds. I gather she was couch-surfing and the accused admitted to having sex with her in that dependent situation. I recognized it as a familiar story, as would countless teenage foster kids.

I think part of the problem is the Look Away Disease and even if the jury was culturally appropriate, it still might arrive at the wrong conclusion. There was great significance to the alleged sexual exchange, in the way I described street currency. It was reportedly his motive for killing her, because Tina was underage. If society could appreciate the extent of her vulnerability in that scenario, we’d be further ahead than tweaking juries.

Tina’s story is a #MeToo experience in the extreme and I regret her suffering wasn’t really seen that way. The poor girl was sexually exploited to death. I don’t know why the establishment believes that couch-surfing foster kids are being charitably cared for. These stories will repeat identically until you stop looking away. All the girls stuck in motels are vulner