Chapter Two: The Disparity Between Us
With how un-Google-able everything had been while I was attempting to lift the publication ban on my name, paired with the fact that my original legal counsel dismissed me in the most peculiar way, things felt pretty dire.
Thankfully, I was able to gain some information on, what I refer to as, the “black market for feminism”, that led me to the one person who was actually able to help me. What I find most heartbreaking about it, however, is that even though I was a volunteer in a trial that belonged to The Crown,
I needed to find myself in a place of privilege in order to fix the huge mistake the Canadian judicial system made that affected me directly.
*
This is peaches; a series of essays dedicated to things I learned while dedicating my life to never being raped again. My name is Maarika Freund, and this is:
Chapter Two: The Disparity Between Us
TRIGGER WARNING: rape, sexual abuse
*
Me on my Wedding Day, October 16th, 2021 (photo taken on Polaroid film)
*
I remember my lowest point within the seven+ year hell rodeo like it was yesterday.
It was in early December of 2018, after I received a phone call from my crown attorney. I was laying on my mattress, which was now situated on the floor of my dad’s guest room, in a house that was solely supposed to be for him and his new family. So physically, I was in a place where I felt like I had to consistently apologize for my existence. On this one particularly low day in early December of 2018, I was in the middle of an intense session of staring blankly at the ceiling. I had no idea how to get out of bed and keep going. This was now the second time I had lost everything because of what dude had done, except his time punched harder than the first. Mostly because I had just failed at being the kind of person who didn’t get raped.
Let me immediately clarify: I didn’t fail because I was raped again. I failed because I fucked up big time. I created a character for myself that I eventually detested having to show up as in life. Especially because this new persona cost too much to maintain, both financially and emotionally. However, through no conscious choice of my own, the identity I fabricated in survival mode was flushed down the proverbial toilet only four months after the preliminary hearing.
In this moment, I was certain the only thing I had left was myself. Whoever she was. As I’m sure you could glean from my opening few paragraphs, this wasn’t the kind of empowering realization that comes equipped with its own 1980’s power-ballad. Instead, the moment would be better scored by a Halloween cassette tape you bought at the dollar store. The last time I was this close to my real self, I was social reject number one after being raped for the fourth time. And, being a guest in my dad’s new family’s home really helped to drive that point home. I really felt like a loser.
The preliminary hearing was, to put it mildly and politely, a pretty long and awful day. It exhausted every single part of my being in a way that I wasn’t ready to admit, and the humans on my cheer squad either refused to cheer for the home team, or slept through their alarms and didn’t show up to the big game. So, I attempted to be strong in a way that was superhuman, extraordinary, and completely unsustainable because – well, I didn’t really have any another choice. I also didn’t want to give anyone another reason to drop me like a hot potato. I had lost so many people when I showed weakness and expressed need after that night that changed everything in June of 2014, and my very worst fear was losing another community all over again. So, I made the decision that I could hold what was being thrown my way by dude’s defence lawyer while simultaneously holding space to be an empowering beacon of light for others. It was a massive oversight on my part because it was way too much. I wasn’t able to do it, and all my worst fears came true for a second time.
Once again, I found myself asking the same question I did in 2014:
Was it safe for me to be myself?
I was now headed to the Superior Court of Justice (SCJ) in Toronto to be the Key Witness in a trial occurring because of something that happened to me in seven months’ time because the Judge at the preliminary hearing believed my testimony. He also witnessed dude’s attempts to distract and torment me throughout my full five hours on the stand. The five hours, mind you, were broken up with a lunch break, in which I did my best to eat four French fries and remain hauntingly silent, as dude and his defence lawyer were sitting right outside the door of my holding room, hoping to hear me saying something incriminating.
As of this day in December of 2018, I had another seven months of voluntary silence to endure. If I talked about what was going on with anyone and dude caught wind of it, it could be easily argued that I was just a vengeful, jilted ex-lover out to get him, nullifying everything done up to this point. Talking openly about what was going on would also have been my tampering with the evidence, as my story was what the entire trial hinged on. There was nothing light about what I was currently living through, and I felt hideously alone. On top of that, because of what happened in 2017, I was really afraid that dude might hurt someone else. This meant, that if I fucked up and we didn’t go to the SCJ because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, I might be putting another woman in danger because I wasn’t strong enough to handle what I was going through.
At that point in time in December of 2018, I had no friends I felt I could safely turn to, no job, no trust in who I was as a human being, and an upcoming appearance at the Superior Court of Justice in Toronto. I was struggling to find the words I needed to get off the mattress and convince myself that I wasn’t just some loser.
Then my phone rang. Every single part of me needed that phone call from my crown attorney to be the one, tiny little ray of light that would get me out of that guest room. Instead, our conversation snapped the one single thread that, up to that point, was holding my fragile existence together.
*
Tuesday October 5th was an incredible day. It felt like I was finally released from a seven+ year contract at the hell rodeo. I could finally step out of the bull pen, stop shovelling poo, and no longer be taunted by that asshole clown. I’m also so grateful that this checkpoint was one that I did not have to reach alone. I had the privilege of hiring Ms. Megan Stephens, a very smart, very capable lawyer, who also happens to be, to this day, one of the most awesome human beings I have ever met. I reached out to Ms. Stephens on the suggestion of one of the women I was speaking with on the proverbial “black market for feminism”. It was a wonderful suggestion, as Ms. Stephens was the one who helped me through the final hell rodeo obstacle course I otherwise would have been expected to by myself, while blindfolded on a unicycle.
The process to lift a publication ban after a sexual assault trial in Canada is supposed to be simple. With the support of your crown attorney, you submit an ex parte application to the courthouse that held the trial, and then a judge signs off on the request. That’s it. However, because these applications had been submitted so infrequently up to that point in time when I was attempting to lift mine, it was brand new territory to the majority of people working within the Canadian judicial system. A harsh reality about humans is that the majority of us don’t enjoy the responsibility of responsibility, especially when there is no handbook to fall back on or revert to. This made my experience submitting the application to lift the publication ban on my name even more traumatizing and dehumanizing than the process of getting to the SCJ, because until I hired an industry professional to take over, all anyone told me was: “I’ve never seen this before”, and “I can’t help you”.
It was in November of 2020 when I started to inquire more seriously about what I was and wasn’t allowed to talk about in relation to my experience in court. I had no idea what I was doing because at the time, as the subject matter was incredibly un-Google-able. I also had no idea that there was still an active ban on my name. I had just released SURVIVOR, and was well into the sixth or seventh draft of HISTORICAL FICTION, the television pilot I wrote about what it’s like to rebuild your life after a rape trial, and wasn’t sure if there were certain things that were off limits to talk about.
To get the answers I needed, I reached out to my original team for help. My victim/witness protection officer told me in an email in December of 2020 that my crown attorney had now become a judge, and would no longer be able to help me. Then she stopped answering my emails, which I will assume was because she was too inundated with active case files. Left to my own devices, I started trying to figure out what I could and couldn’t say about the experience on my own. Each time I got on the phone, however, I couldn’t get help or a straight answer from anyone. It also didn’t help that we were deep into the COVID-19 global pandemic, so walking into the Toronto SCJ to get the answers I needed wasn’t an option for me, either.
Finally, after my third post, REIKI, went live, and after five months of trying to navigate a legal labyrinth by myself, I finally received confirmation that there was still an active publication ban on my name, and this news about the ban still being active came as a huge shock to me.
In 2019, a few days before I was supposed to appear at the SCJ, my crown attorney asked me if I wanted a publication ban on my name. Her question, however, was more of a legal formality than a legitimate question, because as my lips were forming the word “no”, she quickly told me that the ban was only there to protect me in case a reporter that sided with dude decided to write about the trial. I’m fairly certain my crown attorney was so adamant about the ban being in place not because she wanted to protect me, but rather, because she’d already applied for and received one without consulting me. Personally, I was never concerned about the public siding with dude in the trial because it wasn’t going to protect me from the kind of talk I already knew was actively happening. Strangers thinking or assuming I’m a lying whore would have been a cake walk compared to my friends and family abandoning me in 2014 because the situation was too uncomfortable.
As I mentioned in Chapter One, publication bans became common practice in the 1980’s to encourage women to want to come forward. I also mentioned that I don’t believe crown attorneys are given enough time or resources to properly address each case that lands on their desk. So, it’s most likely that my crown attorney was scrambling to prepare for the case, went on full autopilot, and just did whatever her handbook told her to. The unfortunate thing about rectifying her wrong assumption, is that filing a request to revoke the ban before the trial had even begun would have compromised the integrity of both of us before we even entered the courtroom. I also think she had no idea how to go about lifting the ban she had just placed on my name. There was another point my crown attorney really drove home, and that was that it was really important that the judge liked us. The latter comment also made me uncomfortable. Was this how the courts functioned in Canada? Based on a foundation of chaos and like-ability? My crown attorney then made me a verbal guarantee try to put me at ease and to distract me from how she put a publication ban on my name without consulting me:
The ban was only there so that I could be the first one to tell my story, and so that I could tell my story when I was ready.
So, trusting she would stay true to her word, I agreed to having the publication ban in place with the assurance that I would be able to tell my story when I was ready.
*
My crown attorney called that day in December 2018 to tell me that dude’s council had submitted a third party records application to access my private records in an attempt to expose me as a vengeful, lying, jilted ex-lover, and that this application was going to be put before a judge on March 7th, 2019.
A third party records application is actually very common within sexual assault trials, and often gets submitted by defence councils in order to gain as much evidence as possible to support their “not guilty” argument. In fact, this application gets submitted so frequently that there is already a well-oiled system in place to support it. Once dude’s defence counsel submitted it, I was immediately assigned a lawyer to defend me on this one specific matter. It was now this new lawyer’s job to do everything in her power to stop the application from moving forward and to protect my right to privacy. I was told by my crown attorney that this new lawyer would call me in a few days to explain everything, but in the meanwhile, my crown attorney quickly explained to me what it would mean if dude’s council’s application was approved.
If dude’s team was granted access to my private records, and they were successful in finding any evidence that could expose me as a vengeful, lying, jilted ex-lover before the date of the trial, it meant that all of the all the charges would have to be dropped because my story, the main piece of evidence that the trial hinged on, would be discredited, and the work we’d done up to this point would become worthless. An example of something like this happening was within the Jian Ghomeshi trial in 2016[1], where his defence council accessed 5,000 text messages between the witnesses that were sent both before and after his arrest[2]. The messages were so incriminating that Ghomeshi didn’t even have to appear on the stand and testify to be found “not guilty” on five different charges.
Their third party records application, if granted, could give dude’s team access to my personal email and telephone, as well as my private health records, including, but not limited to potential diagnoses from doctors, and any notes a therapist would have taken in-session. What they could access would ultimately be up to the judge at the hearing, but I was to assume they’d go for everything.
Albeit obscenely invasive, what they were doing was completely legal.
The two charges dude was facing were indictable sexual assault, and administering a stupefying substance with the intent to commit an indictable offence. In plain English, he was being charged for drugging me with the intent to rape me, and for raping me. Both are totally embarrassing things to be accused of in a time when the world was hungrily watching their screens for the latest on Harvey Weinstein. So, while I am well aware that I am worthy of living a life that’s, you know, safe, I can understand his wanting to do everything in his power to make the whole thing go away. What, in 2018, could be worse for your social status than being exposed as a rapist? Probably still being the victim of a rape – but maybe it’s too soon for that kind of “funny oh-no!” ha-ha.
I vividly remember how my heart sank and how my body tensed up when I received that news. What if I had done something to fuck everything up? But more than that, I remember how unsafe I felt in that moment. I discovered a whole new frequency of loneliness and it rattled me significantly. Before this phone call, I was only temporarily homeless after all of my worst fears had just come true for a second time. But now, when I thought there was nothing else left to take from me, dude found something I had so naïvely taken for granted: my privacy.
My crown attorney ended the call with: “hang in there, you’re a tough cookie”, and I began spiralling in the guest room at my dad’s place.
*
When this tough cookie was ready to tell her story and learned that the publication ban was still active in 2021 – well – I became so paralyzed with fear that I stopped writing all together. Because of my crown attorney’s verbal promise to me back in 2019, I had just assumed that the ban had expired like she implied it would after the trial was over. That it was really just there so that I could tell my story when I was ready, like she told me. But because of this naïve assumption I made after deciding to trust her, I had actually breached the ban on my name multiple times. Meaning that, if a court decided that the breach was bad enough, I could spend up to two years in prison.
Now, it could very easily be argued that when I learned about the publication ban on my name, and because of the information that was Google-able on the subject matter, that I had gone into something akin to a WebMD hysteria. You know what it is. You get a little cough (before COVID!), and then you your cold symptoms into the search engine, only to find out you have terminal lung cancer. I self-diagnosed myself with, what I refer to as, “legal terminal cancer”. Now, unlike some acute hypochondria, this self-diagnosis wasn’t out of as much paranoia as you would assume. You see, the thing is, around the same time I learned about the ban on my name, a woman from Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, who goes by the pseudonym “C.L.”, had just been criminally convicted for breaching the publication ban on her name[3].
So just to really clarify this for you: in Canada, in 2021, women were being criminally charged for having the courage to tell their stories, and try to help end the stigmas we face on an hourly basis thanks to rape culture.
And, from my own personal conversations on the black market for feminism, most of us had no idea that there was a ban on our names, or what it entailed. We all pretty much faced the same nonsense and misinformation (aka bullshit) that I did with my crown attorney.
C.L.’s ex-husband, who was found guilty of sexual assault, caught wind that she had shared a court document via email with her friends and family to explain what she had been through. This would have been fine if she had redacted her own name from the documents, except she didn’t. Her name was in clear, visible sight. This isn’t stated in the articles, but it’s pretty clear that one idiot on her mailing list decided to forward this to her ex-husband. Maybe it was in a “what the fuck did you do you disgusting pig?!” type sentiment, but it was a really stupid, dumb, idiotic thing for that loved one to do, and they really fucked things up big time for C.L., because her ex reported her to the police.
That’s all it takes. One friend who maybe is trying to be supportive because they read a post on social media about how they’re now supposed to show up in the world, really earnestly not understanding how the system actually works.
C.L. pled guilty to breaching the ban and was criminally charged and fined $2600. With SURVIVOR, BULLSEYE, and REIKI being live online, I became terrified that if the wrong person who just happened to know my story decided they didn’t like me or what I had to say, or even worse, decided to rectify what happened back in June of 2014 by defending my honour with dude, that my already published work could be manipulated and used against me. And, given everything I had just gone through and my family history, my life experience taught me that people were willing to go out of their way to defame me. I trusted no one, and I was terrified.
So, this tough cookie had to get to work on figuring out how to lift the ban, and how to lift it quickly. There was so much positive momentum building with my artistic endeavours, and it was so depressing to feel like I had to stop. I had even just completed an interview with a social media influencer about SURVIVOR that was viewed online by over one thousand people. My work was resonating, and I didn’t want it to be cut short because I was criminally convicted, either on purpose or by accident. And while it could have been really cool and heroic to stand up for this kind of injustice like the strong woman I would love to say that I am, I was completely burnt out from everything I’d been through, and did not have the means or support system to be able to fix this kind of injustice quickly should I actually have ended up with a criminal conviction. While I definitely had enough privilege to hire Ms. Stephens, and I’m so grateful for it, I wasn’t nearly privileged enough to fight so fearlessly.
As I mentioned earlier, publication bans, in theory, are supposed to be lifted ex parte in a fairly simple, quick, and painless process, especially if the ban is only on one person’s name, as was the case for me. In practice, however, it was a completely different story.
Ex parte is a Latin term meaning “by or for one party”, and legally what it implies is that a motion can be made without notice to the other people involved. This means that I should have been able to lift the ban without needing to let dude know about it, especially because, as I previously explained in Chapter One, the ban was put in place to protect me and only me from any further shame or embarrassment. However, the ban was protecting dude and his identity by sheer proximity. But just because he was benefiting from my forced anonymity on the sidelines, and just because his council was able to create a reasonable doubt, doesn’t give him any legal standing in whether or not the ban on my name should be lifted. My ability to speak about what I went through would just be hideously inconvenient to the narrative he created, and was able to control, since the happening in June of 2014.
By the time I found Ms. Stephens, I was well into year six of the hell rodeo and ready to pay anything to have my freedom of speech back. Thankfully, Ms. Stephens is so excellent and efficient at what she does that what I invested was completely reasonable, even with all of the hurdles we faced along the way. In fact, she was so great that I would have paid her multiple-times over again. I’m really grateful that I didn’t have to – but by that point – things were so awful that I really would have paid anything to finally obtain a real sense of peace and closure.
Once Ms. Stephens got to work, there was a massive shift in how I was treated, including full support from everyone involved in lifting the ban, including The Crown. While they still admit to Ms. Stephens that they’d never seen this type of application get filed before at the Toronto SCJ, they were avidly interested in helping me now that Ms. Stephens, a seasoned professional, was taking the lead. We even learned that my crown attorney had never become a judge and was, in fact, still a crown attorney. Thankfully, we finally received her blessing, and she handed full authority on the matter over to Ms. Stephens.
On June 25th, 2021, Ms. Stephens filed ex parte application on my behalf.
Since, at the time, there had been so few instances of this kind of application being filed to date, the judge who received the ex parte application decided not to follow the predetermined procedure that would have protected me from further emotional turmoil. Instead, she declared there was too limited authority on the issue at hand. Because of this limited authority, she decided the former accused had the right to be included in the final decision.
What this meant was that dude was now given the opportunity to come up with a legitimate argument as to why the publication ban on my name, one that I never asked for in the first place, a ban that I felt pressured into agreeing to by my crown attorney, shouldn’t be lifted.
*
The way my crown attorney handled that phone call in December 2018 completely broke me.
…Not that it would have taken much at that point, anyway.
If you’re someone who’s never had to go through anything like this before, I would assume you’d be wondering why this one particular phone call crushed my Soul. That is, unless I had something to hide. The thing is, there had been too many other undignified and outrageous instances I had to weather since entering the legal system up to this point. This one was just the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, and came as the perfect knock-out punch while I was vulnerable and down. And, because all of my worst fears had just come true for a second time, and because I was reminded consistently about what a burden I was at my dad’s place, if a judge decided dude’s legal team could have access to my personal records, then what I was now convinced was my ultimate truth might be exposed:
That I was just a loser.
It really was the only logical explanation to me at this point in time, especially because of what I was seeing with the #MeToo movement online. The whole world seemed to be rallying together to help every other woman in my situation. So, if people weren’t interested in helping me, then there must have been something really wrong with who I was as a person.
What I did next is the reason I remember this day so vividly. I even remember the white, long-sleeve t-shirt and grey track pants I was wearing. To be honest, I haven’t quite decided for myself whether or not the moment was beautiful or disturbing. But I think about it a lot. I think about the helplessness I felt, and the obligation went along with it, even though it wasn’t my case. I think about everything that happened in my life that led up to that one moment in time. And I think about everything that’s happened afterwards.
After that phone call, with nothing left to lose and nowhere to go, I got on my knees and I prayed.
I kneeled beside my mattress, and I put my hands above my head in a state of total surrender. With tears rapidly streaming down my face, I put a 911 prayer out to anyone who might be there. Whoever was there in that moment, willing to listen. I didn’t care who it was, as long as they wanted to help me. Then I asked them, whoever they were, a question.
I asked to be shown whether or not I was a good person.
I asked be shown how I could make up for being a bad one if it became obvious I wasn’t good.
I promised I would do whatever it took to become a good person if it was painfully obvious that I was a bad person, because all I wanted was to be good enough to be loved as my real self.
And then I made a bargain with whoever was there listening. I promised that if I made it all the way through to the trial, that I would be myself, fully, and that I would tell my story. All of it. Even the stuff that painted me in a bad light.
The beauty in this moment is that with absolutely nothing left, I found a reason to get off the mattress. And, my desire to have the faith in myself that I needed to keep going, even though things felt too hard and there wasn’t one single person to hold my hand, is really stunning.
When I talk about faith, it’s important for me to clarify that I don’t mean it in a religious sense. I think that if the concept gets tied up with blind devotion it’s not actually faith anymore, but rather a negation of responsibility within your own life. Having faith, to me, is not behaviour that gets rewarded by some “big daddy” in the sky for following “His” handbook correctly. Faith, to me, is two things combined: the ability to see past the present moment and envision something greater, and the ability to believe in yourself, regardless of how dire the situation at hand is. Faith is believing that it’s possible to move beyond any obstacle and then create a better world to exist in. It’s my opinion that you don’t need to believe in God, a god, or anything for that matter, to have faith in yourself, because faith is an act of courage that comes from within, and not outside of ourselves.
What I find disturbing about my prayer, though, is that I was led to believe, wholeheartedly, that I was bad. And that my being bad was the reason I was going through what I was going through.
In that prayer, I was on my knees apologizing for my existence. I was apologizing for being the kind of person who didn’t deserve to be helped. Worst of all, I was approaching what I was going through as a burden I had to carry on my own. I was on my knees praying to whoever would hear me because not a single person in my life at this point in time was willing to give me an iota of the love or care that I needed. And I was desperate for it.
I should have been able to go to someone. I should have been set up with the proper resources ahead of time by my crown attorney and my victim/witness protection officer for the moments that were going to be hard. And I shouldn’t have felt so responsible for a trial that I was only volunteering to be the Key Witness in because the police and The Crown decided for themselves that dude was dangerous. In this moment, I would also love to say “fuck you” to everyone who has an issue with the word should. What I went through was not okay, and there should have been more support there for me. But, that isn’t how it was for me, and it’s a waste of my time to dwell on it, but I fully stand behind my use of the word should in this instance. I should not have been driven to the point of being on the floor, on my knees, begging the unknown for help.
Before I rose from my knees and let my hands fall back down to my sides, I reminded myself that I didn’t come forward because I wanted to hurt dude. I didn’t come forward because I was trying to get revenge or get even. I came forward because I didn’t want to be terrorized by him anymore. Yes, I fully believed dude was dangerous and might hurt someone else because of what happened in 2017, but I also came forward because I wanted to stop running from him, from what he did, and from what my life turned into because of it.
I finished my prayer and finally left that guest room. Two weeks later, I had two different job offers to choose from. Four weeks after that, I moved into a brand new condo building and haven’t been back to my dad’s place since. Six weeks after that, dude’s council dropped the third party records application.
Their application ended up being a scare tactic they used to try to get me to back out of the trial.
*
In order to move forward with my application to lift the publication ban on my name, the judge ordered Ms. Stephens to send dude a copy of my application. Ms. Stephens also needed to be able to confirm dude’s receipt of said application. This became a huge obstacle when he refused to be served for two full weeks. In fact, his lawyers were so determined to deflect everything that came from Ms. Stephens, that finally, The Crown offered to send a police officer to his home to serve him in person. I do have to say, that when Ms. Stephens stepped up to the plate, The Crown really followed suit, and for the first time, I was really impressed with the Canadian judicial system. When dude’s lawyers were alerted of this next step involving the local authorities, they acquiesced, confirmed receipt of the email, and informed us that dude had left the province.
Ms. Stephens confirmed dude’s receipt of my application and then judge then granted him ten days to come up with a valid argument as to why the publication ban on my name shouldn’t be lifted. There actually is no valid argument as to why a publication ban shouldn’t be lifted when it only concerns one party (i.e. me), so with the law on my side, I made the assumption that in less than two weeks I’d finally get to go back to my writing. After those long ten days passed with no word from dude or his representation, Ms. Stephens and I were heaving massive sighs of relief.
But twelve days later, and two days late, dude’s representation demanded an extra sixty days to come up with an argument. He wasn’t just out of the province, but in a remote location with no access to the internet and needed more time to think. To our incredible surprise, the judge approved the extension. She decided the matter wasn’t that pressing, and too new a development within the Canadian legal system to deny his request.
I now had to live through another series of months in which dude was legally allowed to hold the reigns to my narrative, while I was forced to sit tight and hope for the best one more time.
Those sixty days the judge granted dude to come up with a legitimate argument as to why the publication ban on my name shouldn’t be lifted was one of the most difficult periods of time I’ve ever lived through. What made this waiting period so different from all of the others within the hell rodeo, however, was that I had Ms. Stephens’ support. Ms. Stephens promised me that she wouldn’t stop helping me until I had fully regained my freedom of speech, and I knew that I could trust her. Finally having someone in my corner, diligently working with me so I could finally tell my story, was one of the greatest gifts I have ever received or given myself.
One thing (of many things) that Ms. Stephens and I agreed upon throughout the process was that we weren’t going to make an appeal to the judge with regards to the sixty days she granted dude for the sake of my mental health. We didn’t want to do this for two reasons.
The first was because I shouldn’t have to in order for the pre-determined process to be honoured by the judge. The judge, who also happened to be the same judge during the 2019 trial at the SCJ, just decided not to do it. And, because of her position of power, she was able to make that call. Maybe my crown attorney fucked something up and the judge didn’t like me in the end, and this was the reason it was getting dragged out so hideously.
The second reason we didn’t make an appeal is because we didn’t want to set another unnecessary precedent for other women in the future. Because what we were doing was such a new development within the Superior Court of Justice in Toronto, everything we did mattered. We didn’t want to add another obstacle or task for anyone else applying to lift a ban on their name in the future. So, even though the stress I was living with was actually destroying me, the idea of making things harder for the next woman just because I was uncomfortable felt much worse than just waiting out those sixty days.
On the bright side, if dude did find anything he considered to be a legitimate argument, the judge decided she was going to solve the matter in chambers, meaning there wouldn’t be a COVID-19 style Zoom trial where I would be forced to listen to his arguments. So there was that.
Within that sixty-day waiting period, it was also announced in the news, that with the help of a lot of lawyers and women’s rights activists, the charge on C.L.’s name was reversed and she was no longer in legal trouble for breaching the publication ban on her name[4]. So there was that, too. But I was experiencing so much burnout from my seven+ years in the hell rodeo that regardless of the coaches, therapists, and my incredibly kind lawyer I had supporting me, I was really not okay. I was tired of pretending to have to be, and I was exhausted from having to pay registered professionals for all of my emotional support.
When the sixty day waiting period ended with no word from dude or his council, another eighteen days passed without a word from the judge. Sixty business days later, which I was assured by Ms. Stephens is not how time is measured in the court of law, the judge approved my application, and the publication ban on my name was lifted.
Finally, dude had no more control over my situation or the narrative, and I was free to tell my story.
**
So, I lost.
But not really, actually.
I’m really tired of hearing that women lose their rape trials.
Because the thing is, if you haven’t gleaned this from the last two chapters:
It was never my trial to begin with.
So it was The Crown who lost. Socially speaking, however, that burden gets put on the victim, or Survivor, or whatever you choose to call the person who was abused. My story was just the key piece of evidence that their entire trial hinged on, hence my role as the Key Witness.
The sad thing is, though, is that this was something I didn’t really understand until I finished my time on the witness stand in 2019. I asked my victim/witness protection officer what would happen to me if dude was found not guilty. I was really scared that he might be able to turn around and sue me if his counsel was able to create a reasonable doubt. And I was scared of this because of everything that I had seen and heard in American news coverage. That was when I found out that this whole time, I was just a volunteer in a case that belonged to The Crown. The police had done enough investigation on their own to determine that they believed dude to be dangerous, and they needed my story to help prove that. My victim/witness protection officer also let me know that it wouldn’t have made it as far as it did if every single person along the way didn’t believe me.
I remember really liking her at the time.
After the phone call from my crown attorney in December of 2018, I realized that the legal team working on this case was in way over their heads, and I felt like my story was in the wrong hands.
So, it wasn’t surprising to me that dude was found not guilty. The whole experience, to me, as a volunteer who was bounced around within a very broken system, felt like a steep learning curve for The Crown, and an exhausting reminder that we still very much live in a world that was built to support rape culture.
If you have a problem with my statement about our world being built to support rape culture, then I will ask you to go back and re-examine the disparity between the two applications that this chapter explored. In both instances, dude held all the power while I had to wait and have faith that things would be okay for me. The third party records application that dude and his council filed in an attempt to get me to back out of the trial already had a clear, legal, streamlined process. Things were set up for him to scare me into silence. When I wanted to file my application to lift the publication ban on my name, I was met with multiple obstacles that prevented me from even being able to fill out the form. In fact, there were so many barriers to entry that I had to reach a point of privilege in my life where I could hire and pay a lawyer to help me, even though I was in this mess because of my crown attorney. And even then, once my application was filed, dude was still given the opportunity to stop me from getting my voice back, despite the predetermined, legal procedure that was set up to protect me from further anguish. All because my wanting to lift the ban on my name was “too new”.
In terms of my showing up to do my job as the Key Witness, I know I did a really beautiful job. I was calm, poised, eloquent, and didn’t get provoked once when dude’s defense lawyer was trying to get me riled up. Unfortunately, not many people were in the courtroom to support me while I was on the stand, so this is something you’re going to just have to take my word for. What people were present for, however, was how I was so exhausted after the trial was over.
I had a really hard time pulling my life together afterwards, especially when the start-up I started working for lost its funding, and all but four of us lost our jobs. I really needed to be in my own space on autopilot for a little while, but once again, it wasn’t an option for me. So my life fell apart again, much like it did in December of 2018.
It seems like everyone in left in my life, in Canada, anyway, has only been present for the moments where I couldn’t get off the mattress. It’s been such a long time since I’ve been in a room with someone who’s been willing to remember anything remotely remarkable about me.
That moment of prayer in December of 2018 is going to come up again in my work, because something traumatic happened to me around that same time that caused me to feel like I wasn’t worthy of speaking to god. If god even exists, that is. So that moment of prayer was really brave in a way that’s more heartbreaking than we have time for right now. But what I will say, is that when we revisit that prayer scene, I’m also going to be addressing the New Age obsession with the word “should”.
Until then, while god really may just be a flying spaghetti monster, I’m going to keep throwing pasta at the wall. I have to keep trying, and I have to keep putting my voice out there for whoever to hear. Because what happened to me shouldn’t be happening to our women. And if I can help move the needle even just a millimetre in this lifetime, then I would say it’s been a life well lived, and that the seven+ year hell rodeo was worth it.
**
If you, or anyone you know needs help navigating a publication ban, Ms. Stephens helped to pen an incredible GUIDE TO NAVIGATING PUBLICATION BANS. It was published not long after the ban on my name was finally lifted, and is something I wish I had a couple of years ago, because it makes important information accessible and keeps the revolution off the proverbial feminist black market.
**
While there is never any expectation, if this piece resonated with you, and if it feels right, please feel free to support the work I am creating here:
[1] https://www.macleans.ca/society/what-really-went-wrong-in-jian-ghomeshis-trial/
[2] https://www.chatelaine.com/news/how-did-ghomehis-defence-get-hold-of-5000-messages-between-complainants/
[3] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-april-16-2021-1.5990216/case-of-sex-assault-victim-fined-for-breaking-publication-ban-divides-legal-community-1.5990570
[4] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/kitchener-woman-sex-assault-victim-break-publication-ban-1.6034073
