Landmark case in Toronto underway – man faces 6 months in jail over criminal harassment charges for debating against feminists on Twitter regarding call-out culture
Christie Blatchford: Ruling in Twitter harassment trial could have enormous fallout for free speech
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What’s believed to be the first case in Canada of alleged criminal
harassment-via-Twitter is just a judge’s decision away from being over.
After hearing closing submissions Tuesday from Chris Murphy, who
represents 54-year-old Greg Elliott, Ontario Court Judge Brent Knazan is
expected to rule on Oct. 6.
In the balance rides enormous potential fallout for free speech online.
Elliott is charged with criminally harassing two Toronto female political activists, Steph Guthrie and Heather Reilly, in 2012.
Allegations involving a third woman were dropped.
The graphic artist and father of four lost his job shortly after his
arrest, which was well-publicized online, and if convicted, could go to
jail for six months.
These are astonishing repercussions given that it’s not alleged he
ever threatened either woman (or any other, according to the testimony
of the Toronto Police officer, Detective Jeff Bangild, who was in
charge) or that he ever sexually harassed them.
Indeed, Elliott’s chief sin appears to have been that he dared to disagree with the two young feminists and political activists.
He and Guthrie, for instance, initially fell out over his refusal to
endorse her plan to “sic the Internet” upon a young man in Northern
Ontario who had invented a violent video game, where users could punch
an image of a feminist video blogger named Anita Sarkeesian until the
screen turned red.
Guthrie Tweeted at the time that she wanted the inventor’s “hatred on
the Internet to impact his real-life experience” and Tweeted to
prospective employers to warn them off the young man and even sent the
local newspaper in his town a link to the story about the game.
Elliott disagreed with the tactic and Tweeted he thought the shaming “was every bit as vicious as the face-punch game”.
Until then, the two were collegial online, with Elliott offering to
produce a free poster for Guthrie’s witopoli (Women in Toronto Politics)
group.
As serious as the ramifications of a conviction could be for Elliott,
so could they be dire for free speech online, Murphy suggested in his
final arguments.
He said the idea that all it takes to end up charged with criminal
harassment is vigorous participation in online debate with those who
will not brook dissent “will have a chilling effect on people’s ability
to communicate, and not just on Twitter”.
In fact, Murphy said that contrary to what Guthrie and Reilly
testified to at trial, they weren’t afraid of his client — as suggested
by both their spirited demeanour in the witness box and their deliberate
online campaign to call Elliott out as a troll.
Rather, Murphy said, they hated Elliott and were determined to
silence him — not just by “blocking” his Tweets to them, but by
demanding he cease even referring to them even in making comment about
heated political issues.
To all this, Guthrie pointed out once in cross-examination that
feelings of fear, like all feelings, “develop over time”, and snapped
that she was sorry she wasn’t “a perfect victim” who behaved like a
conventional victim.
The criminal harassment charge is rooted in the alleged victim’s perception of the offending conduct.
The statute says if that conduct caused the alleged victims
“reasonably, in all the circumstances, to fear for their safety”, that’s
good enough.
Yet Guthrie and Reilly didn’t behave as though they were remotely
frightened or intimidated: They convened a meeting of friends to discuss
how Elliott should be publicly shamed; they bombarded their followers
with furious tweets and retweets about him (including a grotesque
suggestion from someone pretending she was a 13-year-old that he was a
pedophile); they could and did dish it out.
“They were not vulnerable,” Murphy said once. “They are very
accomplished, politically savvy women. If they can’t handle being
mentioned in the tail end of a political discussion (on Twitter), then
they’re in the wrong business.”
And, he said, of the meeting both women attended in August of 2012,
to discuss how Elliott would be called out, “That was a conspiracy to
commit a criminal offence … they were conspiring to go out and publicly
shame Mr. Elliott.”
Murphy said the case was akin to “a high school spat, except it’s
adults on the Internet”, and said it is astonishing that the court
should be acting as referee in an online political debate.“If anybody was being criminally harassed in this case,” Murphy told the judge, “it was my client, it was Mr. Elliott.”
That Reilly, who was anonymous on Twitter and who directed her own
volley of hateful tweets at Elliott, should come “to this court and the
police and say she’s being criminally harassed is an abuse of the
system.”
Prosecutor Marnie Goldenberg made only the briefest remarks, and
refused to provide Postmedia with a copy of her written arguments,
saying it wasn’t her practice.
Holy shit these totalitarian mother fuckers
I hope everyone who defends social media’s SJ culture and insists that it is not only Righteous and True, but also that dissenters must be shut down and silenced and the extremists of SJ culture are a boogeyman that have no real power, please read over this carefully because this fucking scares the shit out of me.
I know I said I would try to avoid political blogging but I think this is too important. The fact that this even got to court chills me. That someone could abuse the system to claim harassment over a disagreement sets a very unsettling precedent for our discourse.
I became a leftist because I had nothing but disgust for totalitarianism and authoritarianism. To see the tools used by fascists being wielded by those I would otherwise consider my ideological peers is horrifying. This is not my political movement. This is not the left I was drawn to when Bush was in the White House.
What the fuck happened to us?
#if I get any comments about MUH FREEZE PEACH I’m gonna side-eye the fuck out of you god i hope no one says that because thats exactly what these women are trying to stop. like if you tl;dr’d this these are two women that, when attempting to ruin the life of a someone over what wa admittedly a shit thing to do, their friend disagreed with them. and because he debated them for a long while and proved that he was both salient in his points and refused to concede to theirs their are trying to use the law to silence him and worse put him in jail. let me repeat that in simpler terms. THEY WANT TO JAIL HIM FOR A TWITTER ARGUMENT. this is everything wrong with internet SJ movements and we need to go out of our way to not only condemn these people but stop this farce in its tracks because the precedent it make is seriously dangerous.
Mr. Murphy then suggested that what Mr. Elliott had been doing was
defending himself, and his views, when he was being attacked on Twitter
by her and the other complainants. Wasn’t he entitled to do that?
“He’s entitled to defend himself to the world, Mr. Murphy; he’s not entitled to do it to me.”
“No matter what you say about or to him?” Mr. Murphy asked.
I bolded something in the comment chain above and I’ll quote it again here: “I became a leftist because I had nothing but disgust for totalitarianism and authoritarianism.”
A Middleground 