05/02/2020 2016 ONCJ 35 (CanLII) | CanLII The language itself is harassing. He may not have agreed with her views about Twitter and her right to ask him to stop tweeting or reading her feed. But insulting her body and calling her a hateful bitch, even if the "bitch" is in quotation marks, amounts to harassing. It has nothing to do with comment or argument. In the words of Justice Proulx in Lamontagne, he was responsible for her being harassed and so knowledge can be imputed to him. It is not necessary to deal with wilful blindness or recklessness. This element of the offence is established beyond a reasonable doubt in relation to Ms. Reilly. Fear for her safety For the prosecution to prove the charge, it is not sufficient that it be proven that Mr. Elliott repeatedly communicated directly or indirectly and that he knew she was harassed, as she was. The repeated communication must cause Ms. Reilly to fear for her safety. Relying on how Ms. Reilly answered in court when Crown counsel adduced the evidence of fear, I find that this element has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. This is an example of the advantage to the trial judge of seeing and hearing the witnesses as opposed to reading a transcript. At the outset of her examination, Ms. Reilly told Crown counsel that she went to the police after a press release indicated that Mr. Elliott had been charged. She went to provide to the police the information that she had provided to Twitter around September 25. When Crown counsel asked her how she felt towards Mr. Elliott when she went to the police, she replied that she felt “somewhat frustrated” because her repeated requests to be left alone had been ignored and she faced continued harassment. She did not mention any fear. The information that Ms. Reilly provided to Twitter about her fear was about the September 10 incident at the Cadillac Lounge. Crown counsel questioned Ms. Reilly about what concerned her about the Cadillac Lounge incident. She could not lead Ms. Reilly. If Ms. Reilly did not say something about fear, there would have been no evidence of this element and a possible dismissal. Defence counsel in his submissions suggested that Crown counsel almost pulled the word out of Ms. Reilly. I find that Crown counsel did nothing improper and her examination was flawless, but I agree with that characterization. Ms. Reilly testified honestly. She was authentic and did not try to present herself as anything other than who she was. She and Ms. Guthrie may have been reluctant and not forthcoming about what occurred at the meeting about what to do about Mr. Elliott, but Ms. Reilly, like Ms. Guthrie, respected her affirmation. She was not trying to answer in order to convict Mr. Elliott, whom she dislikes intensely. Ms. Reilly did not testify in any persuasive manner that she feared for her safety. At one point, she changed her avatar from a picture of her to a cartoon. There is no evidence that doing that changed the appearance of her tweets retroactively. And since no tweet appears with any avatar other than her @LadySnarksAlot cartoon, I cannot determine precisely when she did this, and Ms. Reilly did not say. She did not testify that she did this because she was afraid, but said it was because she received advice to do it. She testified that she was “concerned” at the Cadillac Lounge. When Crown counsel asked Ms. Reilly what she meant by being concerned, she answered that “it was concerning because it …I had no idea what his potential future intent could be if he would have chosen to escalate any of the harassment from being online to being in person.” There are so many hypotheticals and conditionals in this honest answer that it leaves me with doubt about whether she was afraid for her safety. In cross-examination, Ms. Reilly testified that she could not remember how Mr. Elliott’s tweet that there was “a whole lot of ugly at the Cadillac Lounge” came to her attention while she was at the lounge. She said it took her two minutes to satisfy herself that he was not physically there. But she felt “that the offline potential stalking of my location or other people’s locations could increase and I was concerned for my safety.” Once again her answer has “potential” and “could increase”. She agreed that the potential stalking did not occur, but stated that she wasn’t psychic and wasn’t able to ensure that that wouldn’t happen. The whole of Ms. Reilly’s concern for her safety reduces to two minutes in the Cadillac bar. Armed with a photograph, she was responding to a tweet from someone she had blocked, but could not remember how the tweet was brought to her attention. She did not think that the tweet referred to her physically, and in fact it did not. No other tweet indicated that Mr. Elliott knew or cared where she was. file:///Users/nerissa/Downloads/Columbia CSV/R v Gregory Allan Elliott.htm 41/43