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By LegalMatters Staff • A man was recently found guilty of sexual assault after sharing online footage of him having sex with two women on different occasions.
The women testified they would not have agreed to sex if they had known he was filming it so he could later post the video to a pornographic website. Both said they suffered psychological harm after discovering the videos were freely available online. The videos have since been taken down.
The court ruled that any consent for sex is vitiated if the act is recorded without a participant’s knowledge. This decision raised concerns with Ottawa criminal lawyer Céline Dostaler.
“There is already a charge in the Criminal Code for making intimate images publicly available without someone’s consent,” she says, noting that s.162.1 (1) makes it a criminal offence to publish or distribute “an intimate image of a person knowing that the person depicted in the image did not give their consent to that conduct.”
Dostaler adds that s.162 (1) makes it a crime to engage in voyeurism.
“The crimes this man committed are already regulated offences, so his actions do not need to be interpreted as some form of sexual assault,” she says.
Dostaler says the ruling leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
“This sexual assault conviction needs to be considered by the appellant court and perhaps guidance from Canada’s highest court,” she says. “We need a clear answer on whether consent is vitiated by not knowing whether a video was made.”
