Former teacher had sex with sixth-grader in the ’80s

A former Outremont teacher who had sex with a sixthgrade student nearly four decades ago has been granted parole on the 12-month sentence she received in February.

The Commission québécoise des libérations conditionnelles (CQLC) agreed to release Colette Casaubon, 81, despite the fact she now denies she was at fault for what happened between August 1981 and July 1982, while she was a teacher at a primary school in Outremont.

On July 8, 2019, Casaubon, who now resides in Cowansville, pleaded guilty at the Montreal courthouse to two counts of gross indecency. By doing so she admitted she seduced and had sex, including intercourse, at her home with one of the boys she was teaching and that she once let other students touch her breasts while asking them what they thought of breast-reduction surgery she had undergone. She was in her early 40s at the time.

The boy she had sex with was the person who filed a complaint against Casaubon decades later as the #Metoo movement grew.

According to a summary of facts read into the court record last year, he told the police that having been sexually abused at such a young age left him confused. He began abusing alcohol and drugs while he was in his early teens and blamed Casaubon for putting him on a path that left him homeless at one point in his life.

On Feb. 10, she was given 12 months and was eligible for parole after she served one-sixth of the time. She will also do two years of probation and be placed for life on the national sex offender registry.

The written summary of the CQLC’S recent decision describes how, while she served time behind bars at the Leclerc detention centre in Laval, Casaubon denied any wrongdoing.

“According to the (people who prepare an offender for parole), your version of the facts has little credibility and what’s more, you project the blame on your victims. You never admitted to displaying inappropriate behaviour toward your students while you also discard the notion that you were sexually attracted to them,” the author of the summary wrote. “You do not recognize your guilt and you blame others.”

Because she denied what she pleaded guilty to in July, her parole officer recommended that she be denied parole. The board decided to grant her a conditional release anyway because, at her age, she was assessed as posing a low risk of reoffending. It also noted there was no evidence that Casaubon abused any other minors between 1982 and when she was charged last year.

Causabon told the parole board she wants to return to scrapbooking, an activity that took up all of her time before she was taken into custody.