Councillor sues daughter for airing abuse
Suit alleges settlement deal was breached
VANCOUVER• Last week, Sherri Thomson saw her mother, Eileen Wilke, for the first time in more than two decades. She stared at Wilke from across the room at a public bylaw meeting in Lions Bay, wondering what would happen once she was recognized.
Wilke is a recently elected councillor in the wealthy coastal village. Thomson had come all the way from Ontario to answer to a lawsuit that her mother had filed against her. The civil claim alleges Thomson violated a settlement agreement to keep quiet about sexual abuse she suffered decades ago at the hands of her stepfather, Wilke’s husband Ronald.
“It took her a minute to figure out who I was — then you see the panic set in,” Thomson said. “I really wasn’t going to say anything at all. It was just to see her.”
Wilke was eventually escorted out of the meeting and someone called Squamish RCMP to report a possible family dispute. “Nothing happened, so we left,” Staff Sgt. Jolaine Percival said.
Thomson said her stepfather was in the audience, but he didn’t recognize her.
This is the second time the family has done battle in the courts. In the 1990s, Thomson sued her mother and stepfather for damages resulting from childhood sexual abuse. She settled out of court for $ 33,000, agreeing not to discuss the case with anyone outside of her immediate family, close friends and therapists. She also agreed not to initiate a criminal investigation.
Then last fall, social media intervened. Thomson was on Facebook when she noticed her mother’s political campaign page — Wilke was running for council in a Nov. 19 byelection. Thomson was furious. “I guess in my heart I always hoped and thought she’d got some remorse, so maybe they were just living under a rock,” Thomson said.
She decided to defy the terms of the settlement and mailed out thick packages of court documents to Lions Bay Mayor Karl Buhr, the local emergency social services, Elections BC, the neighbourhood Block Watch, Lions Bay Community School, a Squamish radio station and Wilke’s opponent in the byelection.
Those packages included more than 200 pages of transcripts from when the Wilkes were questioned by Thomson’s lawyer in 1995.
In those transcripts, Ronald Wilke admits to repeatedly molesting Thomson and her sister. The assaults occurred in the 1970s and ’80s, beginning when Thomson was eight or nine years old and ending when she finally opened up to family members at age 13 or 14.
Eileen Wilke says in her examination for discovery that she kicked her husband out of the house for two weeks when she found out about the abuse. But when he called and begged to come home, she called a family meeting and asked her kids what they thought. During that meeting, she told them they’d lose their home if Ronald wasn’t there to help with the bills, according to the transcripts.
The arrival of the documents in Lions Bay caused a small stir, but Wilke was still elected.
Thomson was disappointed, but the real blow came when she learned that her mother and stepfather were suing her in B. C. Supreme Court, arguing t hat she should pay them $ 33,000 for breaking the terms of the settlement.
“I thought, this can’t be real,” Thomson said. She filed her response to the claim last week.
Her defence denies she breached the settlement, but also argues that if she did, that paragraph of the agreement should be considered void “in that it is on its face an attempt to stifle, or in practice would have the substantive effect of stifling, the investigation and/or prosecution of serious criminal offences.”
The settlement also stipulated Thomson would not go to police, but she recently decided to make a statement to investigators in her Ontario hometown about the abuse she endured all those years ago. A spokesman for Peel Regional Police confirmed an investigation is active.