Political power couple goes head-to-head with publisher over article
It ought to be perfectly clear who is on the side of the angels here and who isn’t.
In the corner of goodness and light are Warren and Lisa Kinsella, canny political operatives, fighting against a right-wing, barely literate, cartoonish and altogether queasy-making local newsletter called Your Ward News (YWN).
In the obvious darker one are James Sears and LeRoy St. Germaine, respectively the editor-in-chief and publisher of YWN.
Sears is a defrocked Ontario doctor whose licence to practice was revoked in 1992 after he pleaded guilty to sexual impropriety with a patient (according to one report of the day, the impropriety consisted of Sears masturbating in the bathroom of the patient’s home while on a house call), who is also a self-styled professional pickup artist who calls himself Dimitri the Lover and an ardent anti-vaxxer.
There is considerably less information in the public domain about St. Germaine, but he is now a 76-year-old with a shiny shaved head.
The Kinsellas allege that Sears and St. Germaine issued death threats against them.
The alleged threats came in the summer 2017 issue of YWN, in a rambling piece written by Sears about a Children’s Aid Society investigation into a complaint about him, and in an article by St. Germaine, which allegedly “put a bounty,” as Warren Kinsella said repeatedly, on his head.
The latter article in fact offered to pay informants only for information that would result in either a successful prosecution or civil suit against the Kinsellas, a sort of one-man Crime Stoppers. Warren Kinsella insisted, however, that the phrase “a bounty on his head” to him means information.
The CAS investigation, Sears wrote in the former piece, had never before been disclosed publicly because “there was the chance that some hothead who cares deeply about me and my family would lose it and do something illegal, like bludgeon the Kinsellas to death … I chose to turn the other cheek and let enough time pass for the people who love, would give their lives for, or would go to jail for me and my family, to react with cool heads.”
(Interestingly, Warren Kinsella Monday told Crown attorney Matthew Giovinazzo that while he didn’t make the complaining call to the CAS about Sears, he knows who did “but it wasn’t me.”)
Sears and St. Germain have pleaded not guilty, and according to Chris Murphy, one of the court-appointed lawyers who represents the pair, the threat wasn’t serious, but rather part of a vicious “battle for publicity” the various parties have been waging for years and in which the Kinsellas gave as good as they got.
For instance, in his crossexamination of Warren Kinsella Tuesday, Murphy showed him a tweet he apparently retweeted in 2015. The original tweet, a blog of some sort, described Sears as a “neo-Nazi sex offender” and publicized his address, car and licence plate.
Yet Kinsella insisted the alleged death threat was “completely unprovoked” and said unequivocally he would never tweet out such private information. Faced with his retweet of the original blog written by someone else, Kinsella said he’d merely tweeted the link to the blog and had never before read the actual article.
When Murphy pressed him on what on earth he thought Sears meant then two years later with his reference to Kinsella publicizing his private information — did he think it “came out of the blue and that Sears was off his nut” — Kinsella replied, with his usual sublime sense of himself, “I do think he’s off his nut, yes.”
Similarly, when Murphy asked him about a piece he wrote and published on his website last year, in which he described not only Sears and St. Germaine as Nazis, but also their distinguished then-lawyers as “the Nazis’ lawyers,” Kinsella denied trying to demean the lawyers, said he was merely describing them, as a reporter would, and in the next breath said the piece was commentary.
This, Murphy told Ontario Court Judge Dan Moore, was improper for a lawyer, and Kinsella is still a lawyer, to do. “It’s clear he’s disparaging their legal counsel.”
That piece was about a hearing which successfully saw Canada Post ordered to stop delivering Your Ward News; the Kinsellas were part of the group that pressured the Liberal government to act.
Warren Kinsella also wrote Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders, seeking advice on how to proceed against the newsletter; both Kinsellas have launched civil actions against Sears and St. Germaine, though only Lisa Kinsella’s remains alive, and it became evident quickly that the pair haven’t hesitated to use their influence to try to see YWN shut down and put out of business.
Even the history to the criminal case is interesting. When the Kinsellas first complained to Toronto Police, the matter was investigated, but two different Crown attorneys who were asked for advice concluded there wasn’t sufficient evidence.
That led to the Kinsellas pursuing the matter as a “private prosecution,” and only when a justice of the peace found there were grounds to proceed did a Crown prosecutor formally become involved. Many other such private prosecutions aren’t so lucky.
Warren Kinsella was asked by Murphy if he wasn’t concerned that by drawing attention to YWN and Sears and St. Germaine and their supporters — and the alleged threat to him and his wife — he wasn’t spreading their views and indeed heightening the alleged threat.
Kinsella serenely replied that he has always believed “it’s better to shine a light on cockroaches so that they scatter.”
His righteousness was palpable, his condescension (“Is there a question there?” and “But we’re here to discuss another matter aren’t we?”) prickly.
Kinsella has about 30,000 Twitter followers; Sears ran for the Toronto mayoralty this week, gained 680 votes and finished 29th of the 35 candidates for the job.