Former Gee-Gees equipment manager pleads guilty to sexual assault, harassment and luring
Cameron Lyons targeted teenage girls as young as 14 on social media under the guise of recruiting them as models or high-priced escorts.
Instead, they faced exploitation ranging from rape to online harassment.
The 40-year-old pleaded guilty Monday to a dozen charges — including sexual assault, criminal harassment, luring and attempting to traffic a person under 18 — involving eight victims over a decade.
Judge Marlyse Dumel heard how Lyons, a former volunteer equipment manager for the University of Ottawa’s football team, used MSN Messenger, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr accounts and aliases to meet and exploit teenage girls.
The first was in 2006 and the last in 2016 when Lyons contacted a Facebook Messenger account he believed belonged to a 17-yearold girl and offered her as much as $2,000 to meet up with “generous” men, court heard.
But it was really a covert account belonging to city police who arrived to arrest Lyons at the Rideau Centre based on his description that he’d be wearing a maroonand-grey sweater.
Officers then connected the Facebook accounts to an IP address linked to Lyons’ home address and computers, hard drives and phones found in his room.
A string of victims appeared in an agreed statement of facts read in court Monday. Lyons often bowed his head or covered his face with a hand as he listened.
He found an 18-year-old victim on dating site Plenty of Fish in March of 2009. Offering to help her make money as an escort, he had her perform a sex act in a hotel stairwell “to prove herself.” Then he sexually assaulted her in an east-end motel after photographing her in lingerie he’d bought her.
She told him she didn’t want to have any further contact with him but he sent her messages until she changed her phone number and moved.
He sent Facebook messages to a girl — who repeatedly told him she was 15 — offering her cash to model and have sex with clients at hotel parties in March 2015. He then had sex with her twice in hotel stairwells, including having her “work off ” a $100 loan.
Another 15-year-old girl reported that in October 2015, Lyons contacted her on Facebook and met her to discuss purported modelling jobs. Then he sent her texts trying to get her to work as a prostitute. She kept saying she wasn’t willing to have sex for money but Lyons continued to contact her, posing as a would-be client offering cash and cocaine.
In October 2016, investigators released information about the case in a bid to find any other victims. Three young women who knew one another came forward.
Lyons, who is in custody, will face a sentencing hearing in June.