HE TRIED TO DESTROY ME
Woman testifies she was ‘always looking around’ due to ex-husband’s online harassment
A woman who is accusing her ex-husband of trying to destroy her life by harassing her through emails and on a website began her testimony in court Monday.
Crown counsel Mark Myhre told a B.C. Supreme Court jury that the campaign of harassment by Patrick Fox of Burnaby against Desiree Capuano of Arizona arose from a bitter custody dispute involving their son.
At the end of the dispute, Capuano had custody of the boy, who cannot be identified due to a publication ban, Myhre told the jury.
“Mr. Fox stated that it was his goal to do everything in his power to make her life as miserable as possible, hopefully so miserable that she would commit suicide,” he said.
Myhre said that the accused’s goal was carried out through email communications with Capuano and through a website that he had created. He said the accused also sent four handguns registered to him to an address in California.
The prosecutor said that he would play an audio tape of Fox speaking to an RCMP officer, admitting to shipping the guns to the U.S. and to being the author of the website and that it was his intention to “ruin her life.”
Fox, who apart from having a court-appointed lawyer to cross-examine Capuano is self-represented, has pleaded not guilty to one count of criminal harassment and one count of possessing firearms in a place where he wasn’t authorized to do so.
Court heard that the couple met in a bar in January, 2000, when Fox was going by a different surname, and got married in August of that year. Their son was born in September, 2000, and the couple was separated in 2001.
Capuano, 36, a mother of two, told the jury that the tone of many of the emails her ex-husband sent her was demanding, mean and aggressive.
In an email sent to her in July, 2013, seeking an “amicable” resolution to their dispute, Fox, who is six years older than Capuano, demanded that she return their son immediately or face “repercussions,” she said.
The email threatened that every past and present employer of hers would be scrutinized and her life “picked apart,” with every person she’d had a relationship with found and questioned, said Capuano.
“How did (Fox’s) words make you feel?” asked Myhre.
“Scared,” replied Capuano, who was testifying behind a screen ordered by the judge that prevented the accused from making eye contact with her. Fox had a small TV screen placed in front of him that allowed him to see his ex-wife sitting in the witness box behind the screen.
Capuano told the jury that she believed Fox when he said in an email at one point that he didn’t think anything would be more important than destroying her and got the impression he’d hired an investigator to search for her.
“I was always looking around, always. I didn’t have anything to hide. But thinking somebody was following me, makes you look around.”
Capuano, who works in IT, said Fox contacted her employer and many of her work colleagues were wrongly left with the impression she was a stripper and a drug user.
She said she sent Fox an email asking that he cease and desist, claiming that she was being harassed, but Fox replied that it was not technically harassment and she had no basis for making such a claim.
Capuano said she discussed the problem with her employer and the employer was supportive but because of the harassment she was seen as more of a security threat and in 2015, when the company laid off some workers, she was let go even though she’d been there for seven years.
She said she contacted the Phoenix police after discovering the existence of the website and the harassment stopped “for a little while” but it eventually was resumed.
Earlier, Myhre told the jury that they would be hearing a lot about the interactions between the couple and that there was a potential to be sidetracked.
Capuano is expected to continue her testimony Tuesday.