Splitting hairs over ‘acrobatic’ law student
“It was the reverse table top yoga position. There’s nothing particularly ‘acrobatic’ about the table top position, is there?”
That’s Nadia Guo, in an email sent me over the weekend, correcting my description of her contorting flexibility as demonstrated in a photo posted on her professional escort — a.k.a. Dawn Lee — Tumblr account. Whilst simultaneously performing oral sex. With the caption: “I’m just your regular acrobatic hooker.”
Usually I place corrections or clarifications for a previous column at the bottom of a subsequent column rather than having the matter addressed by the Star’s Public Editor.
I take direct responsibility for my own mistakes. And that aforementioned table yoga position description was a mistake. So here is your correction, Nadia.
It also gives me the opportunity for a Take 2 dive into last Thursday’s Law Society “good character” hearing arising from complaints made by lawyers and other officials against Guo. The appellant has completed her articling phase, but is not yet called to the bar. That will depend on the reserved decision of this tribunal.
In the way of lawyers, Guo provided a litany of splitting hairs whinges about the column.
It should be noted, off the top, that Guo made no objection to revelations about her alternate life as a sex-trade worker, which is not on the table at the tribunal. A handful of readers were incensed about my purportedly “doxxing” Guo, though she doesn’t seem to mind that publicity and it was in the public realm already. To be clear: I have no issue with sex-trade workers and have advocated for them on multiple occasions. But as a prostitute, Guo gives a bad name to lawyers. And as a pending lawyer, Guo gives a bad name to sex-trade workers.
Guo was arrested — but not charged — in 2015 after flipping the bird to intake workers at a civil court clerk’s office. She’d been annoyed after waiting hours to be served. The incident escalated and Guo was removed by a security guard.
“I was never arrested for giving anyone the finger,” she writes.
“In my view, I was arrested for taking my phone out and trying to photograph a court officer’s badge. In the officer’s view, I was arrested for trespassing. However, I would counter that with the fact that I was outside the building at the time when he rushed me and knocked the phone out of my hand.”
Guo acknowledges she was fired from a 2014 summer job with a Toronto law firm. In the agreed statement of facts filed at the hearing, a senior member of that firm claimed Guo had posted confidential information about another partner, whom she’d mocked on Twitter for not knowing what a PDF file was; that there were “shouting matches” and “outbursts in the office” when Guo was on the phone with her mother, and that Guo’s “attire in the office was ‘totally inappropriate’ ” and “ultra-revealing”, which made staff “uncomfortable.”
In the email, Guo counterpunches, as is her wont. “When I was fired, none of these things were brought up. In fact, this employer had never said anything to me about my choice of office attire, nor that anyone in the office was ‘made to feel uncomfortable’ about it. Further, it was July and 35 degrees outside with humidex. If they had an issue with my hemlines, they should have spoken up.”
(As an aside and along a similar vein, Guo tweeted in August 2015 about a female lawyer in the courthouse being reprimanded for wearing “inappropriate” clothing when visiting a client in jail. “God forbid the jail guards, who probably have no lives anyway, comment on my wardrobe choice, like omg what a f- travesty.” This is in the addendum of tweets to the agreed statement of facts)
Guo’s core personality quirk, the common denominator in four formal complaints brought against her, is that she has no off-switch on social media and zero discretion.
It was Guo who turned to Twitter for a lengthy wrangle that arose from soliciting an unrepresented client in the courthouse who’d approached her. That, she argues, was not a “scoop,” nor was it admitted to as such in the agreed statement. “Apparently defence lawyers aren’t allowed to approach potential clients in the halls?” Among the lawyers who responded was veteran counsel Jordan Weisz, who pointed out several reasons why such client solicitation is wrong. “You will very quickly be known as a lawyer that does not have much of a moral compass. Or you will be seen as desperate for work or willing to compromise your principles to gain clients. It will take years to undo this impression that others have of you. It reinforces the image of lawyers as ‘ambulance chasers.’ ”
That devolved into a screed from Guo about “white male privilege” and lawyers who spend their weekends golfing or at their Muskoka cottages.
Guo: “experiment: you point out one thing about rich white man privilege and all the rich white men come out of the corners to cry and whine.”
To another respondent, John Hale, sent to his private address: “God do you people ever get sick of your presumptuous crap? you do realize you’re part of like a small minority of cloistered, old white men who have clearly never been challenged by someone younger and smarter than they. people who clearly didn’t grow up with social media or care for the value in free speech. a group of hypocrites who’d do anything to protect the freefalling status of their outdated profession. your time is almost over.”
Generating another of the complaints against Guo were her postings on a website she launched — Keep Resisting — which drew a sharp reprimand from the then-assistant deputy attorney general, criminal law division. Writing on behalf of the ministry, James Cornish asserted Guo had made “personal, inflammatory and egregious statements about the justice system, and about various individuals involved in it, including police officers, Crown prosecutors and judges.”
Cornish also complained that Guo had divulged contents of the Crown’s disclosure in a criminal case and “disclosed information shared by the Crown in the course of settlement communications …”
The website, continued Cornish, contained the names of Crowns and police officers who Guo alleged “have violated people’s Charter rights” and included the names of judges she labelled “Bad Justices.”
Indeed, the “Bad Crowns” segment named Ontario and Quebec Crown prosecutors who’d drawn Guo’s wrath, two “Bad Judges” and 49 “Bad Cops.”
For her objectionable activities on the CLA listserve, Guo was booted off by its executive director. “Hello all, please note that we have withdrawn Nadia Guo’s listserve privileges.”
Guo, on social media: “the best thing that came out of this whole CLA fiasco is now I know who I can trust in the defence bar and who I can tell to f- off.”
There isn’t enough space in a newspaper column to distil all the contents of the thick agreed statements of facts file. But I’ll mention one other incident that didn’t result in a formal complaint: Twitter posts about inefficient court clerks, who should be “fired and replaced with robots.” When one of those clerks confronted Guo in the courthouse, Guo snapped back — according to the ASF — “well, I guess I’d be upset if my job was redundant.”
She subsequently apologized for those tweets.
But here’s Guo, self-described as defender of all the poor schmos caught up in the pitiless justice system, about wanting to throw things at clients when they make inculpatory statements: “STFU already.”
Guo would do well to take her own advice.
Last thing. In my column I made reference to Guo’s redsoled Louboutin pumps, in which she had difficulty walking.
“I’m glad you finally learned how to spell Louboutin. Maybe one day you’ll own a pair.”
Perhaps so, if I charged $300 as a hooker.