Woman says ‘Sorry if I wasn’t a perfect victim’
Lawyer for man charged with Twitter harassment spars in court with accuser
TORONTO — Why, the Twitter trial is beginning to resemble Twitter itself: The dialogue is shrill, some of the players are increasingly ubersensitive and derision is the name of the game.
There was Chris Murphy, the lawyer for accused stalker Gregory Elliott, asking Stephanie Guthrie, the alleged victim of Elliott’s alleged harassment, reading aloud a tweet of his client’s.
“Blaming the majority of normal men for rape … is wrong,” Elliott, a 53-year-old Toronto man, wrote back in September of 2012. “Rapists are not normal men; they’re crazy. Why not blame the mentally ill?”
It hardly rang in my ears as the ravings of a perverse woman-hater, nor apparently in Murphy’s, because after reading it for Ontario Court Justice Brent Knazan, Murphy asked, in his reasonable way, “That’s a pretty good point?”
In the witness stand, Guthrie snorted, yelled, “Are you kidding me?”, pounded her fist and then announced, “I know lots of normal men who have raped; I have been raped by normal men.”
If he was as gobsmacked as I was by that, Murphy didn’t show it; he simply asked if that meant Elliott’s was an offensive point of view.
“Of fensive?” Gut h r ie replied. “I would say dangerously misguided.”
Now it was a thousand degrees in the Old City Hall courtroom, where the AC had to be turned off for anyone to have a prayer of hearing anyone else, and, as Knazan later remarked, the proceedings were on the sixth day (albeit spread over months) in the fifth hour.
The inference was Guthrie, who has been testifying most of that time, must be drained and losing her patience.
But still, the exchange was an effective illustration of Murphy’s point — that Elliott’s real sin was to take issue with Guthrie’s politics.
In other words, he wasn’t harassing her; he wasn’t trying to scare her; he was disagreeing with her.
Elliott is believed to be the first person in Canada to be prosecuted for criminal harassment via Twitter. He and Guthrie, a prominent feminist and activist, met online in the spring of 2012 when she advertised for someone to do a free poster for an event she was organizing for witopoli, the Women in Toronto Politics group she co-founded.
Elliott responded; they even met once IRL (in real life), for dinner, where she says now she recognized immediately a “creepy glint” in his eye but nonetheless continued to have a professional relationship with him for a short time because she was hoping for that poster.
Plus, as she put it with a weary sigh, “We live in a world that forces women to second-guess those feelings … ‘Did I really feel creeped out?’ So I second-guessed it.”
Interestingly, Guthrie considers feeling creeped-out a “form of fear.” And fear — fearing for her safety — is an essential element of the offence with which Elliott is charged.
Criminal harassment is any unwanted conduct — whether actually following someone or deluging her with unwanted tweets — which causes the target to reasonably fear for her safety.
And the perpetrator, in this case Elliott, must know that his conduct made the target feel harassed or be reckless as to whether she did or not.
There’s no allegation that Elliott ever made sexual comments to Guthrie or the other two complainants in the case, or that he even threatened any of them. The investigating Toronto police officer, Det. Jeff Banglid, already has testified to this, and Guthrie has acknowledged it herself.
The two had a major fallingout over how Guthrie dealt with a 24-year-old Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., man named Bendilin Spurr.
He’d created a repellent facepunch game, wherein the user could punch a picture of the feminist blogger Anita Sarkeesian until his screen, and Sarkeesian’s face, turned red with blood.
Guthrie had, in her own words, sicced the Internet on Spurr — tweeted to prospective employers to warn them off and sent the local newspaper a link to the story about the game.
Elliott had disagreed with the tactic, rather mildly in the virulent debate this public shaming sparked and which saw Guthrie subjected to a torrent of hate mail, and tweeted that he thought it “was every bit as vicious as the face-punch game.”
What followed was that Guthrie blocked him on Twitter, but he kept on top of her movements by watching the hashtags she followed and shadowing the events she organized. She believed he was obsessed with her, in part because of her politics, but said, “It doesn’t make it any less harassing or stalking because he was obsessed with my politics,” and not, say, her looks.
She was clearly tired with Murphy’s questions, not shy about giving back as good as she got.
“Have we not been over the fact that it was the volume, Mr. Murphy? The frequency of tweets?” she said once.
When he asked her to point to one — just one — that had instilled fear in her, she snapped, “That’s not how feelings work, Mr. Murphy. They develop over time.” When the lawyer suggested she wasn’t fearful, that she’d made fun of Elliott and taunted him, she sighed theatrically and said, “There’s no perfect victim, Mr. Murphy, and no perfect way to respond to being stalked. Sometimes you have to fight back a little bit …. I’m sorry if I wasn’t a perfect victim.”
Murphy then suggested that what Elliott had been doing was defending himself, and his views, when he was being attacked on Twitter by her and the other complainants. Wasn’t he entitled to do that?
“He’s entitled to defend himself to the world, Mr. Murphy; he’s not entitled to do it to me.”
“No matter what you say about or to him?” Murphy asked.
“Not to me,” she said.