Cyberbully gets six years in prison
Revenge campaign of harassment spanned 13 years, 38 victims
Robert James Campbell was sentenced Thursday to six years in prison for shredding the reputations of targets around the world in what an Ottawa judge described as an obsessive, 13-year online campaign of fear.
Some of his victims who sat in on the hearing had told the court that he had them living in fear. One victim detailed hateful harassment that turned his world upside down, and another remains so unnerved he’s thinking of uprooting his family and leaving Ottawa for good.
One of Campbell’s targets was cast online to colleagues as a sex fiend whose daughters worked as prostitutes when they weren’t organizing for the Nazi party. Campbell, now 42, created fake email accounts and online profiles of his targets so it would appear the emails, including bogus invitations to their colleagues for sex parties, had originated from the victims.
Justice Ann Alder said the vicious campaign warranted a significant sentence and noted that Campbell, who launched the online harassment in a misguided revenge plot, has expressed remorse. Calling the case unsettling, Alder told court: “This is cyberbullying at its highest.”
The judge also noted that the online crimes were not sexually-motivated, and gave Campbell 20 years to pay victim surcharge fees on the more than 60 crimes to which he pleaded guilty last November — including identity theft, stalking and defamatory libel.
Campbell, who has obsessive compulsive disorder, started the online campaign the day he quit his job at a software firm. He became so obsessed that he didn’t leave his west-end apartment for the first seven months.
He presented some of his targets to the world as child predators and exotic dancers. In all, he terrorized at least 38 known victims in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, 18 of them in Ottawa.
Campbell didn’t address the court at Thursday’s sentencing hearing, but in an interview with the Citizen last November days before he pleaded guilty, he expressed shame and apologized: “I want to take the opportunity to apologize wholeheartedly to the people I have hurt. I hope in time they can forgive me.”
He said he was resigned to serving time and said a sentence at a federal penitentiary would afford him the help he needs.
“As I pay my debt to society, I will continue to seek help with my mental health issues. My goal is that upon my release I can become a productive member of the community,” he said.
Campbell was credited for time served, so his actual sentence is four years and 11 months.
It is his first prison sentence and the judge wished him luck. She said that although Campbell would take it all back in a heartbeat if he could, it was much too late for that.
His cyberbullying extended to his targets’ children and their grandparents, and though it lasted 13 years, it was far from fading as Campbell actually escalated the online attacks in the final few years before his arrest on the morning of July 31, 2014.
“I got carried away and became desensitized to what I was doing,” he told the Citizen.