Lowering the bar
Jesse Chiavaroli once owned three bars in Hess Village. An investigation by The Spectator’s Susan Clairmont has uncovered allegations of sexual assault, violence and unpaid bills against the friend of chef Manny Ferreira
When he skipped town, Jesse Chiavaroli left a trail of debt and sexual assault allegations behind.
One Hamilton woman accuses Chiavaroli of drugging her, sexually assaulting her and stealing her wallet. Another says he has a history of using the bars and nightclubs he operated as a place to meet women and have sex with them. It is a pattern that is now under scrutiny by police.
No charges have been laid. Yet another woman has filed a lawsuit against him alleging he slapped her backside so hard she needed surgery.
In small claims court, a Hamilton judge ordered Chiavaroli to pay thousands of dollars he owed another local business.
Now that trail leads from
Hamilton all the way to Victoria, B.C., where police are investigating Chiavaroli after multiple allegations of sexual assault surfaced on social media a few weeks ago.
More than a dozen women from Victoria and Hamilton have contacted police with complaints about Chiavaroli.
While the Victoria Police Department has appealed to
complainants to come forward, it has not publicly named Chiavaroli. The Spectator has independently verified he is the subject of the investigation.
Chiavaroli, 42, once owned or operated three nightclubs in Hess Village; Ora, Trust and Heist. Before that, he operated Cache, a bar in St. Catharines.
The Spectator has also reported close connections between Chiavaroli and Manny Ferreira, a wellknown Hamilton chef who was the subject of a recent Spectator investigation into multiple allegations of harassment, sexual harassment, sexual assault and indecent exposure.
Ferreira, 42, owns Mezcal, a taco and tequila spot on James Street South. Downstairs, he has Uno Mas, a tapas and cocktail lounge.
The Spectator has reached out to Ferreira several times in the past for comment. His lawyer responded with a statement that says Ferreira denies all the allegations against him, which range from slapping butts to grabbing a woman’s crotch, sending an unwanted video of himself masturbating to an employee, exposing himself to a customer in his restaurant and having intercourse with a woman who says she told him “No.”
The Spectator’s repeated attempts to reach Chiavaroli have been unsuccessful.
Chiavaroli and Ferreira were friends who liked to party. Together they owned a now defunct nightclub called Baroque on John Street South.
Disturbing behaviour
Stories told to The Spectator about their behaviour are disturbing and paint a picture of some of the darker aspects of the restaurant and nightclub industries.
One 36-year-old woman says the first time she met Chiavaroli was at Ferreira’s apartment on Herkimer Street.
It was during the afternoon on Sept. 3, 2018.
“He was on a couch,” she says. “His nose was bleeding and there was coke everywhere.”
The woman has asked that her name not be used because she fears retaliation from Chiavaroli’s friends and wishes to protect the privacy of her family.
Ferreira also “had cocaine in front of him,” she says. There was a woman there as well, but she wasn’t doing drugs.
Before long, Chiavaroli was “completely passed out,” she says.
Toward the end of that year, she met Chiavaroli again when she and a girlfriend went to Uno Mas for a drink.
Ferreira gave the women free drinks then asked her to come into the kitchen. He took her into the walk-in freezer where they were joined by Chiavaroli.
Ferreira allegedly asked her to show her breasts to Chiavaroli. She complied and she says Chiavaroli fondled her.
“I felt special,” she says. “I felt pretty. I felt like I was getting attention.”
That night, she and Chiavaroli “exchanged
numbers.”
Some night after that, they “hooked up.” It was consensual, she says, but it also “pushed boundaries.”
She describes it as “rough sex” that included slapping and choking.
Once, she went to Baroque with a girlfriend and Chiavaroli gave them free drinks, she says.
Chiavaroli then “brought us into the bathroom and asked us if we wanted to do cocaine.”
Her friend “did a line” and both women consensually performed oral sex on Chiavaroli, the woman alleges.
During that encounter, a female staff member knocked on the door. The woman says Chiavaroli “lost his shit” and yelled at the worker.
“It was so scary,” the woman recalls.
Another time, Chiavaroli invited her and a friend to spend the day on his “yacht” docked at Port Colborne.
When she arrived, she found there were eight other women aboard and two older men.
They headed out into the lake. Booze and cocaine were plentiful, she says.
“Girls were getting plastered, drunk.”
One girl was so intoxicated she fell into the water, she says, and Chiavaroli had to jump in to rescue her.
The party was over after that. On the way back to shore, the woman says she was told by one of the older men on the boat that it belonged to him. She says he vowed to never take Chiavaroli out in it again.
The next time she saw Chiavaroli would be the last.
She dined with a girlfriend at a seafood restaurant in Burlington and they were joined afterward by Chiavaroli for drinks.
At one point, the friends went to the bathroom together, leaving their drinks on the table.
They returned, continued drinking and the woman says the next thing she remembers is waking the following morning, alone, in a room at the hotel adjacent to the restaurant.
Her wallet was gone, she was bleeding, and there were bruises all over her body — particularly her inner thighs, she says.
She believes Chiavaroli roofied (drugged) her drink. The Spectator has no way to verify that claim.
She called Chiavaroli and she says he told her they had consensual sex, and that his wallet was stolen too. She says he blamed the friend who had been with them. However, that friend said she left and didn’t go to the hotel, the woman says.
The woman says she went to Joseph Brant Hospital and had a rape kit and a toxicology test done.
She says the toxicology report showed she had “the date rape drug in her system.”
The Spectator has not seen the toxicology report.
We have, however, seen photos of the woman’s bruising. Some pictures show a hospital ID band on her wrist.
She says she thought she consented to having her rape kit “submitted” to police at the time. However, police never contacted her.
“I don’t know what happened. I don’t have faith in our police. Nothing ever gets done. They don’t take you seriously. You just learn to be quiet.”
The Spectator asked Halton Regional Police Service if it has any complaints about Chiavaroli.
“We’re not able to find any investigations that match your inquiry,” was the response.
After the night at the hotel, she heard from Chiavaroli one more time.
In a text, he asked her to lend him $20,000. He needed it right away, but would cut her a cheque for $25,000 which she could cash in a few days.
The Spectator has a copy of the text.
“I’m a business man and you’re a business woman but we both have unique needs so I want to make you an offer,” it reads. “The meeting I had today went a little sideways.”
She declined. Soon after, she says, Baroque closed down.
And Chiavaroli seemed to vanish. “I thought he was dead,” she says. She was surprised when he resurfaced amid sexual violence allegations in Victoria, where he may also be known as Jesse Chaves or Jesse Chavez.
“I felt vindicated,” she says. “I always doubted myself.”
The ‘life of the party’
Another woman who knew Chiavaroli personally and professionally in the Niagara and St. Catharines area says he moved out west in 2019.
The woman, who knew him from 2006 to 2016, does not want to be identified because she is afraid of retaliation from Chiavaroli’s friends.
“When he was younger and good looking, he didn’t have a hard time getting women,” she says. “He had that charm that lured women in.” He also liked to party.
“He was fun. Always willing to have a good time … The life of the party.”
Plus, “he was a very big cocaine addict, to the point where his nose would be bleeding. It was really bad,” she says.
Chiavaroli was involved in a long string of businesses — bars, restaurants and nightclubs — and giving cocaine and booze to women for free was part of his game to get them to have sex with him, she says.
“He flirts with girls. He kind of grooms them.”
Women in Victoria have told the media that while Chiavaroli was working as a bartender at Chuck’s Burger Bar, he would give them free drinks and invite them to his apartment.
(Chuck’s Burger Bar was originally a Hamilton restaurant on Locke Street that relocated to Victoria. The Spectator has tried repeatedly to reach owner Chris Preston without success.)
Here in Ontario, Chiavaroli would “take the girls into the washroom” of his businesses and have sex with them, the woman says, acknowledging the sex appeared to be consensual.
“He loved the thrill of the secretive, rough play,” she says.
The lawsuit
Chiavaroli was so rough with Danyelle Markland-Smith that she needed surgery, according to a lawsuit.
The now 30-year-old Hamilton resident has filed a $675,000 civil suit against him.
(Markland-Smith and her family successfully sued Hamilton Police Service after officers broke down their door in 2011 while everyone
was sleeping in a botched drug raid meant to target someone else.)
In 2016, Markland-Smith was putting herself through Mohawk College, where she was studying civil engineering technology, by working as a server in Hess Village clubs. She got to know Chiavaroli. “Immediately I saw a womanizer,” Markland-Smith says. “He was super friendly. Very flirtatious. He kisses everyone on the cheek, on the forehead, on the hand.”
He was also “always intoxicated,” she alleges, either on alcohol or cocaine. Markland-Smith says she has seen him use copious amounts of both.
She got a job working on the patio of Ora — one of Chiavaroli’s businesses. Markland-Smith and the other women working there were expected to wear sexy clothing.
“All the girls I was working with, all were pretty much wearing lingerie,” she says.
When patio season closed, she was laid off.
On Jan. 20, 2017, she went to Ora as a customer on a Saturday night and wound up staying after hours to help Chiavaroli close. There was another man and woman still in the club.
She was asked to drive everyone to Chiavaroli’s home because she was sober. She agreed.
Markland-Smith describes standing with her left elbow on the bar, her right hip jutting out, “the way you might be waiting for someone who is taking too long.”
That’s when Chiavaroli walked behind her and slapped her “on my right hip and butt.”
“I was stunned because he’d never put his hands on me before.” “Jesse, what the hell?” she said. Markland-Smith drove everyone to Chiavaroli’s place on the south Mountain. She didn’t want to join them in doing cocaine, so she took an Uber home.
“On Monday, I couldn't sit in class,” Markland-Smith says. “I was so uncomfortable.”
That night, she went to St. Joseph’s hospital.
Her injuries were so severe she was put on an IV for seven days, she says.
Later, she required surgery. Details of Markland-Smith’s injury or her surgery were not shared with The Spectator.
“When I realized the pain wasn’t going away” she filed a police report against Chiavaroli for sexual assault, but a charge was not laid. She filed a lawsuit on Jan. 18, 2018. The statement of claim, which has not been tested in court, names Chiavaroli as Jesse Chiava — one of the alternate names The Spec has learned he uses — as well as four numbered companies, two of which were operating as Ora. It is unclear who is behind the numbered companies.
The statement identifies Chiavaroli as a manager at Ora and says “he sexually harassed and/or sexually assaulted the plaintiff … when he violently struck her buttocks in an unwarranted and sexualized manner without consent” causing “disfigurement of her buttocks requiring surgical intervention.”
It calls the incident an “act of battery” and says Chiavaroli “failed to take any reasonable steps to control his known propensity for erratic and sexually inappropriate behaviour.”
It claims “he consumed alcohol and/or other intoxicants excessively to the point where his judgment and ability to act appropriately was impaired.”
The document lists claims against Ora, including that it “fostered a workplace wherein sexually inappropriate behaviour was embedded within their work culture.”
When a statement of claim is filed, it must be served on the defendant.
Process servers hired by Ross and McBride law firm tried to serve Chiavaroli.
Court records show that on 16 occasions from Jan. 24, 2018, to Dec. 1, 2018, they went to four different addresses looking for him, including Ora, Baroque, his home in St. Catharines and his girlfriend’s place in Toronto. They visited as early as 1 a.m. and as late as 11:30 p.m. They left messages at four cellphone numbers belonging to Chiavaroli.
Along the way, the process servers were told repeatedly by Chiavaroli’s staff that he would be back soon. They also learned the liquor licence for Ora was suspended, Chiavaroli’s drivers’ licence was suspended and he had been evicted from his apartment for non-payment of rent.
As a last-ditch effort, lawyer Brian Simo, who represents MarklandSmith, says they went before Justice Dale Parayeski on April 9, 2019, to file a motion for an amendment allowing them to serve him “via alternate means.”
They wanted to serve Chiavaroli by social media.
Parayeski granted the amendment and, on April 11, 2019, Chiavaroli was served via Facebook and Instagram.
Simo says he is not the first lawyer in Ontario to do that, but it’s very rare.
“The matter remains before the courts and none of the parties has responded to the statement of claim,” says Simo.
In April 2019, Chiavaroli’s Facebook account, which has since been deleted, had an intro that said: “Living life as if everything is rigged in my favour.”
It wasn’t until a few weeks ago, when a friend alerted MarklandSmith to the allegations about Chiavaroli in Victoria, that she and Simo knew he was living out there.
Unpaid bills
Martinus Geleynse knows what it’s like to chase after Chiavaroli.
As former editor of Urbanicity magazine, he was introduced to Chiavaroli in February 2015 through the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce. They struck a deal for Chiavaroli to buy advertising for Ora in the publication.
“It seemed really stand up and really good,” says Geleynse.
“He was really gregarious,” says Geleynse. “Very friendly. Very polite. A real charmer. A big guy with an imposing presence.”
But soon Geleynse says red flags started appearing. The first was a “too good to be true” event Chiavaroli said he was putting on involving Raptors basketball stars at his club, Heist. He promised Geleynse interviews. None of that materialized. Then there were the unpaid bills. Geleynse and his staff went to Ora and his other clubs many times to try to collect, but they were always told “you just missed him.”
In December 2016, Geleynse sent Chiavaroli a notice that he was taking him to small claims court. Chiavaroli never showed up for the hearing and a judge ordered him to pay Urbanicity $3,751.21.
Urbanicity chased Chiavaroli for a while, trying to get its money. In the end, it gave up.
“I guess he was in Victoria,” says Geleynse.