Cellphone flashpoint at YouTuber’s sexual assault trial
Device raises questions about intentions, consent
For a moment — during what a YouTuber calls consensual sex and a McMaster University student says is sexual assault — the film- maker had his phone out.
It is unclear if Jack Densmore made a sex video of the student. Yet, the incident has become a flashpoint at his trial.
The phone raises questions about Densmore’s intentions, the possibility of consent and the difference between Densmore and Jack Denmo, the name he uses online.
These allegations stem from a first date on Aug. 5, 2020. Densmore was 26 and well-known for videos — some of which have been viewed 10 million times — in which he hits on drunk university students, signing their breasts and encouraging them to have sex with multiple partners during unsanctioned homecoming (HoCo) parties.
Densmore is banned from several university campuses, including McMaster.
The student was 19 and had just finished her first year at Mac. Her identity is protected by a publication ban.
They matched on Tinder and she went to his Hamilton Mountain home to meet for the first time. She arrived late and they didn’t go for a hike or dinner or drinks, as they had discussed. Instead, they wound up on his bed, watching TV.
They kissed, and she was OK with that, she testified.
She was not OK, however, with him biting her breasts so hard it hurt, she said. Or inserting his fingers into her vagina and causing pain.
Densmore forced her to perform oral sex on him, she said. And he forced her onto her stomach and penetrated her vagina without her consent, she said.
The student testified that while she was being made to fellate Densmore, she looked up and saw his cellphone in his hand. “What are you doing?” she asked. “I’m filming you,” he said.
“I didn’t say you can do that. I don’t want you to do that.” “OK. No worries,” he said.
He put the phone down.
The student testified she does not know if he took a video or not.
Mark Fahmy, the lawyer representing Densmore, emphasized in his cross-examination that the student had asked his client to stop filming. And he immediately complied.
He suggested the student could have asked him to stop any activity she didn’t want, and Densmore would have complied.
“Everything you’ve asked him to do he’s done, right?” said Fahmy.
He then said the reason Densmore had his phone out was to make a “consent video” — a video confirming the student was willingly agreeing to sex.
“At one point he was trying to tell you ‘I’m making a consent video,’ ” Fahmy said.
“No,” the student answered. Fahmy asked if she had ever seen one of Densmore’s YouTube posts about consent videos. She said no.
Fahmy queued up a Densmore video. He introduced it by saying it was “his Denmo character saying to people at HoCo ‘Be careful when hooking up, doing a day kill. Make a consent video.’ ”
Densmore often refers to “day kills” in his videos, a term he uses for a daytime random sexual encounter. Before Fahmy could start the video, however, Superior Court Justice John Krawchenko stopped him and said he would not allow it.
Some of Densmore’s YouTube videos school young men on how to pick up women. He advises them to make consent videos to avoid allegations of rape.
In a matter separate from his current trial, involving a different woman, Densmore is facing more sex crime allegations. He is charged with sexual assault, voyeurism and distributing intimate images. That trial is pending.
Ironically, though Fahmy had been about to show one of Densmore’s consent video clips to the court in an effort to suggest that was what he intended to do with his phone, the lawyer had earlier gone to great lengths to separate Jack Densmore, regular guy, from Jack Denmo, “a semifamous YouTube guy.”
“You know in those videos he was making, it was a character, not his actual self, right?” Fahmy asked the student.
“No,” she said. “In my mind, the way he was portraying himself online was his self.”