A former physical education teacher at a special school for young people with speech or deafness disabilities has been sentenced to 40 months in prison for luring two students using a teenage girl’s fake Facebook account in the purpose of extracting intimate photos of his victims.
The scheme put in place by ex-teacher Frédérick Bergeron in early 2020 to attract two of the students from École Joseph-Paquin required a significant degree of planning and manipulation. By creating the false account of a 15-year-old girl in the name of Jenifer Poulin, the accused came into contact with a first teenager.
The boy who suffers from a language disorder and an autism spectrum disorder has developed a romantic relationship via social media with Jenifer, alias Frédérick Bergeron, who asks him for photos of his penis.
Then refusing to provide other explicit images, the 14-year-old was threatened by Jenifer to broadcast the intimate photo.
The boy’s mother, emotional, came to tell all the consequences of this extortion on her son. “He abused his naivety and his vulnerability […] he blackmailed him into not talking,” she told the court. Her son started self-harming and suddenly had suicidal thoughts.
First butterflies
However, this whole preamble was aimed at getting in touch with another student. The 29-year-old man, still through Jenifer, then approached the second victim, a 15-year-old girl who suffers from deafness.
The victim saw Jenifer as a confidante, confessing to her in particular that she was in love with her physical education teacher.
Mixing real life and fake account, Frédérick Bergeron encouraged the victim to get closer to him. “You were the first normal guy who was interested in me, a 15-year-old disabled girl,” the victim wrote in a letter read by prosecutor Andréanne Sirois.
“You made me feel my first butterflies, I was ready for anything for you, far from suspecting that these butterflies were poisoned,” she added in her letter.
Her mother indicated that her daughter did not see herself as a victim and that she wanted to be present for the sentence in order to say “goodbye” to her former teacher.
Before sending the accused to the shadows for 40 months, Judge Jean-Louis Lemay spoke to the man who now works in construction and who undertook real work on him. “For you, Mr. Bergeron, it was a game, for them it was learning about life,” said the judge.