Her name is Laurence Gratton. While she was a teaching student at the University of Montreal in 2015 and 2016, she began to be harassed online. She was not alone: several students in her class were receiving the same type of messages, all of them threatening.
Messages were always sent from fake accounts.
Laurence Gratton’s story is in the recent documentary I salute you bitch on cyberviolence targeting women in Canada, France, Italy and the United States.
In the story of these students from the University of Montreal, not only were they threatened, but they had also acquired the certainty that the person who had targeted them was… in their class.
It took months of lobbying and research for their fears to be taken seriously. On the side of the University, nothing to do, we considered that it was a private dispute. On the police side, it took a lot of insistence for the SPVM to finally take matters into their own hands.
The harasser was eventually arrested. He was indeed a student in the same program as his targets. He pleaded guilty in 2018 after 116 days in pretrial detention, in addition to promising to comply with a range of conditions, such as that of doing therapy.
The SPVM investigation focused on what the stalker did to three of the students. Laurence Gratton was not one of them, but she provided documentation to the investigator, in addition to access to her accounts. The case left Laurence deeply disturbed: we are talking about years of being harassed and threatened.
After 2018, Laurence was never bothered online again…
Until the movie I salute you bitch come out in the room.
Indeed, on October 31, Laurence received a message of threats and insults. A photo accompanied the message, taken from the film Chills, that of the masked killer armed with a knife. With these words: “Are you scared tonight??? »
I also add that the threatening message had been sent from a fake account in the name of Laurence’s niece. This detail is not trivial: Laurence told me that the man convicted in 2018 seemed to have access to private information about his targets. Threats and insults often had a factual basis, drawn from their intimate life. The students deduced that their torturer had managed to infiltrate their mailboxes.
IMAGE FROM LAURENCE GRATTON’S FACEBOOK PAGE
Screenshot of the threatening remarks received in Laurence Gratton’s Facebook messenger
And there, on October 31, a new threatening message, sent from a fake account bearing the name of Laurence’s niece, information that is not public. Everything, in the form, reminded Laurence of the messages received from her stalker in 2015 and 2016. Same tone, same abuse of punctuation.
Is the one ? For Laurence, it’s obvious: yes. Of course, she can’t prove it. Still, that day, his world cracked a bit, the fear returned. She called 9-1-1.
Two Terrebonne police officers responded to his call and told him there was nothing they could do.
No big deal, Laurence went to the police station the next day to plead her case, convinced that common sense would prevail. She explained everything to the agents: here is the message I received, the modus operandi is the same one that targeted me and other girls in 2015 and 2016, the guy was convicted in 2018 so I would like to press charges…
Response from the agents: we will not take the complaint, there is no chance that we will trace the person…
And buy a surveillance camera, Madam…
(She recorded the conversation.)
Laurence then contacted me to tell me his story and the refusal of the Terrebonne police to even take his complaint.
I was flabbergasted: online threat cases can be difficult to investigate, sure, but not always. In the absence of an obligation of result, the police still have an obligation of means. Not taking a complaint, in this very particular context, seemed to me… particular.
So I contacted the Terrebonne police, telling myself that there were in this refusal the seeds of a potential chronicle: a woman harassed and threatened by a guy who pleaded guilty to charges of threat and harassment in 2018 begins to receive threatening messages again… And the police tell him to buy a surveillance camera, refusing to take his complaint.
The morning of my request for an interview, I received a response from the Terrebonne police: Laurence’s complaint had just been admitted and passed on to the Criminal Investigations Bureau…
I don’t want to spit in the soup, but the police should have the lucidity to take this crap seriously without a journalist taking an interest in the case.
I have no way of knowing if the man who pleaded guilty to charges of stalking and threatening three of Laurence’s classmates in 2018 is the one who sent her that same threatening message on October 31. 2022.
I just know that if the police don’t take cyberstalking seriously, a phenomenon that ruins the lives of the women who are its targets, nothing will change. The police alone cannot stem the tsunami of online hate that targets women, but the police are part of the solution to stemming impunity.
Today, Laurence Gratton and the two documentary filmmakers from I salute you bitchLéa Clermont-Dion and Guylaine Maroist, are in Quebec City to file a petition signed by nearly 23,0001 people and calling for an end to impunity for cyber-violence, in particular through police training.
What day is tomorrow, by the way?
Yes, it’s December 6th.