Prosecutors began and concluded their case Monday in the trial of a Montreal man accused of fomenting hatred against Jews.
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Gabriel Sohier-Chaput, who used the online nickname Zeiger, faces one count of willfully promoting hatred in connection with a January 2017 blog post on the far-right neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. Mr. Sohier-Chaput, 35, pleaded not guilty to the single charge.
Mr. Sohier-Chaput admitted during the legal proceedings to be Zeiger, to have published articles for The Daily Stormer in 2016 and 2017 under this pseudonym, and being partly the author of the post for which he is the subject of a lawsuit.
Crown prosecutor Patrick Lafrenière argued in court Monday that Mr. Sohier-Chaput was the sole author of the short blog post, which called for Nazi imagery to be distributed “everywhere” in order to upset the as many Jews as possible.
Essentially, the evidence shows that around January 2017, the accused was the editor of ” The Daily Stormer “, a far-right publication, Mr. Lafrenière told the court in his opening statement.
“What the court will have to determine is whether we are talking about willfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group,” he added.
The blog post on the far-right website references a 2017 Global News article about Nazi posters appearing in New Westminster, British Columbia, and a Holocaust survivor’s reaction to the hateful pictures. The blog post contains racist images and comments about Jews.
If convicted, the charge carries a maximum sentence of two years.
The charge against Mr. Sohier-Chaput follows a criminal complaint against B’nai Brith in May 2018 — the same month, a series of articles in theMontreal Gazettedescribed him as a leading neo-Nazi figure in North America. He made a first court appearance at the end of 2020.
Two Crown witnesses appeared before Quebec Court Judge Manilo Del Negro on Monday, both members of the Montreal police’s cybercrime unit. They testified on the first day of the trial that they searched for content online under the name Zeiger in 2018.
Agent Sébastien Pelletier-Langlois said his search revealed more than 800 articles penned by the pseudonym Zeiger. He said the article related to the accusation against Mr. Sohier-Chaput was still online last week.
But when cross-examined by the defence, neither officer said they could say for sure whether the post was edited, posted or edited by someone else, or who added the racist imagery.
“He acknowledges having written the article, in part,” defense lawyer Hélène Poussard told the court on Monday.
The defense will have its turn to present evidence when the case resumes on Tuesday.