(Montreal) After winning a high-profile human rights and free speech case in the Supreme Court of Canada last year, Mike Ward avoids a libel suit brought by Jérémy Gabriel’s mother.
Posted at 1:27 p.m.
A Quebec Court judge dismissed the defamation lawsuit brought by Sylvie Gabriel against the comedian, in connection with a joke he made between 2010 and 2013 about Jérémy Gabriel, who was a singer at the time. well-known handicapped teenager.
His mother demanded damages of $84,600 from Mike Ward, arguing that the joke he had made at the expense of Jérémy Gabriel had caused him significant harm.
Judge Manon Gaudreault dismissed the lawsuit on May 30. She argues that the one-year deadline for filing a defamation suit had passed — even taking into account all the time this case has spent in other courts.
Judge Gaudreault, however, rejects in passing the comedian’s assertion that the prosecution of Mme Gabriel constituted an abuse of process and an excessive use of the legal system.
Photo Hugo-Sébastien AUBERT, LA PRESSE archives
Jeremy Gabriel
Judge Gaudreault’s decision is the latest step in a long legal saga between the Gabriel family and Mike Ward, a saga that has gone all the way to the Supreme Court.
In a very divided decision (five against four), the highest court in the country ruled last October that the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal did not have jurisdiction to render a judgment on the complaint of discrimination filed by Mr. Gabriel, since it was more of a defamation case.
Jérémy Gabriel has Treacher Collins syndrome, a congenital disease characterized by deformities of the skull and face. According to the Supreme Court, the comments made by the comedian about Jérémy Gabriel during a show a few years ago did not meet the criterion of discrimination invoked by the applicants.
When Mike Ward brought up Jérémy Gabriel in his shows, the teenager was a well-known singer, who had appeared alongside Celine Dion and the Pope at the Vatican.
In 2016, the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal ordered Mike Ward to pay Jérémy Gabriel $35,000 and $7,000 to his mother in moral and punitive damages, ruling that they had both been victims of discrimination. The Court of Appeal then upheld the verdict and endorsed the payment of $35,000 to the young man, but canceled the damages that were to be paid to his mother.
The case went to the Supreme Court, pitting artistic expression, in the form of dark satirical comedy, against the protection of human dignity. The highest court in the land found that the singer and his mother had chosen the wrong forum – the Human Rights Tribunal – to bring their lawsuit, since it was not a case of discrimination, under charters, but of defamation.
Like his mother, Jérémy Gabriel also filed a defamation lawsuit against Mike Ward in the Superior Court; he claims damages of $288,000. The comedian’s lawyer, Julius Grey, said he will ask the court to dismiss the lawsuit, at a hearing scheduled for June 29. Me Gray will argue that this is yet another abuse of process.