After suffering a setback in the Supreme Court last October, Jérémy Gabriel and his mother persist and are suing comedian Mike Ward again for the jokes he made about the young singer’s disability more than ten years ago now. They are claiming $372,600 from him.
In the complaint filed Tuesday morning at the Quebec City courthouse, Jérémy Gabriel’s lawyers acknowledge that the Supreme Court ruled that Mike Ward’s remarks were not discriminatory in nature, but conclude that the judgment of the highest court in the country still leaves room for other civil remedies.
Jérémy Gabriel thus asks Mike Ward to pay him $288,000 for the damage caused to him by the jokes about him, when he was still a minor. As for his mother, Sylvie Gabriel, she is suing the comedian for $84,600, reiterating that the teasing of her son also had a devastating effect on her.
In interview at Duty, Mike Ward’s lawyer, Me Julius Grey, called this new lawsuit “relentlessness”. He says he intends to file a motion to dismiss, believing that there is prescription and that the lawsuit “is not tenable”.
In his show “Mike Wark s’eXpose”, presented from 2010 to 2013, the king of black humor in Quebec had cheerfully made fun of the physique of Jérémy Gabriel, who has Treacher-Collins syndrome, and had given questioning his singing skills.
The young man and his mother had replied in 2015 by addressing the Commission for Human Rights and Youth. The trial court agreed with them by ordering Mike Ward to pay Jérémy Gabriel $35,000 and $7,000 to his mother.
This judgment had been roughly confirmed in 2019 on appeal, but the amount planned to compensate Sylvie Gabriel had been canceled.
Mike Ward, who has always made this case a political fight for freedom of expression, had taken his case to the Supreme Court, which, in a split decision, had finally agreed with him this fall.