Documentarian Sébastien Rioux can breathe a sigh of relief: his cyberstalker Peter Poncak was sentenced Thursday to a nine-month prison sentence, accompanied by three years’ probation and several conditions of release.
“ It’s a weight less on the shoulders. There, it’s really over. It’s a story that lasted more than four years in my case, but I think that with a sentence like that, we will dissuade many people from doing the same. And I know it will set a precedent. It’s one of the first causes of online harassment in Quebec,” says Mr. Rioux in an interview with The Press.
The main interested party is a documentary filmmaker and musician from Trois-Pistoles. At the end of 2019, he decided to file a police complaint against Peter Poncak, who had sent him a meme from the film on social networks Takenwhere we read “ I will find you, and I will kill you » (in French: “I will find you and I will kill you”).
At the time, police found Poncak and questioned him, but no charges were filed. However, it was after this first complaint that everything changed, the columnist of The Press Isabelle Hachey.
In early 2020, Mr. Rioux began receiving a torrent of threats, insults and hateful messages on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, as well as by email. The artist was at a point where he even dreaded sitting in front of his computer in the morning, starting his day. Mr. Rioux finally filed a complaint a second time in the fall of 2020. An investigation was opened again.
Nearly a year later, on August 4, 2021, Gatineau police, supported by the Montreal cybercrime squad, arrested Peter Poncak, aged 38, after linking his accounts to an IP address. Poncak was finally found guilty last March, but his trial subsequently slowed down. In April, his sentence was postponed until February due to court congestion.
An exemplary sentence
At the end of the phone, Thursday, Sébastien Rioux said he was simply “serene”: he will finally be able to move on to something else in the months to come. “I was expecting one or two months in prison, so I won’t hide from you that at nine months, I was very surprised. The judge wanted to give an exemplary sentence. She placed a lot of emphasis on the seriousness of the growing scourge of hatred on the Internet. And I salute him,” adds the Pistolois.
“From the beginning, the reason why I came out publicly was that I wanted to raise awareness about the subject. Now my goal is to turn all of this into something positive. In particular, I will be giving conferences on cyberbullying in schools soon,” he concludes.
Peter Poncak already had an extensive criminal record before his trial. He had notably been found guilty of harassment on six other occasions, but also of failure to comply with orders and of assault.