The second administrator of Dis son Nom will have to reveal her identity. In a decision handed down on Tuesday, the Quebec Court of Appeal upheld the Superior Court’s decision refusing to grant anonymity to the creator of the whistleblowing page and requiring Dis son nom to provide Jean-François Marquis with the redacted denunciations received until August 2020.
Delphine Bergeron, the other administrator of the page, had chosen to reveal her identity to the To have to in September 2020. But the second administrator wished to preserve her anonymity since she says she was the victim of sexual assault and that she fears “the stigma and the consequences linked to such an experience”.
Since the start of the legal proceedings undertaken by Jean-François Marquis, this second administrator has been designated by the initials AA The man is suing Dis son nom and his administrators for defamation and is claiming $50,000 from them in moral and punitive damages after his name be found in August 2020 on the list of alleged abusers.
This public list – once hosted on Facebook and now on a website – was launched in the summer of 2020, just as a new wave of public denunciations of sexual misconduct were gaining momentum. This “official list of alleged abusers of Quebec” contains the names of hundreds of people targeted by allegations ranging from inappropriate words to rape recognized by the courts. These names were added to the list following denunciations made by alleged victims to Dis son nom.
Anonymity not automatic
In the decision of the Court of Appeal, Judge Geneviève Marcotte mentions that the mere fact of being the victim of sexual assault does not give “an automatic right to anonymity”. She recalls that it was AA who decided to reveal in court the stories of the sexual assaults that she says she suffered and that these “are not essential to the main argument of [Dis son nom] which consists in pleading the public interest to denounce the aggressions experienced by others”.
In short, it would be “unfair for the appellant AA to be able to take refuge behind anonymity when she is accused of having set up a process of public denunciation of alleged abusers without due diligence and in defiance of their reputation,” continued Judge Marcotte. Chief Judge Manon Savard and Judge Suzanne Gagné agree with their colleague’s decision.
In court, CBC / Radio-Canada and The Press had acted as intervenors in pleading for AA to reveal its identity. The two media had recalled “the primordial nature of publicizing the proceedings and the important role of the media as a ‘transmission belt’ to inform the public of the legal proceedings”, writes Judge Marcotte.
Communications destroyed?
In addition, the Court of Appeal confirms that Say his name will have to give Jean-François Marquis all the denunciations received until August 2020 by redacting the names of the alleged victims. This one wishes to demonstrate that the administrators of Say his name did not set up a rigorous verification process before adding a name to the list.
“If there is a public interest in denouncing the aggressors, its demonstration inevitably passes through the highlighting of a fair treatment of sufficiently credible and reliable denunciations”, writes Judge Marcotte, specifying that the trial judge will have to look into this question.
The judges of the Court of Appeal say, however, that they were informed by Me Pierre-Hugues Miller, the lawyer for Jean-François Marquis, that the administrators of Say his name “would have destroyed the evidence concerned by the order”. “However, the allegation of destruction of evidence is impossible to confirm in light of the content of the appeal file,” said Judge Marcotte.