In my column from last ThursdayI wrote about Robert Miller, this individual who allegedly set up a system to sexually exploit minors with the complicity of several individuals, some of whom had the task of concealing his actions and others of feeding his network.
With nearly forty potential victims in this affair, I wondered about the silence of the DPCP and the SPVM since the revelation of this sordid story. What are they doing? Are there any ongoing investigations?
An alleged victim of Miller contacted me following this column. She wanted to assure me that several women, including herself, had indeed filed criminal complaints. I’m going to call him Sacha.
She is waiting…
Sacha was allegedly recruited at age 14 by another of Miller’s victims. She met him at the Queen Elizabeth hotel. Very quickly, he would have been asked to recruit other girls. That’s what she’s going to do.
Sacha therefore filed a complaint just after seeing the Radio-Canada report, in February 2023. The process of finding the right police station where to file her complaint would have been, for her, a real obstacle course, not to mention the line sexual exploitation emergency that didn’t work.
Since then, she has been waiting for charges to be filed. It took her, she said, several months before meeting a prosecutor.
I won’t go into detail about how she claims to have been treated by the police… Anyway, Sacha tells me she almost gave up everything, but she resisted. At the very least, she wants Miller prosecuted, even if he is old and sick. She wants this to be done in the name of all those teenage girls who have likely become broken women.
Under influence
Sacha is part of the category of victims who can give rise to ambivalent feelings when we don’t know how a sexual exploitation network works. It is a perverse system that quickly takes control of victims through fear, money or love, often all at once, to cause them to become accomplices and commodities. Very often, both at the same time.
Sacha is therefore part of what the justice system does not say, but thinks very strongly: an imperfect victim. In this category you can include those whose memory is failing; drug users; those who refuse to say too much out of fear or who lie about certain details that are too humiliating.
However, when Sacha tells me about his saga with the justice system, I am amazed. I believed that we had made great progress in the treatment of victims. That we understood that with this type of case, there are no perfect victims!
What do prosecutors do?
Sacha tells me that she is not the only one to have filed a criminal complaint. However, more than a year later, why are there still no charges?
One of my sources in this case told me that certain victims who participated in reports would have been pressured by prosecutors and police officers to sign authorizations allowing them to have access to these interviews granted to medias. Why do this? What is the goal?
It makes no sense! What more do they want to lay charges?