The trial of the man accused of making threats and criminal harassment against the columnist of Montreal Journal Sophie Durocher, began on Wednesday. While the columnist said she was frightened and shocked by the accused’s remarks, the latter instead pleaded an error of judgment due to anger.
“I didn’t think it would get this big,” said the accused Martin Larouche in his testimony. Earlier, columnist Sophie Durocher explained that she had filed a complaint with the police to “stand up” to the threats that many journalists were receiving at the time.
At the heart of the trial is a post written by the accused on August 2, 2022, as he was returning from work. “Durocher deserves to be slapped so hard that she falls into a coma for a couple of years,” the warehouse manager commented on the social network X, formerly Twitter. Mr. Larouche was responding to a thread about violence against unvaccinated people during the health crisis.
Columnist Sophie Durocher testified that she felt “deeply troubled” by the remarks of this man, whom she had never heard of before. “I collapsed, I was deeply shocked by the violence of the remarks. It was a violence to which I was not accustomed, I was in tears,” the columnist recalled in court, on the verge of tears.
She was also filled with a sense of incomprehension in the face of the violence of the remarks. “I have difficulty accepting that someone could suggest or imagine that a journalist who does her job deserves to end up in a coma for several years. The violence of those remarks inhabited me for a certain time,” she confided before Judge Alexandre Dalmau.
Faced with these threats that she considers “serious”, Sophie Durocher publicly asked on X that Martin Larouche apologize and withdraw his comments, failing which she will file a complaint with the Montreal Police Department (SPVM).
Martin Larouche responded to him a few days later in a private message, claiming to have deleted the tweet. He acknowledged that his comments had no place and that his words, written “in a fit of anger”, were his way of showing his frustration against “violence in front of the unvaccinated”.
He suggested to Sophie Durocher that they make a “joint mea culpa”: “I want you to acknowledge your responsibility in the “violent” climate of the last two years,” the accused wrote, referring to the altercations between vaccinated and unvaccinated people during the COVID-19 pandemic. For Ms. Durocher, this message is a way for the accused to reiterate his threats.
“The violence of the remarks affected me so much that I told myself that at any moment, someone could take action. It’s not normal for me to walk around my city afraid of getting slapped,” said Sophie Durocher, before adding that she and her husband, columnist Richard Martineau, have been taking comprehensive security measures for several years. They have hired security agents from the firm GardaWorld to monitor their residence on three occasions and do not receive their mail at home, “so that no one knows our address,” said Ms. Durocher.
The columnist of the Montreal Journal was then subjected to a close cross-examination by the defence lawyer, Me Marie-Michelle Côté. She notably referred to a text published by Sophie Durocher on August 19, 2022 on the website of the Montreal Journalwhere the columnist revealed details about the accused’s private life.
The defence lawyer also suggested that the messages published by Martin Larouche were not directly addressed to Ms. Durocher and that the latter did not take into account a second message of apology that the accused sent her.