'Creeper Hunter' on trial over personal remark about prosecutor
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The words blurted out by Jason Nassr during an intense cross-examination were like “a punch to the stomach.”
“I know you have a kid named (child’s name),” Nassr, creator of the now-defunct Creeper Hunter TV website, said to the assistant Crown attorney questioning him on Jan. 31, 2023, at an often confrontational trial that ended with him convicted by a jury of extortion, harassment by telecommunications and two child pornography counts.
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As soon as Nassr made that comment, Superior Court Justice Alissa Mitchell stopped the cross-examination, asked the jury to retire to their jury room, then tore a strip off Nassr, warning him he could be charged with contempt if he kept it up.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor was left stunned and shaken. “It stopped me dead in my tracks,” he said at Nassr’s latest Superior Court criminal trial Monday – this time facing the rarely laid charge of intimidating a justice participant.
What followed was a lingering fear that a man he was prosecuting for online activities would track down his family through social media and other means and create trouble for them.
“You have to remember that by then I had been dealing with him for a couple of years and I’d viewed hours and hours of video and other evidence gathered to realize that Mr. Nassr is really good at tracking down people,” he said.
“So immediately, my biggest fear is what he was going to do to my kids, my wife, my family. I felt very exposed.”
Nassr, 45, of Windsor is no stranger to a London courtroom. His five-week marathon trial in 2023 delved into his online activities as a self-styled vigilante who posed as young teenage girls in attempts to ensnare people he claimed were child predators.
Unlike his first Superior Court trial, which went on for five weeks in 2023, assistant Crown attorney Thomas Mack closed his case Monday after the prosecutor, his only witness, testified and Nassr’s defence lawyer, Ingrid Grant, told Justice John Stribopolous the defence would not be calling any evidence.
The 2023 trial detailed how Nassr would hop on adult dating sites purporting to be a young adult woman, and once he grabbed someone’s attention, would move the discussion to text messages and reveal “she” was really a 12- or 13-year-old girl.
Then he would keep up the highly sexualized conversations and sometimes arrange to meet in person. Those potential hook-ups were really gotcha moments where Nassr would show up with a camera and confront his target. He would edit, narrate and produce episodes on his Creeper Hunter TV website, including the names, ages and hometowns of the targets.
Some of those episodes prompted police investigations after Nassr’s viewers – not Nassr – would contact the authorities.
But his first trial was triggered by texts and phone calls with a 49-year-old London-area man who was confronted by Nassr 10 months after he didn’t show up for a meet-up. The man denied any sexual impropriety, but Nassr still used the conversations as fodder for the website.
The man took his own life. That sparked a police investigation that uncovered an enormous amount of data and writings at Nassr’s apartment that fit the definition of child pornography.
Nassr was given a two-year conditional sentence, with 18 months served in house arrest, to be followed with two years of probation. He is appealing the convictions.
Stribopoulos heard Monday that Nassr and the prosecutor had some previous history before the trial when Nassr was called to testify at the Ontario Court preliminary hearing of one of his targets. The prosecutor said the child porn charges were eventually withdrawn because other than Nassr’s online episode, the Crown didn’t have the raw data of text exchanges between Nassr and the target.
Nassr hinted before his trial that he wanted to pursue an abuse-of-process application, arguing the prosecutor was trying him for activities that had been encouraged before. But an agreement was worked out with Nassr’s former defence lawyer to not proceed with the application.
But it was clear during Nassr’s testimony that he still wanted to discuss it, and specifically talk about the prosecutor, leading to his defence lawyer leaving the case.
Nassr faced off against the prosecutor for whom he was now showing clear signs of disdain, especially after the prosecutor suggested Nassr got sexual gratification from his activities and that he enjoyed “the highly sexualized dirty talk” where he role-played a young teen girl talking to older male strangers.
He also suggested that the conversations and the meetings “turn you on.”
Monday, Mack played that part of the audio transcript to the judge, while Grant, the defence lawyer, played even more of it in cross-examination.
The court transcript returned to the exchange between Nassr and a man in the United States, ultimately leading to the target sending images of himself performing a sex act. There were brief glimpses of Nassr shirtless, sweaty and breathing heavy.
Nassr raised his voice and told the Crown that he was “trying to pervert this into something that it’s not and became angry.”
Then he said the prosecutor’s child’s name.
The prosecutor said the comment was “a punch to the stomach.” He left the courtroom to compose himself, breathe, thought briefly about leaving the case, then decided he needed to see it to the end, because to stop “will be a sign of encouragement to (Nassr).”
Nassr said later he’d overheard the prosecutor say his child’s name while in conversation with someone. The prosecutor told the court he does not talk about his family and maintains a separation between his professional and personal lives. His family doesn’t have social media connections because of his job. And, he said he was extra careful in front of Nassr.
Grant, in cross-examination, suggested the prosecutor was intentionally trying to make Nassr angry. Grant noted that Nassr told the court he had a mental illness and that the prosecutor had an ethical obligation to leave the case if he was fearful.
The prosecutor disagreed. “I do my job . . . I was just trained to keep going.”
Closing arguments are expected on Tuesday.
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