Windsor's 'Creeper Hunter' loses Charter fight in rare intimidation case
Jason Nassr’s defence of his next criminal battle has suffered a major constitutional setback.
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By: Jane Sims
LONDON, ONT. — Jason Nassr’s defence in his next criminal battle has suffered a major constitutional setback.
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A Superior Court judge decided Tuesday that testimony given two years ago by the creator of the now-defunct Creeper Hunter TV is not protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and is admissible at his upcoming trial on a charge of intimidating a justice system participant.
That’s because what he said in the witness box forms the basis for the criminal charge.
Nassr, 44, of Windsor, was convicted of harassment by telecommunications, extortion and producing and distributing child pornography by written word in February 2023 following a marathon trial that delved deeply into his activities as a self-styled vigilante who used questionable tactics to identify people he said were child predators.
Nassr would pose as young adult women on adult dating sites, then, after catfishing someone, would move the conversations to text messages and reveal “she” was actually a 12- or 13-year-old girl.
Highly sexualized conversations and sometimes an invitation to meet in person would follow. Those rendezvous would end with Nassr showing up with a camera and confronting the target. Those meetings would then be published on his website with the target’s name, age and hometown. There were 100 episodes.
Some episodes resulted in police investigations after Nassr’s viewers contacted authorities, and Nassr was sometimes called upon for information.
But the suicide of a 49-year-old London area man, confronted on the phone by Nassr 10 months after he didn’t show up to a planned meeting, prompted a police probe of Nassr’s tactics.
The investigation unearthed an enormous amount of data and writings during a search of Nassr’s apartment that met the definition of child pornography.
At the end of a jury trial that took years to get off the ground — mostly because of Nassr’s inability to keep a lawyer and his endless legal arguments — he was found guilty of the harassment, extortion and child porn charges. He received a two-year conditional sentence that included 18 months of house arrest.
While he appeals those convictions, Nassr still faces a charge stemming from his conduct while testifying at the lengthy, sometimes contentious Superior Court trial.
In March 2023, Nassr was charged with a rare count of intimidating a justice system participant for a comment he made during a heated exchange while under cross-examination.
Justice James Stribopoulos, who’s presiding at the three-day, judge-alone trial set for this summer, heard pre-trial Charter arguments this year where Nassr contended his previous testimony should be inadmissible at his next trial because of Charter protections — and that would have ended the prosecution because the comment forms the entire basis of the charge.
Nassr had chosen to testify, and amid his cross-examination his lawyer was excused because of a breakdown in the solicitor-client relationship.
It was after the lawyer had withdrawn that Justice Alissa Mitchell cautioned Nassr “not to call into question the bona fides of the prosecutor or how he had behaved or conducted the case.”
While he was being questioned, it was suggested to Nassr that he enjoyed posing as a teenage girl and engaging in “dirty talk” with adult males. The exchange between Nassr and the prosecution became heated.
Then Nassr said out loud, in the presence of the jury, that he knew the name of one of the prosecutor’s young relatives.
The jury was excused and Mitchell told Nassr “not to mention anything personal about the prosecutor, to maintain civility and not to raise his voice,” Stribopoulos said in his decision Tuesday.
“She also reminded him that she could find him in contempt if he failed to follow her directions,” he added. The trial continued and Nassr was never found in contempt by the judge.
But a month after the jury’s guilty verdicts, Nassr was charged for saying the name of the young person. “The Crown alleges that by doing this, Mr. Nassr intended to provoke the state of fear on the prosecutor and impede him from performing his duties.”
Nassr argued Section 13 of the Charter should make his trial testimony inadmissible because it protects witnesses who give incriminating evidence at one proceeding from having that same testimony used against them at another — except in cases of perjury or giving contradictory evidence. In other words, it guarantees immunity from prosecution for self-incrimination.
But that protection is for witnesses who describe events that happened previously and who can’t then be confronted with having that testimony used against them, Stribopoulos said.
“It does not afford protection to an accused whose prior testimony ‘forms the very substance of the offence with which the accused is now charged,’” he said, quoting from appeals court precedents.
To use the Charter as Nassr suggested “would grant every witness the immunity to commit offences while testifying, effectively transforming Section 13 of the Charter from a shield to a sword that witnesses could wield with relative impunity,” Stribopoulos said.
“The bargain at the heart of Section 13,” he said, is that if a witness testifies truthfully, the state can’t turn around and use the evidence against them.
“A bargain that enabled witnesses to commit crimes while on the witness stand with impunity would be entirely unconscionable,” Stribopoulos said.
Nassr’s defence lawyer, Ingrid Grant, had also argued that alleged offences committed during testimony could be dealt through contempt citations. Stribopoulos said he was “hard-pressed to understand” how, if Section 13 protects witnesses’ testimony from subsequent use, that same testimony could be the foundation of a contempt finding.
Also, “when the witness is also the accused, there may be compelling reasons for a trial judge to refrain from resorting to the contempt power, especially in jury trials,” Stribopoulos said.
A judge deciding not to use a contempt citation “hardly seems like a valid reason to excuse a witness from no responsibility or crimes they commit while testifying,” he said.
Nassr heads to trial Aug. 11.
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