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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Kinky Cop Pics Spur Libel Lawsuit

VANCOUVER, B.C. (CN) - A Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman claims in court that a self-styled police informant and a lawyer defamed him, setting off a media onslaught involving photos taken from his profile on a social networking site for fetishists.

James Charles Brown sued A. Cameron Ward and Grant Wakefield, in B.C. Supreme Court. Ward is a Vancouver barrister and solicitor. Wakefield, of New Westminster, occupation unknown, knows the John and Jane Doe who are the only other defendants, according to the complaint.

Brown claims that Wakefield made fake profiles on Fetlife.com to gain access to Brown's private material posted on the site, including photos and transcripts of online conversations.

Brown claims Wakefield breached the site's terms of use and breached Brown's privacy by leaking the material to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and the Vancouver Sun.

Wakefield provided the material to a columnist at the newspaper, and a number of the photos show Brown "engaged in consensual acts," according to the complaint. Other photos depict "a person of unknown identity, who is not the plaintiff, engaged in what appear to be acts of [sic] simulated acts of non-consensual sexual violence, including images of woman [sic] being abducted, hog-tied, and sexually assaulted," the complaint states.

Wakefield characterized the photos as being "reminiscent" of convicted serial killer "Robert Pickton's crimes against women," the complaint states.

Brown says he played a "minor role" in the Pickton investigation in 1999.

He claims that Wakefield also started a Twitter account under a false name, posting several messages accusing Brown of corruption, sexual assault and of having "connections" to Pickton.

Brown says the Twitter posts also accused him of hiring an expensive law firm to silence victims and witnesses.

After an article in the online magazine Erotic Vancouver criticized media outlets for misidentifying Brown in several of the lurid photographs, Wakefield posted comments on the site and emailed the article's author, nonparty Reive Doig, according to the complaint.

In the comments and the email which he allegedly sent under an alias, Wakefield defamed Brown by claiming he was blackmailing senior officers and that Brown was a "violent and sadistic criminal who preys on young runaways," the complaint states.

The story got major play from local media and was complicated by Wakefield's alleged links to a blog website for disgruntled members of the R.C.M.P.

The B.C. Civil Liberties Association this week decried the force's decision to seize Wakefield's computers in a rare criminal libel investigation and fought to have the search warrant behind the seizure unsealed.

According to the Civil Liberties Association, Wakefield faced death threats after leaking the story, and appears to have been targeted for providing the information first to the R.C.M.P., which had initiated its own investigations of Brown's activities.

Brown claims defendant attorney Cameron Ward repeated the libel in blog posts which referred to him as a "sexual sadist" and a "sexual deviant" with possible criminal ties to serial killer Pickton.

Ward represented victim's families at a public inquiry into the Pickton case, and has refused to remove the postings from his firm's website, Brown says.

Brown claims Wakefield and Ward and the two Doe defendants maliciously defamed him "to expose the plaintiff to contempt, ridicule and hatred, and to cause other persons to shun or avoid the plaintiff, and to lower the plaintiff's reputation in the eyes of right-thinking members of the community, all of which has in fact occurred."

Brown is represented by Bryan Baynham, with Harper Grey, of Vancouver.

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