Jail time for posting nude pics of ex

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This article was published 30/05/2022 (941 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Manitoba man who posted nude photos of his ex-girlfriend to Twitter as an act of revenge will spend nine months in jail.

Provincial court Judge Robert Heinrichs handed the man a custodial sentence due to his “swift and perverse course of action in wanting to inflict harm.”

The man, identified by the initials S.A., had sought a conditional sentence of 18 months, but Heinrichs wrote his action “requires a clear message of denunciation” that a conditional sentence couldn’t satisfy.

The man pleaded guilty to a charge of knowingly publishing the intimate images, after he found out in March 2021 his on-and-off-again ex-girlfriend had been in a relationship with a different man a year earlier, when the pair had not been together.

After they argued on the phone, the man called her about 200 times and texted her 150 times, including messages in which he threatened to kill the man she’d been “cheating with.” He said he’d expose the victim by posting her nude photographs “everywhere,” Heinrichs wrote in the May 16 decision.

He posted 15 nude photos of her on his personal Twitter account, Heinrichs wrote, noting the offender had around 434 followers on the social media account at the time. He also directly tweeted the photos to the victim.

She called police within an hour and the man was arrested hours later.

He was released on an undertaking that morning and one of the first things he did was text the victim, asking her to drop the charges. That was a breach of a no-contact condition he had agreed to at the time of his release, Heinrichs wrote.

He deleted the photos only after police showed up to arrest him.

The judge pointed out there’s no way to know how many people saw the photos, saved them or shared them.

While the victim didn’t submit an impact statement to court, the judge wrote that the harm could be both “perpetual and personal.”

The man, who is in his 20s, had no prior criminal record and had pleaded guilty early on. A pre-sentence report found there’s a low risk to reoffend.

The man will serve an additional 15 days for breaching the undertaking, as well as two years of probation following his sentence. He was ordered not to contact the victim or use social media.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @erik_pindera