Glen Canning, father of Rehtaeh Parsons, leaves provincial court in Halifax on Thursday, Jan. 15, 2015. A second young man who pleaded guilty in the child pornography case involving his daughter was sentenced to a year of probation. Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan HALIFAX — It was like a galling new version of the ancient American comic strip that ran in some Sunday newspapers in the 1900s, but whose punchline gag endures — the strip’s two awkward Frenchmen frozen in an excess of politesse.
“After you, Alphonse.”
“No, you first, my dear Gaston.”
And this was how the notorious picture of Rehtaeh Parsons — naked from the waist down, hanging out a window after she’d thrown up, unaware that the half-naked boy behind her was looking over his shoulder to a camera and giving a thumbs up — came to be taken.
According to the boy, after Rehtaeh had collected herself and purportedly invited them to pick up where they’d left off, he and his friend did an Alphonse-and-Gaston as they bickered about who would go next with the then-15-year-old.
The boy was then just 16 himself. He pleaded guilty to one count of distributing child pornography last month and was sentenced Thursday to a year’s probation, with orders to get counselling and stay away from alcohol. The other boy earlier pleaded guilty to production of child pornography and was given a conditional discharge, with a year’s probation.
Their identities are protected by the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
A woman holds a photo as several hundred people attend a community vigil to remember Rehtaeh Parsons at Victoria Park in Halifax.[THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan) ]
In an exclusive interview this week with Postmedia News, the boy in the picture, along with his parents, sat down to talk for the first time about what happened that night. The boy says he and the other boy and Rehtaeh were having consensual sex when “you could tell she was getting ready to get sick, so we hopped up, I opened the window and said ‘You can get sick here,’ so she said ‘OK,’ and got sick out the window.”
Rehtaeh went to the bathroom, and when she returned, the boy said, “We had a smoke out the window.
“We were like laughing and stuff, we were behind her, like giggling and stuff because she had her shirt on and no pants and she was just like hanging out the window.
“We were kind of laughing about the night, she was like, ‘You guys can keep going,’ and me and (the other boy), we’re like pointing at each other.
“Like, ‘You go ahead’ and he said ‘You go ahead,’ so I was like whatever, I go on (Rehtaeh). I just posed for the picture and he took his cellphone out and took it.”
The family of a bullying victim is considering a charter challenge that would argue the ban on the victim’s identity infringes on their right to freedom of expression. [Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press/Files]
Now just-turned 20, the boy had sent the picture, on two different occasions about two weeks apart, to two friends, both of them girls.
It is but one of the contradictions of the case that the recipients of the picture, who passed it on to others at Cole Harbour District High School, who passed it on to still more, were themselves female.
Another of the contradictions is that the boy Judge Lenehan said had “lit the wildfire, so to speak” is such a slight young man, bright, well-spoken and even capable, albeit in that awkward-bordering-on-ghastly way of the young man, of being thoughtful.
At Cole Harbour High, in Grade 11, he was on the football team and by his own shy admission, a “pretty popular” kid.
He is also brave.
He read a statement in court at the end of his sentencing, apologizing to Rehtaeh’s family and his own and admitting he’d made “a huge mistake.”
“I will not live with the guilt of someone passing away, but I will live with the guilt of sending the picture.”
And he reminded the packed courtroom, “I have pled guilty to distributing child pornography, not a sexual assault” and said “I never played a part in the bullying (of Rehtaeh), nor would I.”
That was a courageous challenge to the public narrative that has taken root here and far beyond Nova Scotia.
***
On April 4, 2013, after a quarrel with her boyfriend, an upset Rehtaeh returned home and attempted to hang herself in the bathroom. She suffered brain damage and was removed from life support three days later.
Her mother took to Facebook, telling the world, “Rehtaeh is gone today because of the four boys that thought raping a 15-year-old girl was OK and to distribute a photo to ruin her spirit and reputation would be fun.”
There were never four boys involved, and as a friend of Rehtaeh’s who was at the house that night told police and as Rehtaeh’s own messages suggested, there may never have been a sexual assault. There certainly wasn’t a reasonable prospect of conviction.
Rehtaeh Parsons is shown in a handout photo from the Facebook tribute page ‘Angel Rehtaeh.’ [Handout/The Canadian Press]
(“Did some things” is the boy’s code for sex, at least in telling his story in front of his parents.)
The next day, Rehtaeh was with that girl and the boys. They were all drinking heavily — straight vodka shots — and at some point, the two boys and Rehtaeh headed to the bedroom.
Police later told the boy they estimated he’d had 11 shots, Rehtaeh eight. He said at no time did he believe she was so drunk she didn’t know what she was doing.
“Obviously, if I felt like if she didn’t want it, it wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “It was all mutual. We were in the groove.”
The next day, when the boy “woke up sober” he checked his phone and found the other boy had sent the picture.
“I thought, ‘OK, that’s what happened last night,’ ” and sent it to the first girl. “I just said, ‘Look what I did last night type of thing,’ ” he said. “Kind of bragging about it, but it was a joke as well.”
On the night of the picture, when Rehtaeh Parsons wouldn’t go home, she slept alone in a spare room.
The boy of the house, said the one in the picture, “didn’t want her sleeping in his bed in case she got sick in there or something.”
There it was again, the bloodless, casual cruelty of the young, same as it ever was, only now, in the modern world, with what the judge called “tragic consequences, the worst ever.”
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