Already in legal hot water for his online child predator vigilantism, convicted child pornographer Jason Nassr faces a new criminal charge: intimidating a judicial official.
The charge filed in the Ontario Court of Justice was laid following Nassr’s lengthy Superior Court trial and convictions by a jury in February of harassment by telecommunications, extortion, and producing and distributing child pornography by written word, all related to his activities on Creeper Hunter TV, his vigilante website.
Nassr, who made an appearance by telephone at Tuesday’s Superior Court monthly scheduling court to set dates for pre-sentencing applications, said he wants to argue to stay his charges before his slated sentencing hearing on July 19, and mentioned he had a new, unspecified charge for “something that supposedly occurred during trial.”
“I’m not sure how that’s going to affect things as well,” he told Justice Duncan Grace, adding he has been summoned to make his first appearance on the matter on April 5.
Nassr’s convictions stem from the interactions he had with a 49-year-old London-area man, whose identity is protected by court order, that Nassr had targeted through his Creeper Hunter TV activities.
Nassr created content for the website by trolling adult dating websites and posing as an 18-year-old woman. Once he had interest from someone, the conversation would move to private, highly sexualized text messaging where Nassr would tell his target he was a 12-year-old girl.
An in-person meeting would be arranged and Nassr would show up and film the target, accusing them of being a child predator. A slickly produced episode, complete with names, hometowns, occupations, video, photos, text messages and Nassr’s narration, would be posted on the Creeper Hunter TV website.
Nassr made contact with a London-area man’s dating profile and had a graphic, text message conversation with the man’s phone number in July 2019. A meeting was scheduled but the man never showed up.
Nassr taped a phone call with the man in which he accused him of being a child predator, told him he was going to the police, asked how his kids would feel once it was made public and asked repeatedly why he didn’t hand his phone over to the authorities.
The man told Nassr many times his phone had been hacked at the time of the initial interactions.
Nassr produced a Creeper Hunter TV episode with the phone call, the text messages and the man’s social media photos. An unfamiliar social media profile contacted the man’s estranged wife with the episode and she called police. The jury was told at the trial the man had died. The jury wasn’t told he took his own life a week after his conversation with Nassr.
London police opened an investigation into Nassr’s activities and searched his Windsor apartment where they found a mountain of digital evidence related to Creeper Hunter TV, with some of it meeting the definition of child pornography through written word.
At the five-week trial, Nassr showed some animus toward the Crown and the London police because police services across the region had sought him out for information in the past after concerned people called police about targets profiled on the Creeper Hunter TV website.
He especially was hostile toward assistant Crown attorney James Spangenberg, who prosecuted the case, and who had once called Nassr as a witness at an Ontario Court preliminary hearing for a man whose charges were later withdrawn.
At Nassr’s trial, especially while Spangenberg was cross-examining him, Nassr became unhinged and made some deeply personal comments about the prosecutor.
The trial almost went off the rails several times, particularly because Nassr announced he wanted to launch an abuse of process application in the middle of his testimony – something that already had been ruled out of bounds – and forced his criminal defence lawyer to ask to be removed from the case.
Justice Alissa Mitchell told Nassr, who carried on to the end of the trial without a defence lawyer, that once the trial was over and if he was convicted, he could raise the abuse of process application then.
Grace set a two-day hearing for abuse of process for May 8 and 9. Nassr said the new intimidation charge “would likely directly impact how I proceed with the application.”
Grace also scheduled Nassr’s charter application for trial delay on May 31, an issue Nassr had waived during the case’s slow march to trial.
At this point, Nassr doesn’t have a defence lawyer to argue the applications for him. Grace asked him if he had found new counsel. “Negative,” Nassr said. “I’ve contacted hundreds of lawyers in the last couple of weeks and so far (I’ve been) unsuccessful.
“It’s not necessarily an issue of funds. It’s an issue of finding somebody willing to take my case,” he said.
Nassr told Grace he has ordered court transcripts and still was seeking information from the Crown, specifically some unspecified emails. After assistant Crown attorney Jeremy Carnegie said he would look into the matter, Grace reminded Nassr Tuesday’s appearance was strictly for scheduling purposes.
Meanwhile, Creeper Hunter TV (creeperhuntertv.com) and its 100 episodes with both “catches” and “nominees” have been removed from the Internet, something both the Crown and the London police had sought after Nassr was convicted.
At a hearing last month to set Nassr’s sentencing date, Spangenberg had asked for a judge’s order that the website be taken down. Mitchell declined to make the order without a formal application.
It wasn’t necessary. London police spokesperson Const. Sandasha Bough said after Nassr was convicted, the police contacted Cybertip.ca, a website operated by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, and asked for help in getting the website removed because it contained written child sexual abuse material.
“Steps were taken as a part of the normal Cybertip.ca processes to report this site and request its removal,” she said in an email.
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