Rehtaeh: Hi, my name is Rehtaeh Parsons I have lots of friends. My boyfriend's name is Grant and my good friends are Megan.
Leah: Rehtaeh was very quiet approached things very cautiously. She worked better alone; she found the large groups very noisy and she was sensitive.
Glen: She always constantly had a smile on her face, she was always happy. One of those babies I think people hoped for. I was the first person to hold her in my arms, very little crying but always a sense of wonder. Hey [Azie 00:01:34], what a good boy. I got that dog from Rehtaeh actually. She said that there was a pug at the SBC and he was abandoned, I’m glad Rehtaeh volunteered there because that's where he came from. Chattery dog. She was very intelligent when she was 13 years old she was reading Jane Goodall books. There’s always preteen magazines everywhere but Rehtaeh would be the one who goes in and looks at the sign section for an astronomy magazine so she'd come around a book black holes. I have no idea where that came from it certainly didn't come from me.
Leah: Morning [inaudible 00:02:07]. No Frankie.
Rehtaeh: Come here Frankie.
Leah: Rehtaeh actually worked to rehabilitate many dogs in a sense. These are all rescue dogs from different situations. We’ve rescued 700 dogs. This is Rehtaeh's favorite dog right here, Jazzy. She even has her little fun bone today yes it's from Rehtaeh.
Speaker 4: It's a very different name; tell me how she got her name?
Leah: When I was about 12, my niece's name was Heather so I spelt Heather backward and I was Rehtaeh, that's nice.
Speaker 4: Did she like her name?
Leah: She loved her name, she was very proud of her name. When she about 12, I found that was the age that she challenged me most. She was very strong willed she was the reason I went to university, two degrees so I did seven years straight. She was my driving force and my focus. Then we moved here when she started school and-
Selena: Cole Harbour is the biggest suburb of Dartmouth pretty much a typical suburb in every way. There isn't as much to do there, as there is if you live Downtown but there're a ton of kids and teenagers living there and there's a big hockey culture there. If you know, Sydney Cosby is from Cole Harbour.
Leah: Well this is her junior high school, she came out of this school with straight A's and then she started at Cole Harbour High.
Selena: Cole Harbour High is a pretty big high school. It’s had some problems in the past but there isn't that much to set the high school apart.
Leah: Even though you the same friends your whole life other schools are filtered into that high school so now you have this diverse group and she met a new friend there.
Glen: This was a Wednesday night and I remember it because she was sitting in my car. High school just started, how is everything going we always had these discussions. I said, “Who are you going to this party with?” She mentioned the girl's name and I said, “Well is that a new friend of yours I've never heard that name before?” she said, “Yeah that’s a new friend of mine.” I said, “Okay.”
I remember this just clear as day. “Are the friends with you the kind of friends who are going to make sure you are okay?” She said, “Yeah of course they are, of course they're okay.” She got out of the car and really the next I saw my daughter she was not my daughter anymore.
Leah: She asked if she could have a sleep over at this girl's house and I agreed that she could.
Glen: Something really traumatic happened to her.
Selena: They went over this boy's house.
Leah: I had no idea that it was going to turn into a party but they offered vodka she started drinking [inaudible 00:04:46].
Glen: I was going home to visit my mum in Ottawa and we're sitting on a plane I got a text message from Rehtaeh and it said, “I need to come live with you.” I said, “Rehtaeh,” I'm texting her back, “are you okay, is everything all right?” I text her I said, “I'm on the plane and we're starting to move.”
Leah: My sister said, “You need to come home right away.” I said, “Why?” She said, “Rehtaeh is here and she needs you.” Rehtaeh was culled up in the kitchen in a bowl rocking herself back and forth. She just said everything that she could remember. Her and her friend went to another friend's home where two boys lived and they were there hanging out two other guys had stopped then that were friends of the two. They got vodka and she really didn't know the effects of what that alcohol was going to do to her. She remembers being led upstairs, she remembers them taking turns on top of her and she remembers hitting her head on the window because she started to throw up. She does remember somebody saying take a picture, take a picture. The next morning she woke up in a different room between the two other males that were in the house. She didn't put the pieces together right away.
Glen: Rehtaeh's mum called me and she said, “I need to tell you something.” I said, “Okay.” She goes, “You really need to sit down and get ready.” because she said, “This is the worst.” I said, “Okay what's wrong?” She said that when Rehtaeh went to that sleep over, they went down street to another house and there was boys there and they raped her. I just wanted Rehtaeh to know I said, “I love you and this is going to be okay we'll get through this.” The story came out that Rehtaeh was a slut on Tuesday at school and they're all bragging about it. Rehtaeh passed and slept with four guys. Her reputation right there in school spread like wild fire and that's when she contacted me and she was just in panic she couldn't believe this happened. She doesn't even remember anything happened.
Selena: She got to school realized that everybody was talking about her and that something had happened. Then found out when she was at school that this photo which she didn't even know existed had been texted around from kid to kid and that a lot of people had seen it already.
Leah: Someone came up to her and said, “Did you see? I can’t believe that picture of you and you're a slut.”
Glen: He decided to start scraping the photograph around, “This is me and this is Rehtaeh Parsons and I'm having sex with her as she hangs out a window throwing up.” Man it’s hard for me to get my head around how someone could do something so sick like that.
Leah: Right there you really think that someone throwing up wants to have sex?
Selena: She found out what was in the photo and she left school and she never went back to that school.
Glen: It went viral, it literally spread everywhere. The local newspaper did a story on this and they said it would share with probably hundreds of kids and not just in Rehtaeh's school, not just in Cole Harbour High but with the whole school district. High schools in the whole city.
Leah: That's when it started and as soon as she became, I'd call it being a target, everyone started saying things to her. No one came around anymore.
Glen: That happened on a Thursday; Friday Rehtaeh had a nervous breakdown.
Leah: We went to the police the next day.
Glen: She went to the police station with her mum, she sat down she made a statement to the police.
Leah: She gave her statement for two hours and then a few days later they called to say that we gave it to the wrong person.
Glen: The police said that officer you gave your statement to wasn’t authorized to take the statement so you have to come make it again.
Leah: She had to do that again for ten hours.
Glen: Between those two periods even as someone who has being really intoxicated will know things can come back to you and that's when it came back to her that she remembers saying no to somebody. What they did was they took the two statements they looked at them both and said, “Well these aren't the same, you're confused.”
Leah: If there's any discrepancy in those two statements, they use that against her.
Glen: Almost right away in this investigation, they started to treat Rehtaeh like she was the person that they were going to investigate.
Selena: The police investigated for almost a year. The police did not seize the cell phones or the laptops or anything belonging to any of the boys involved.
Glen: Four males assaulting Rehtaeh and not one of those four male was ever brought into a police station for an interview. That-
Speaker 4: What about the cell phones did they seize cell phones?
Glen: They never seized a single cell phone off of anybody.
Leah: We had to get the photo for the police.
Glen: They had this picture they had the story that went along with the picture, they never went to the school to try to stop it and they knew who had it, they knew who was spreading and the police took no measures whatsoever. Not a single thing. It almost seems like this classic example of making a decision about sexual assault right at the very start. You look at the overwhelming evidence that was available to the police in this case that's the only thing that makes any sense to me.
Leah: The person in charge of the investigation they asked her if she interviewed the males. She said no she's interviewing people that had the photo and that didn't make sense to me. Why would you interview everybody around them so that they can get together and get their story down path? I would assume that you would go directly to them and separate them and get their stories. She said, “This isn't CSI Leah we don't do that.”
Glen: I hated it when they said that to us. This isn't CSI if CSI ends in arrests, CSI ends in someone going in and enforcing the law so we know it's not CSI believe me we know. If the police are going to keep telling people this isn't CSI they should change the motto on their badge to that our CMP this isn't CSI.
Leah: She treated me like I had no business to ask. She actually said to me that I don't have to tell you anything. Those were her exact words to me so I stopped speaking to that police officer and I went above her to her supervisor and above him to the person in charge of the unit. I remember speaking to him and begging him. He said, “Make sure she's in counseling and put her in sports.” I said, “You don't understand sports is not the answer. She's in therapy right now she wants some answers and so what are you guys doing in her case?” They said it didn't look promising for the sexual assault because it's more of a he said she said. “You mean to tell me that these pictures out there and you’re just going to say that we're working on it?”
Glen: If they have a picture like that and police sit there and say, we don't have enough evidence to support a charge of sexual assault then we have police officers in the city who don't understand what sexual assault is.
Speaker 4: Mean while Rehtaeh was going through all this?
Leah: The picture just kept circulating kept showing up here.
Glen: During that year, we watched Rehtaeh turn into literally a ghost.
Leah: She said, “I'm too young to deal with these emotions.” People they just wouldn't leave her alone.
Glen: She lost everything, everything she'd worked for in school, her dreams were down the drain, she lost all her friends.
Leah: Then she would really upset, “Where are my friends?” She said, “I know I have family that loves me but where are my friends?” I couldn't answer that.
Bryony: She switched to my school as the picture would follow her, the bullying would start too with then the girls of the school because girls like to completely call people names apparently.
Speaker 4: What were the names they'd call her?
Bryony: Oh gosh here we go. Am I allowed to say that on camera?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Bryony: Whore, slut I heard some girl call her a prostitute one time I have no idea why. Just stuff like that.
Speaker 4: It was mostly girls who were bullying her?
Bryony: Yeah. Not guys it's mostly girls. I've watched her get bullied she was standing right next to me and there's nothing I could do about it that's what's sad. Girls would come and get right up in her face and physical try to get her to fight them and stuff. Rehtaeh was just didn't want to fight obviously so she says, “I don't want to fight, I don't want to fight.” They’d be trying to fight her and stuff. That’s what the girls at my school used to do. I'd be standing right next to her and it’s like what do I say? Some of the people that were trying to fight her were people I had known for years too so I didn't really know what to do about it. She had this one girl all the time that was really giving her a hard time. The forwarded messages from this girl what she would say to her and stuff and it was just horrible, she was so mean to her pretty much telling her to go kill herself.
Glen: Then March she actually tied a belt around her neck and she was actually going to hang herself, when she was going to do it she heard the car pull up. After that, she had a bit of a breakdown.
Leah: She was afraid she was going to hurt herself.
Glen: I drove her to the emergency IWK hospital Downtown Halifax.
Leah: We thought, “This is great, she's going to get the help she needs in the hospital.”
Glen: I left the hospital that night crying and upset but also feeling relieved because I'm thinking in my mind, “she's got help now. These are the professionals they're going to change her suicidal thoughts into something positive.”
Leah: That was another bad experience. There was no trauma specialists when she did act out in there they put her in lockdown unit and they put her in a room and they left her there for 24 hours by herself and nobody went to talk to her.
Selena: That's a story in itself at the children hospital; the staff at the hospital stripped her at one point. She said that it was male staff nurse who stripped her and locked her in a room basically wearing just maybe her underwear.
Glen: They took her clothes off her and then broke down she was screaming, “give me my clothes back.” Then she was saying, “Why are those men here I am naked.” That's in a hospital where she went to get help.
Leah: They treated her like a delinquent instead of being treated for the trauma.
Glen: The hospital came out and said, “That doesn't happen here in this hospital.” Then what happened is all these other parents came up and said “Wait a second that happened to my daughter too. Men were there when her clothes were off.” A day later the hospital reiterated, “That does happen here in extreme circumstances but it never happened to Rehtaeh Parsons.” Then a witness went to the press and said, “I was there when Rehtaeh Parsons was there and I remember her screaming for her clothes back and I remember men being there.” This is a sexual assault victim it was ridiculous. She ended up staying there for five weeks and I will say it was a stupid stupid thing for me to ever leave her in that hospital I wish to God I had taken her home that day. Everything was worse when she left there she was far more angry.
Leah: She learned to cut her wrists and her arms in there she felt that she was suicidal the day they discharged her and-
Speaker 4: Why would they discharge her if she's still feeling suicidal?
Leah: They felt she was there long enough.
Glen: I'm in the room alone with Rehtaeh and I looked at her and she looked at me and she goes, “Dad I'm going to die.”
Leah: We begged them when she left to put her somewhere. They signed her up for a drug rehab program.
Glen: She said, “I don't want to go that it's stupid I'm not a drug addict.” I said, “I know but,” I said, “There's going to be other help there. There’ll be counselors and people you can talk to.” She goes, “Yeah but I'm not a drug addict this is all about drugs.” she goes, “I'm not a drug addict. They have a drug treatment program so whatever the mental health issue is it's got to be drugs it's a rubber stamp drugs drugs drugs. A kid coming in here and they're suicidal and they're traumatized they're drug addicts.” I took her there on the first day she promised me she'd give it a chance she called me up 20 minutes later then she was really really upset and I said, “oh okay I've seen her like this before.” where you know. A kid from Cole Harbour High a boy who knows what happened to her and is friends with the kids who assaulted her was sitting there glaring at her in her first meeting for drug counseling. Did no one ever read her file?
She came over here to live with us after she got out of the hospital and her stay was so bad there a few months after she left she was upstairs here and she was crying and upset. I heard her ask for me and I went up to her bedroom and her arms were cut up and she was real bloody and I'm just, “Oh God Christ. One the worst decision I ever made in my life was putting my daughter in that hospital.”
Leah: This whole time we're still dealing with police and then finally he said, “There’s not going to be any charges for the sexual assault or the child pornography.”
Selena: Police lead out their case before the crime prosecutors and they got an almost immediate no that their prosecutors were not interested in taking it to court. Police went back and told Rehtaeh and her parents. Rehtaeh was according to her parents she was devastated.
Leah: Oh, she was out paged. She stomped around, she was angry, she was yelling, “How dare they? Everyone is going to still think I am a slut and they're walking around smiling and look what we got away with.” The injustice of it all was really that set her back. Then she tried to go back to school she said, “I want to go because I feel I have enough friends around me now to support me that I'm strong enough.” She wasn't allowed into Cole Harbour High, they wouldn't allow her to go there. I sat there in the office and he said, “She can't comeback to this school.” I said, “Why?” He said, “She transferred out of this area you are not allowed to transfer back into this area.” I said, “Well her home is here and you are aware of the reason why she transferred out of here.” He’s all, “I’m well aware of why.” I said, “Okay so the boys are walking in this school, they are allowed to be here and you're going to tell us that she's not allowed to be here so you're victimizing her all over again?”
Selena: They never really let up with the texting and the harassment. She had been taking records of the various things that were sent to her and she would sent them to the police. When the police came back after all that time and just said, “There is no case. We can’t take it forward.” She got really upset that one night in April and tried to kill herself, which her parents I think really never truly believed she would do.
Leah: That evening I was downstairs in bed, she came in and her friend Jenna was living here at the time too. I could hear Rehtaeh’s voice raising; she was on the phone with her boyfriend. When she got off the phone, I guess she said to Jenna, “Fuck this I’m going to the bathroom I’m going to hang myself.” Then she locked herself in the bathroom.
Jenna said she tried to open the door and was talking to her through the door saying, “Rehtaeh open the door, I love you.” She said, “All of a sudden Rehtaeh stopped talking to me.” I came up and grabbed something in the drawer on the way to get it into the, but I could feel her weight on the back of the door.
I honestly didn’t think there was anything in the bathroom that she could hang herself on so I was surprised to feel her weight. It’s like you go to autopilot. I said to Jenna, “Give me scissors, give me a phone we need to dial 911.” I cut the belt off her neck and I had her laying on the floor. Jason started working on her, he could do CPR and he did that. Then they came in and worked on her for half an hour, so it was 45 minutes without any pulse.
When she got to the hospital, I remember one nurse was pretty blunt with us and said, “This doesn’t look good and she is probably going to die.
Glen: I can hardly remember it, it’s such a blur but I think I just screamed my daughter is dead and gone out of the door as fast we could. I said, “Guys I’m Glen Cunning Rehtaeh Parsons is here and she is my daughter.” When they buzzed me in I could see the far end of the hospital, here comes this doctor walking really fast he is holding his hands up like this and I said, “What do you know? Just tell me what you know.” I said, “Well I know that she hang herself and I know that they are having problem finding any brain activity.” He said, “I’m just going to be honest, this will be as grim as it will get and she is not going to recover from this.” I went in to see her laying there. It’s something I regret berceuse on the way home, on the Wednesday night she asked me to stop [inaudible 00:22:49] but I was too tired. It was after nine, I just wanted to go home. I said, “Let’s just go home it’s too late to eat junk food blah, blah.” I remember when I went over and kissed her and I whispered, “Wake up I’ll take you to McDonalds.” It was a long, long three or four days in the hospital man, he never woke up.
Her mum went home and wrote a message on Facebook that she had lost her daughter following sexual assault and people bullying her. It was just a Facebook post and it seemed like it triggered something in people to hear about viral things happening on the internet. The list just absolutely exploded. I don’t know why.
Leah: I wrote that first story and then everything really blew up. It just got much bigger than I ever thought it was going to get. Then anonymous got involved.
Anonymous: Greetings citizens of the world we are anonymous. Yet again, we bring to you another tragic story of yet another young life taken from us so early Rehtaeh Parsons 17 leaves-
Glen: The next thing I knew anonymous got involved with the story and I’m not sure how they did but I’ve heard that they looked at me and her mother and what we were writing as a cry for help.
Anonymous: Our thoughts and prayers go out to her family and friends. Rehtaeh was a victim of gang rape, also a victim of constant bullying.
John: I took it personal. It wasn’t in another country or another city it was right in Halifax where I grew up all my life. I have a daughter same age as Rehtaeh and I hear they take her phone and they investigate her and they didn’t even speak to the boys and didn’t talk to them, didn’t take their devices, didn’t check their accounts, didn’t do anything. I’d be upset too.
Selena: They would release YouTube videos every couple of days and they knew a lot about the case really quickly. They do this thing called doxing where they go and trace somebody’s presence online.
Anonymous: We can confirm the identities of two of the four alleged rapists. If we were able to locate these boys within two hours, it will not be long before someone else finds them.
Selena: At one point, they threatened to release the identities of the boys involved.
Anonymous: It is important for Nova Scotia to have faith in their justice system better act fast.
Selena: They present themselves as this Robin Hood of the justice system and it really caught the imagination of people.
Glen: When anonymous got involved it became even bigger still.
Anonymous: Our demands are simple we want the RCMP Peter take immediately legal action against the individuals in question. You will be held accountable for your failure to act.
Glen: I couldn’t even tell you the amount of interviews BBC, CNN, stations in Japan, Columbia, China, Russian news stations, all across Canada every major media company you can think of. I have a friend in Saudi Arabia and he wrote me a message, “What happened you are in the news over here in Saudi Arabia?” What ended up happening people were realizing if Anonymous is involved then they cant assume they are going to be hidden. One of the males who was there that night was realizing, “Shit people are going to know who I am. They are going to release my name; I need to tell my side of the story.”
Leah: I receive a Facebook message from one of the males. He was scared for safety after Rehtaeh died.
Glen: He said, “Everyone hates me now I don’t know what to do, I’m crying I need to talk to you.” Leah was like, “No, I’m not interested in having a conversation with you. If you’ve got anything to say you can say it right here right now.” As amazing as it sounds he wrote this long Facebook confession. We are up having sex with her and she was okay and about 15 minutes after Rehtaeh looked like she was going to get sick and we both helped her when she got sick and she was out the window for about five minutes. We were asking her if she was okay she said, “I’m fine you guys keep going.” I told him to go ahead and he told me to go ahead so I went again. We picked her up, carried her over the window and she leaned out she started to throw up and said after about five minutes, “Who’s going first?” What he is talking about he’s talking about having sex with her. I’m not sure if it was my phone or his but the picture was taken without her noticing. Me being a drunk idiot I posed for the photo. After she got out of the window, we laid her on the bed to go to sleep.
Leah: You could have said what he told me really on top of what she told me he filled in all the blanks.
Glen: The other two boys we asked them to help us bring her to the spare room so we woke her up and she didn’t want to go downstairs so we picked her up and she hit him in the face once. Then we kept bugging her to get up and she finally did and walked down the stairs to pare room. She laid in the bed and I remember telling her to stop kissing me and stuff. Asked me to leave the room, I left the room and sat on the couch and he came out 20 minutes later with a smirk on his face. I had curfew so I told him I had to go home, he walked me to the door, gave me props woke up the next day and he told me that she had sex with [inaudible 00:28:20]. Christ! This is him saying, “I raped Rehtaeh Parsons.” Rehtaeh’s mum did a screen capture of it and called the police.
Selena: Then Anonymous put up this YouTube saying they had gotten their confession. They said to the Justice Minister of Nova Scotia if you don’t open this case again and see justice done in a courtroom we are going to come after you and we are going to expose the boys’ identities.
Anonymous: Since the police are useless we as citizens must stand together and say no more. Remember this day.
Leah: They opened the case again.
Selena: The RCMP did reopen the investigation. They were very specific as to say that it was not about any information that had come in online or anything like that that it was old-fashioned people coming forward from the community. They involved the child crime specialist this time around when she had died.
Glen: I’m very thankful that they did what they did. The police had months, months and months to do something to protect Rehtaeh, they watched that image be spread all over the community, all over Halifax and they didn’t do anything about it at all. Nothing.
Speaker 5: Court door is now open, door number four.
Leah: They did charge two people. They probably could have charged more. One got charged with making and distributing and the other one with distributing. They said they are not going to go with the sexual assault.
Glen: It should have been sexual assault. Child pornography it's bitter sweet. I even asked them I said, “What about sexual assault? They have the new Facebook message that came through. What about sexual assault? They are saying she was drunk and throwing up.” He said, “That’s just not going to happen.”
Speaker 4: Why did the police not take this as a confession? I don't get it?
Glen: I don't know, and he's admitting that Rehtaeh was in a state where she couldn't walk and she's throwing up then she's not in a position to give consent. That is just the basic flat out law in Canada. You have to be in a state where you are capable of giving consent. A girl throwing up who needs to be carried is not in a position to do that. These are the words right out of that kids mouth and the police knew this before my daughter died. I can't get over this.
Selena: It fascinated me how the case could become such a train wreck. The police, it seemed they really struggled with any evidence that was online or electronic, which is how all the evidence is. These are all teenagers, all they do; everything they do is on their phones. All the officers didn't even have internet access on their computers at work. It was highly restricted. They couldn't go on Facebook, they couldn't look things up the same way you or I could. Another thing I looked out was the attitude they took towards sexual assault. From what I gathered of the police investigation, they really kind of would ask people, “Do you believe she consented?” The biggest example is when they interviewed that other girl who been there at that night.
Glen: The other girl who was there with Rehtaeh, where the hell is the other girl, right? She knew both of these boys. She had dated both of them and she came upstairs and she was mad and angry and she left.
Selena: They treated her as a witness even though she hadn't been in the room. She definitely wasn't there when the photo was taken or anything like that. They asked her if she thought Rehtaeh had consented, she said, ‘yes'. I asked why she was so sure that Rehtaeh had consented, she said, “Because one of the mum's boys had been home that night. Her bedroom was down the hall and that she hadn't woken up.” This girl said, “If you're getting raped by one person or two people or in this allegation it was four people, you're going to be screaming and you're going to be crying. The mum didn't wake up and therefore Rehtaeh could not have been raped because she hadn't screamed.” Which completely ignores the fact in the criminal code of course you can be raped if you're unconscious.
What surprised me when I was reporting on it was not only how uninformed the teenagers were about those issues, but their parents. I had adults ask me, “If somebody is unconscious does that make it rape?” Which it does. “Even because they drank themselves into being unconscious is it still rape?” Which it is. If somebody is unconscious that they can't consent. Rehtaeh had said that she had drank the equivalent of eight or nine shots or drinks, over the course of the night and she was 15 at the time. There's a lot of uncertainty over how drunk is too drunk, but even beyond that people sometimes didn't understand that unconscious makes it rape.
That's a very basic thing under Canadian law. They really didn't know where to start and neither did their parents and it seems like in a way neither did the police. They weren't trying to gather information. They never interviewed the boy while she was alive. They never interviewed them until they charged them months after her death. In this case, it was unbalanced in how they had focused so much on her. If they can't handle that case, how well are they handling any sexual assault case?
Glen: When the police started doing the investigation, a young lady contacted Rehtaeh and said, “Is this one of the boys who did this to you?” Rehtaeh said, “Yeah. It was.” The girl said, “Well he did the same thing to me.” Rehtaeh was just like “You've got to call the police. Can you please come forward with everything like this?” The girl said, “After what I saw what happened to you, I don't want to.” We're basically setting an example for other victims out there while there's not a photo of my case, I don't have a confession in my case, so what chance in hell do I have of justice if this girl who had all that evidence can't get any either. We quite literary really do blame victims. That's why it's easy to get away with this.
Leah: Rape is the only crime that I can think of that the victim becomes the accused.
Glen: If I was mugged downtown, Halifax and someone took my wallet and the police investigated me. Why was I there at nighttime, did I have a beer, is it a misunderstanding, do I give to charity? If I give to charity, then I'm used to giving my money away. Look at the statistics too. Novas Scotia right now has the worst conviction charge rate for sexual assault in Canada. You have people going to jail in Nova Scotia for a matter of months, when they are found of rape. On average, by the time a man ends up even in a courtroom he has six victims behind him. 95% of rape victims they believe are telling the truth so that means 5% of the men, or the rapists are telling the truth. We should treat the cases like that, rather than go right off the bat and treat it his word, her word, she loses.
Leah: You see it over and over again in any article you ever read about a rape situation. All you have to do is go to the comments to see it's alive and well.
Glen People are ignorant and abusive and there are trolls on the internet. Someone wrote up a Facebook page called Rehtaeh Dead Parsons. They stole pictures off Facebook page and they photo shopped where they are bugging out. They photo shopped belts around her neck. They made comments like, ‘Hey Rehtaeh how's it hanging'. They would show a picture of a dead body hanging in a tree and it was probably the vilest, sickest most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life. I wrote Facebook and I said, “Look my daughter just died. Her name is Rehtaeh Parsons it's all over the news. It's a huge international story. I want this Facebook page taken down. It's mocking her death. It's insulting and disgusting.” Facebook wrote back to me and said, “We reviewed that page in a dozen violator standards.”
Facebook you've got to be joking. If this is your standard, why don't you just admit you don't have any standards? I wrote something on my website because I know that Anonymous is following the story. I got an email from some weird email address in Russia, somewhere like that and it just said, “Glen read this.” I went and looked at the Rehtaeh Dead Parsons page; this was like a couple of hours after. There was a message there that this page hacked by Anonymous. All the images were gone, there was just one single post there and it said, “The person who made this page is this person.” It was the photograph of the older sister of the boy in that photograph raping my daughter. This was his older sister, she's 21 years old and she made a page like that to mock Rehtaeh's death.
Then what happened, I got a death threat on YouTube. This is my YouTube channel and every video about Rehtaeh, even videos we would do where she was just a child and we were trying to put something out there as a memorial to her. They would show up on there with their filth and their ignorance and abuse and really, really just mean, mean stuff. “You were there her whole life; did you ever try being a good dad? You're talking to me like you're some kind of important dad. You probably raped your daughter her whole life it's no wonder she was so fucked in the head.” They write this stuff to me. “His daughter is a slut. She was all-tight until everyone had sex with her. She sucked and had sex with every guy in the city. Your daughter didn't even one high school credit.” Of course she didn't she fell apart. I don't know where it came from. For somebody to be just so goddamn mean. Their user name was iamkarma902, I took the iamkarma902 thing to mean local person, because our area code is 902.
I also took the fact that they knew a little bit about this case that this may be somebody who is involved here. Here it is here, “Keep talking shit because I know your face, your car, where you live, what you do. Keep getting lippy bud and you might be going to visit your daughter. Have a good day Glen Cunning. You're going to join your daughter.”
I screen captured it and I went to Halifax police department. Police here treated that very seriously. They went to the RCMP in Ottawa. They went to the FBI in Washington DC. The FBI went into Google and with a warrant said, “We want the IP address of the one who made this comment.” From Google it went back to the FBI and then it went back to the RCMP and then it went to the police here and they said, “We made an arrest in this case.” They said his name, which I don't think I can legally say. They told me who it was. The person who it was is the person who's in the photograph with Rehtaeh.
Speaker 4: Same kid doing the thumbs up?
Glen: Same guy doing the thumbs up. Giving the big thumbs up with a big smile. Isn't that sad you did enough damage to our daughter that she ended up without a will to live and you've got to be so filthy on how you go about it you even reach out to us when we are grieving and start insulting us and threatening us too. There's no remorse with this kid at all.
Bullying today is so much far worse and so much more devastating to people. It's not something you can get away from. I was bullied in grade seven. I was beat up in school but I could go home and I'm safe at home. Nowadays the way kids communicate there is no getting away from it. It's everywhere. People take out cell phones and they take a video of you getting beat up or they are all laughing at you and calling you a loser. The next thing you know there’s 100 people telling you to go kill yourself on Facebook and on your profile and sending tweets out with the video on there of you getting beat up.
Bryony: Girls can get away with bullying so much more. More and more young girls are committing suicide because of it, because it's easy to call a girl a slut over Facebook. It's so easy to send her a message and tell her how much of a whore she is. Something needs to be done about it honestly. I see it all the time.
Glen: After Rehtaeh's death, there were some responses by a lot of politicians.
Steven: We're just sickened seeing a story like this.
Glen: Steven Harper said we've got to stop calling this bullying and start calling it for what it is; criminal harassment. I couldn't have agreed more.
Steven: Bullying to me is a connotation of kids misbehaving. What we are dealing with in some of these circumstances is simply criminal activity.
Glen: There's a great big upheaval and screaming about Bill C-13., “Oh my God! It's going to be an invasion of privacy and all our stuff is going to be available to anybody.” No it's not. It addresses a few different things. One of them is the distribution of intimate images without consent. Peter McKay, minister of justice has referred to that as Rehtaeh's law because when that photo was being spread all over the police came up and said, “Well that's not against the law.” You have failed marriage or relationships and they have images of you that would be very embarrassing. Revenge porn I think it's called, and they post them all over the internet to humiliate people, it's not illegal and it should be.
Another one, it's going to address issues of the police being able to go to internet service providers and get information they need when crimes are being committed online and to get that information quickly. Which I think is going to make a huge difference and that's why I support this law. They could have this kid arrested in a matter of days. Hours even if the right laws were in place. It should not take eight/ten months, what it took in my case for a death threat. What if I was a vulnerable person and I was actually really afraid for my life? What if it was like an ex-husband who's been threatening to murder me? You want to wait eight months to hear back from Google? Much rather than be eight hours.
We can't just sit here with the whole, 'We're going to protect free speech crap'. You're not protecting people who are using free speech to make the world better. You're just protecting a bunch of trolls and criminals and pedophiles and child molesters and rapists. These are places you live in too. The boys there live in this kind of communities. What kind of communities do they want? It's not free speech it's hate speech.
Leah: He's found guilty. It actually happened and it's emotional.
Speaker 4: Do you think you're closer to getting justice for Rehtaeh?
Leah: There'll never be justice for Rehtaeh; she just wanted to be validated instead of being blamed for her own crime. The fact that he has plead guilty has part of me built some solace in that.
Glen: His guilty plea here today, tells everyone the police knew, child porn was being spread around Halifax, and they didn't do anything to stop it and also at Cole Harbour High. They knew child porn was being distributed in their halls of their school and they didn't do anything to stop it at all. What that means really is they did nothing to protect the victim. That to me is just wrong. That big question had to be asked: Why wasn't something done while it would have made a difference?
Leah: The stones, I started by painting memory stones for Rehtaeh. It's a way for me to feel calm it's just to paint. We place these everywhere we go. Something very spiritual about the stones.
Glen: She grew up, a part of her, here in this park. It played a big role with Rehtaeh. It's very fitting that this park is so beautiful. It was really nice. People say time heals all wounds, but it doesn't. A big, big part of me died in that hospital room with my daughter.
Leah: I felt like I was having an outer body experience. We already decided we'd be organ donors then they said the recipients aren't all ready and that was a real dilemma for me at that moment. I didn't really feel comfortable keeping her body alive. I almost changed my mind. Lucky we did because one of them was a teenager that received her heart. That child would have died if I would have changed my mind. There's five lives she saved.
Glen: In spite of all this grief and upset, it is nice to know that she is still out there today, some of her anyways, is still out there, very much alive and that has changed people's lives for the better for sure.
Leah: It's happening everywhere. I have 32 countries on my page just because this is a global issue. Rape, suicide, the cyber bullying.
Glen: As long as we let kids do this kind of stuff like that, we're going to get kids get out of high school and go out there into the world and they are just going to be mean. They are going to think getting your way is about bullying, tormenting and terrorizing people who are in your way. That's shit. I don't want to live in a society like that. You think some username like 'iamkarma902' on YouTube means you’re hidden? He's going to be in court for criminal harassment and death threats. You're not anonymous you're not. If you think you're anonymous, Anonymous will get you.
Selena: Rehtaeh's peer group that she grew up with would have the same sex Ed classes as she did; they had never had a word about consent in school.
Bryony: First of all, don't teach women not to wear clothes that are suggest being rape. Teach the boys not to rape, there's a good idea. Secondly, the whole suicide topic nobody really talks about it. Honestly, in the entire three years I was in high school I think the topic was brought up once. That's sad. It should be part of our education. People should know that, there's people they can turn to, to talk to if they’re considering suicide. Whereas we don't have any of that. My school wanted to completely forget that she even existed. No one once ever offered her support or offered her help. I think maybe if they did, maybe she'd have a chance of still being here today.
Speaker 4: Have you ever blamed yourself?
Leah: I probably went through a phase where I felt, not blame myself, but guilty. It wasn't enough, what if. Every time I felt like that, I would feel this almost like a voice over my right ear, “Don't do that. Stop that.” It feels like Rehtaeh's right there like, “Stop doing this.”
Glen: I think this is so important to reach these kids and say, “Look it's never a victims fault, ever. It's not a victims fault for rape or sexual assault and it certainly isn't when it comes to cyber bullying.” It's a crime. It's the criminals fault. Goodbye.
Leah: Rehtaeh was very quiet approached things very cautiously. She worked better alone; she found the large groups very noisy and she was sensitive.
Glen: She always constantly had a smile on her face, she was always happy. One of those babies I think people hoped for. I was the first person to hold her in my arms, very little crying but always a sense of wonder. Hey [Azie 00:01:34], what a good boy. I got that dog from Rehtaeh actually. She said that there was a pug at the SBC and he was abandoned, I’m glad Rehtaeh volunteered there because that's where he came from. Chattery dog. She was very intelligent when she was 13 years old she was reading Jane Goodall books. There’s always preteen magazines everywhere but Rehtaeh would be the one who goes in and looks at the sign section for an astronomy magazine so she'd come around a book black holes. I have no idea where that came from it certainly didn't come from me.
Leah: Morning [inaudible 00:02:07]. No Frankie.
Rehtaeh: Come here Frankie.
Leah: Rehtaeh actually worked to rehabilitate many dogs in a sense. These are all rescue dogs from different situations. We’ve rescued 700 dogs. This is Rehtaeh's favorite dog right here, Jazzy. She even has her little fun bone today yes it's from Rehtaeh.
Speaker 4: It's a very different name; tell me how she got her name?
Leah: When I was about 12, my niece's name was Heather so I spelt Heather backward and I was Rehtaeh, that's nice.
Speaker 4: Did she like her name?
Leah: She loved her name, she was very proud of her name. When she about 12, I found that was the age that she challenged me most. She was very strong willed she was the reason I went to university, two degrees so I did seven years straight. She was my driving force and my focus. Then we moved here when she started school and-
Selena: Cole Harbour is the biggest suburb of Dartmouth pretty much a typical suburb in every way. There isn't as much to do there, as there is if you live Downtown but there're a ton of kids and teenagers living there and there's a big hockey culture there. If you know, Sydney Cosby is from Cole Harbour.
Leah: Well this is her junior high school, she came out of this school with straight A's and then she started at Cole Harbour High.
Selena: Cole Harbour High is a pretty big high school. It’s had some problems in the past but there isn't that much to set the high school apart.
Leah: Even though you the same friends your whole life other schools are filtered into that high school so now you have this diverse group and she met a new friend there.
Glen: This was a Wednesday night and I remember it because she was sitting in my car. High school just started, how is everything going we always had these discussions. I said, “Who are you going to this party with?” She mentioned the girl's name and I said, “Well is that a new friend of yours I've never heard that name before?” she said, “Yeah that’s a new friend of mine.” I said, “Okay.”
I remember this just clear as day. “Are the friends with you the kind of friends who are going to make sure you are okay?” She said, “Yeah of course they are, of course they're okay.” She got out of the car and really the next I saw my daughter she was not my daughter anymore.
Leah: She asked if she could have a sleep over at this girl's house and I agreed that she could.
Glen: Something really traumatic happened to her.
Selena: They went over this boy's house.
Leah: I had no idea that it was going to turn into a party but they offered vodka she started drinking [inaudible 00:04:46].
Glen: I was going home to visit my mum in Ottawa and we're sitting on a plane I got a text message from Rehtaeh and it said, “I need to come live with you.” I said, “Rehtaeh,” I'm texting her back, “are you okay, is everything all right?” I text her I said, “I'm on the plane and we're starting to move.”
Leah: My sister said, “You need to come home right away.” I said, “Why?” She said, “Rehtaeh is here and she needs you.” Rehtaeh was culled up in the kitchen in a bowl rocking herself back and forth. She just said everything that she could remember. Her and her friend went to another friend's home where two boys lived and they were there hanging out two other guys had stopped then that were friends of the two. They got vodka and she really didn't know the effects of what that alcohol was going to do to her. She remembers being led upstairs, she remembers them taking turns on top of her and she remembers hitting her head on the window because she started to throw up. She does remember somebody saying take a picture, take a picture. The next morning she woke up in a different room between the two other males that were in the house. She didn't put the pieces together right away.
Glen: Rehtaeh's mum called me and she said, “I need to tell you something.” I said, “Okay.” She goes, “You really need to sit down and get ready.” because she said, “This is the worst.” I said, “Okay what's wrong?” She said that when Rehtaeh went to that sleep over, they went down street to another house and there was boys there and they raped her. I just wanted Rehtaeh to know I said, “I love you and this is going to be okay we'll get through this.” The story came out that Rehtaeh was a slut on Tuesday at school and they're all bragging about it. Rehtaeh passed and slept with four guys. Her reputation right there in school spread like wild fire and that's when she contacted me and she was just in panic she couldn't believe this happened. She doesn't even remember anything happened.
Selena: She got to school realized that everybody was talking about her and that something had happened. Then found out when she was at school that this photo which she didn't even know existed had been texted around from kid to kid and that a lot of people had seen it already.
Leah: Someone came up to her and said, “Did you see? I can’t believe that picture of you and you're a slut.”
Glen: He decided to start scraping the photograph around, “This is me and this is Rehtaeh Parsons and I'm having sex with her as she hangs out a window throwing up.” Man it’s hard for me to get my head around how someone could do something so sick like that.
Leah: Right there you really think that someone throwing up wants to have sex?
Selena: She found out what was in the photo and she left school and she never went back to that school.
Glen: It went viral, it literally spread everywhere. The local newspaper did a story on this and they said it would share with probably hundreds of kids and not just in Rehtaeh's school, not just in Cole Harbour High but with the whole school district. High schools in the whole city.
Leah: That's when it started and as soon as she became, I'd call it being a target, everyone started saying things to her. No one came around anymore.
Glen: That happened on a Thursday; Friday Rehtaeh had a nervous breakdown.
Leah: We went to the police the next day.
Glen: She went to the police station with her mum, she sat down she made a statement to the police.
Leah: She gave her statement for two hours and then a few days later they called to say that we gave it to the wrong person.
Glen: The police said that officer you gave your statement to wasn’t authorized to take the statement so you have to come make it again.
Leah: She had to do that again for ten hours.
Glen: Between those two periods even as someone who has being really intoxicated will know things can come back to you and that's when it came back to her that she remembers saying no to somebody. What they did was they took the two statements they looked at them both and said, “Well these aren't the same, you're confused.”
Leah: If there's any discrepancy in those two statements, they use that against her.
Glen: Almost right away in this investigation, they started to treat Rehtaeh like she was the person that they were going to investigate.
Selena: The police investigated for almost a year. The police did not seize the cell phones or the laptops or anything belonging to any of the boys involved.
Glen: Four males assaulting Rehtaeh and not one of those four male was ever brought into a police station for an interview. That-
Speaker 4: What about the cell phones did they seize cell phones?
Glen: They never seized a single cell phone off of anybody.
Leah: We had to get the photo for the police.
Glen: They had this picture they had the story that went along with the picture, they never went to the school to try to stop it and they knew who had it, they knew who was spreading and the police took no measures whatsoever. Not a single thing. It almost seems like this classic example of making a decision about sexual assault right at the very start. You look at the overwhelming evidence that was available to the police in this case that's the only thing that makes any sense to me.
Leah: The person in charge of the investigation they asked her if she interviewed the males. She said no she's interviewing people that had the photo and that didn't make sense to me. Why would you interview everybody around them so that they can get together and get their story down path? I would assume that you would go directly to them and separate them and get their stories. She said, “This isn't CSI Leah we don't do that.”
Glen: I hated it when they said that to us. This isn't CSI if CSI ends in arrests, CSI ends in someone going in and enforcing the law so we know it's not CSI believe me we know. If the police are going to keep telling people this isn't CSI they should change the motto on their badge to that our CMP this isn't CSI.
Leah: She treated me like I had no business to ask. She actually said to me that I don't have to tell you anything. Those were her exact words to me so I stopped speaking to that police officer and I went above her to her supervisor and above him to the person in charge of the unit. I remember speaking to him and begging him. He said, “Make sure she's in counseling and put her in sports.” I said, “You don't understand sports is not the answer. She's in therapy right now she wants some answers and so what are you guys doing in her case?” They said it didn't look promising for the sexual assault because it's more of a he said she said. “You mean to tell me that these pictures out there and you’re just going to say that we're working on it?”
Glen: If they have a picture like that and police sit there and say, we don't have enough evidence to support a charge of sexual assault then we have police officers in the city who don't understand what sexual assault is.
Speaker 4: Mean while Rehtaeh was going through all this?
Leah: The picture just kept circulating kept showing up here.
Glen: During that year, we watched Rehtaeh turn into literally a ghost.
Leah: She said, “I'm too young to deal with these emotions.” People they just wouldn't leave her alone.
Glen: She lost everything, everything she'd worked for in school, her dreams were down the drain, she lost all her friends.
Leah: Then she would really upset, “Where are my friends?” She said, “I know I have family that loves me but where are my friends?” I couldn't answer that.
Bryony: She switched to my school as the picture would follow her, the bullying would start too with then the girls of the school because girls like to completely call people names apparently.
Speaker 4: What were the names they'd call her?
Bryony: Oh gosh here we go. Am I allowed to say that on camera?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Bryony: Whore, slut I heard some girl call her a prostitute one time I have no idea why. Just stuff like that.
Speaker 4: It was mostly girls who were bullying her?
Bryony: Yeah. Not guys it's mostly girls. I've watched her get bullied she was standing right next to me and there's nothing I could do about it that's what's sad. Girls would come and get right up in her face and physical try to get her to fight them and stuff. Rehtaeh was just didn't want to fight obviously so she says, “I don't want to fight, I don't want to fight.” They’d be trying to fight her and stuff. That’s what the girls at my school used to do. I'd be standing right next to her and it’s like what do I say? Some of the people that were trying to fight her were people I had known for years too so I didn't really know what to do about it. She had this one girl all the time that was really giving her a hard time. The forwarded messages from this girl what she would say to her and stuff and it was just horrible, she was so mean to her pretty much telling her to go kill herself.
Glen: Then March she actually tied a belt around her neck and she was actually going to hang herself, when she was going to do it she heard the car pull up. After that, she had a bit of a breakdown.
Leah: She was afraid she was going to hurt herself.
Glen: I drove her to the emergency IWK hospital Downtown Halifax.
Leah: We thought, “This is great, she's going to get the help she needs in the hospital.”
Glen: I left the hospital that night crying and upset but also feeling relieved because I'm thinking in my mind, “she's got help now. These are the professionals they're going to change her suicidal thoughts into something positive.”
Leah: That was another bad experience. There was no trauma specialists when she did act out in there they put her in lockdown unit and they put her in a room and they left her there for 24 hours by herself and nobody went to talk to her.
Selena: That's a story in itself at the children hospital; the staff at the hospital stripped her at one point. She said that it was male staff nurse who stripped her and locked her in a room basically wearing just maybe her underwear.
Glen: They took her clothes off her and then broke down she was screaming, “give me my clothes back.” Then she was saying, “Why are those men here I am naked.” That's in a hospital where she went to get help.
Leah: They treated her like a delinquent instead of being treated for the trauma.
Glen: The hospital came out and said, “That doesn't happen here in this hospital.” Then what happened is all these other parents came up and said “Wait a second that happened to my daughter too. Men were there when her clothes were off.” A day later the hospital reiterated, “That does happen here in extreme circumstances but it never happened to Rehtaeh Parsons.” Then a witness went to the press and said, “I was there when Rehtaeh Parsons was there and I remember her screaming for her clothes back and I remember men being there.” This is a sexual assault victim it was ridiculous. She ended up staying there for five weeks and I will say it was a stupid stupid thing for me to ever leave her in that hospital I wish to God I had taken her home that day. Everything was worse when she left there she was far more angry.
Leah: She learned to cut her wrists and her arms in there she felt that she was suicidal the day they discharged her and-
Speaker 4: Why would they discharge her if she's still feeling suicidal?
Leah: They felt she was there long enough.
Glen: I'm in the room alone with Rehtaeh and I looked at her and she looked at me and she goes, “Dad I'm going to die.”
Leah: We begged them when she left to put her somewhere. They signed her up for a drug rehab program.
Glen: She said, “I don't want to go that it's stupid I'm not a drug addict.” I said, “I know but,” I said, “There's going to be other help there. There’ll be counselors and people you can talk to.” She goes, “Yeah but I'm not a drug addict this is all about drugs.” she goes, “I'm not a drug addict. They have a drug treatment program so whatever the mental health issue is it's got to be drugs it's a rubber stamp drugs drugs drugs. A kid coming in here and they're suicidal and they're traumatized they're drug addicts.” I took her there on the first day she promised me she'd give it a chance she called me up 20 minutes later then she was really really upset and I said, “oh okay I've seen her like this before.” where you know. A kid from Cole Harbour High a boy who knows what happened to her and is friends with the kids who assaulted her was sitting there glaring at her in her first meeting for drug counseling. Did no one ever read her file?
She came over here to live with us after she got out of the hospital and her stay was so bad there a few months after she left she was upstairs here and she was crying and upset. I heard her ask for me and I went up to her bedroom and her arms were cut up and she was real bloody and I'm just, “Oh God Christ. One the worst decision I ever made in my life was putting my daughter in that hospital.”
Leah: This whole time we're still dealing with police and then finally he said, “There’s not going to be any charges for the sexual assault or the child pornography.”
Selena: Police lead out their case before the crime prosecutors and they got an almost immediate no that their prosecutors were not interested in taking it to court. Police went back and told Rehtaeh and her parents. Rehtaeh was according to her parents she was devastated.
Leah: Oh, she was out paged. She stomped around, she was angry, she was yelling, “How dare they? Everyone is going to still think I am a slut and they're walking around smiling and look what we got away with.” The injustice of it all was really that set her back. Then she tried to go back to school she said, “I want to go because I feel I have enough friends around me now to support me that I'm strong enough.” She wasn't allowed into Cole Harbour High, they wouldn't allow her to go there. I sat there in the office and he said, “She can't comeback to this school.” I said, “Why?” He said, “She transferred out of this area you are not allowed to transfer back into this area.” I said, “Well her home is here and you are aware of the reason why she transferred out of here.” He’s all, “I’m well aware of why.” I said, “Okay so the boys are walking in this school, they are allowed to be here and you're going to tell us that she's not allowed to be here so you're victimizing her all over again?”
Selena: They never really let up with the texting and the harassment. She had been taking records of the various things that were sent to her and she would sent them to the police. When the police came back after all that time and just said, “There is no case. We can’t take it forward.” She got really upset that one night in April and tried to kill herself, which her parents I think really never truly believed she would do.
Leah: That evening I was downstairs in bed, she came in and her friend Jenna was living here at the time too. I could hear Rehtaeh’s voice raising; she was on the phone with her boyfriend. When she got off the phone, I guess she said to Jenna, “Fuck this I’m going to the bathroom I’m going to hang myself.” Then she locked herself in the bathroom.
Jenna said she tried to open the door and was talking to her through the door saying, “Rehtaeh open the door, I love you.” She said, “All of a sudden Rehtaeh stopped talking to me.” I came up and grabbed something in the drawer on the way to get it into the, but I could feel her weight on the back of the door.
I honestly didn’t think there was anything in the bathroom that she could hang herself on so I was surprised to feel her weight. It’s like you go to autopilot. I said to Jenna, “Give me scissors, give me a phone we need to dial 911.” I cut the belt off her neck and I had her laying on the floor. Jason started working on her, he could do CPR and he did that. Then they came in and worked on her for half an hour, so it was 45 minutes without any pulse.
When she got to the hospital, I remember one nurse was pretty blunt with us and said, “This doesn’t look good and she is probably going to die.
Glen: I can hardly remember it, it’s such a blur but I think I just screamed my daughter is dead and gone out of the door as fast we could. I said, “Guys I’m Glen Cunning Rehtaeh Parsons is here and she is my daughter.” When they buzzed me in I could see the far end of the hospital, here comes this doctor walking really fast he is holding his hands up like this and I said, “What do you know? Just tell me what you know.” I said, “Well I know that she hang herself and I know that they are having problem finding any brain activity.” He said, “I’m just going to be honest, this will be as grim as it will get and she is not going to recover from this.” I went in to see her laying there. It’s something I regret berceuse on the way home, on the Wednesday night she asked me to stop [inaudible 00:22:49] but I was too tired. It was after nine, I just wanted to go home. I said, “Let’s just go home it’s too late to eat junk food blah, blah.” I remember when I went over and kissed her and I whispered, “Wake up I’ll take you to McDonalds.” It was a long, long three or four days in the hospital man, he never woke up.
Her mum went home and wrote a message on Facebook that she had lost her daughter following sexual assault and people bullying her. It was just a Facebook post and it seemed like it triggered something in people to hear about viral things happening on the internet. The list just absolutely exploded. I don’t know why.
Leah: I wrote that first story and then everything really blew up. It just got much bigger than I ever thought it was going to get. Then anonymous got involved.
Anonymous: Greetings citizens of the world we are anonymous. Yet again, we bring to you another tragic story of yet another young life taken from us so early Rehtaeh Parsons 17 leaves-
Glen: The next thing I knew anonymous got involved with the story and I’m not sure how they did but I’ve heard that they looked at me and her mother and what we were writing as a cry for help.
Anonymous: Our thoughts and prayers go out to her family and friends. Rehtaeh was a victim of gang rape, also a victim of constant bullying.
John: I took it personal. It wasn’t in another country or another city it was right in Halifax where I grew up all my life. I have a daughter same age as Rehtaeh and I hear they take her phone and they investigate her and they didn’t even speak to the boys and didn’t talk to them, didn’t take their devices, didn’t check their accounts, didn’t do anything. I’d be upset too.
Selena: They would release YouTube videos every couple of days and they knew a lot about the case really quickly. They do this thing called doxing where they go and trace somebody’s presence online.
Anonymous: We can confirm the identities of two of the four alleged rapists. If we were able to locate these boys within two hours, it will not be long before someone else finds them.
Selena: At one point, they threatened to release the identities of the boys involved.
Anonymous: It is important for Nova Scotia to have faith in their justice system better act fast.
Selena: They present themselves as this Robin Hood of the justice system and it really caught the imagination of people.
Glen: When anonymous got involved it became even bigger still.
Anonymous: Our demands are simple we want the RCMP Peter take immediately legal action against the individuals in question. You will be held accountable for your failure to act.
Glen: I couldn’t even tell you the amount of interviews BBC, CNN, stations in Japan, Columbia, China, Russian news stations, all across Canada every major media company you can think of. I have a friend in Saudi Arabia and he wrote me a message, “What happened you are in the news over here in Saudi Arabia?” What ended up happening people were realizing if Anonymous is involved then they cant assume they are going to be hidden. One of the males who was there that night was realizing, “Shit people are going to know who I am. They are going to release my name; I need to tell my side of the story.”
Leah: I receive a Facebook message from one of the males. He was scared for safety after Rehtaeh died.
Glen: He said, “Everyone hates me now I don’t know what to do, I’m crying I need to talk to you.” Leah was like, “No, I’m not interested in having a conversation with you. If you’ve got anything to say you can say it right here right now.” As amazing as it sounds he wrote this long Facebook confession. We are up having sex with her and she was okay and about 15 minutes after Rehtaeh looked like she was going to get sick and we both helped her when she got sick and she was out the window for about five minutes. We were asking her if she was okay she said, “I’m fine you guys keep going.” I told him to go ahead and he told me to go ahead so I went again. We picked her up, carried her over the window and she leaned out she started to throw up and said after about five minutes, “Who’s going first?” What he is talking about he’s talking about having sex with her. I’m not sure if it was my phone or his but the picture was taken without her noticing. Me being a drunk idiot I posed for the photo. After she got out of the window, we laid her on the bed to go to sleep.
Leah: You could have said what he told me really on top of what she told me he filled in all the blanks.
Glen: The other two boys we asked them to help us bring her to the spare room so we woke her up and she didn’t want to go downstairs so we picked her up and she hit him in the face once. Then we kept bugging her to get up and she finally did and walked down the stairs to pare room. She laid in the bed and I remember telling her to stop kissing me and stuff. Asked me to leave the room, I left the room and sat on the couch and he came out 20 minutes later with a smirk on his face. I had curfew so I told him I had to go home, he walked me to the door, gave me props woke up the next day and he told me that she had sex with [inaudible 00:28:20]. Christ! This is him saying, “I raped Rehtaeh Parsons.” Rehtaeh’s mum did a screen capture of it and called the police.
Selena: Then Anonymous put up this YouTube saying they had gotten their confession. They said to the Justice Minister of Nova Scotia if you don’t open this case again and see justice done in a courtroom we are going to come after you and we are going to expose the boys’ identities.
Anonymous: Since the police are useless we as citizens must stand together and say no more. Remember this day.
Leah: They opened the case again.
Selena: The RCMP did reopen the investigation. They were very specific as to say that it was not about any information that had come in online or anything like that that it was old-fashioned people coming forward from the community. They involved the child crime specialist this time around when she had died.
Glen: I’m very thankful that they did what they did. The police had months, months and months to do something to protect Rehtaeh, they watched that image be spread all over the community, all over Halifax and they didn’t do anything about it at all. Nothing.
Speaker 5: Court door is now open, door number four.
Leah: They did charge two people. They probably could have charged more. One got charged with making and distributing and the other one with distributing. They said they are not going to go with the sexual assault.
Glen: It should have been sexual assault. Child pornography it's bitter sweet. I even asked them I said, “What about sexual assault? They have the new Facebook message that came through. What about sexual assault? They are saying she was drunk and throwing up.” He said, “That’s just not going to happen.”
Speaker 4: Why did the police not take this as a confession? I don't get it?
Glen: I don't know, and he's admitting that Rehtaeh was in a state where she couldn't walk and she's throwing up then she's not in a position to give consent. That is just the basic flat out law in Canada. You have to be in a state where you are capable of giving consent. A girl throwing up who needs to be carried is not in a position to do that. These are the words right out of that kids mouth and the police knew this before my daughter died. I can't get over this.
Selena: It fascinated me how the case could become such a train wreck. The police, it seemed they really struggled with any evidence that was online or electronic, which is how all the evidence is. These are all teenagers, all they do; everything they do is on their phones. All the officers didn't even have internet access on their computers at work. It was highly restricted. They couldn't go on Facebook, they couldn't look things up the same way you or I could. Another thing I looked out was the attitude they took towards sexual assault. From what I gathered of the police investigation, they really kind of would ask people, “Do you believe she consented?” The biggest example is when they interviewed that other girl who been there at that night.
Glen: The other girl who was there with Rehtaeh, where the hell is the other girl, right? She knew both of these boys. She had dated both of them and she came upstairs and she was mad and angry and she left.
Selena: They treated her as a witness even though she hadn't been in the room. She definitely wasn't there when the photo was taken or anything like that. They asked her if she thought Rehtaeh had consented, she said, ‘yes'. I asked why she was so sure that Rehtaeh had consented, she said, “Because one of the mum's boys had been home that night. Her bedroom was down the hall and that she hadn't woken up.” This girl said, “If you're getting raped by one person or two people or in this allegation it was four people, you're going to be screaming and you're going to be crying. The mum didn't wake up and therefore Rehtaeh could not have been raped because she hadn't screamed.” Which completely ignores the fact in the criminal code of course you can be raped if you're unconscious.
What surprised me when I was reporting on it was not only how uninformed the teenagers were about those issues, but their parents. I had adults ask me, “If somebody is unconscious does that make it rape?” Which it does. “Even because they drank themselves into being unconscious is it still rape?” Which it is. If somebody is unconscious that they can't consent. Rehtaeh had said that she had drank the equivalent of eight or nine shots or drinks, over the course of the night and she was 15 at the time. There's a lot of uncertainty over how drunk is too drunk, but even beyond that people sometimes didn't understand that unconscious makes it rape.
That's a very basic thing under Canadian law. They really didn't know where to start and neither did their parents and it seems like in a way neither did the police. They weren't trying to gather information. They never interviewed the boy while she was alive. They never interviewed them until they charged them months after her death. In this case, it was unbalanced in how they had focused so much on her. If they can't handle that case, how well are they handling any sexual assault case?
Glen: When the police started doing the investigation, a young lady contacted Rehtaeh and said, “Is this one of the boys who did this to you?” Rehtaeh said, “Yeah. It was.” The girl said, “Well he did the same thing to me.” Rehtaeh was just like “You've got to call the police. Can you please come forward with everything like this?” The girl said, “After what I saw what happened to you, I don't want to.” We're basically setting an example for other victims out there while there's not a photo of my case, I don't have a confession in my case, so what chance in hell do I have of justice if this girl who had all that evidence can't get any either. We quite literary really do blame victims. That's why it's easy to get away with this.
Leah: Rape is the only crime that I can think of that the victim becomes the accused.
Glen: If I was mugged downtown, Halifax and someone took my wallet and the police investigated me. Why was I there at nighttime, did I have a beer, is it a misunderstanding, do I give to charity? If I give to charity, then I'm used to giving my money away. Look at the statistics too. Novas Scotia right now has the worst conviction charge rate for sexual assault in Canada. You have people going to jail in Nova Scotia for a matter of months, when they are found of rape. On average, by the time a man ends up even in a courtroom he has six victims behind him. 95% of rape victims they believe are telling the truth so that means 5% of the men, or the rapists are telling the truth. We should treat the cases like that, rather than go right off the bat and treat it his word, her word, she loses.
Leah: You see it over and over again in any article you ever read about a rape situation. All you have to do is go to the comments to see it's alive and well.
Glen People are ignorant and abusive and there are trolls on the internet. Someone wrote up a Facebook page called Rehtaeh Dead Parsons. They stole pictures off Facebook page and they photo shopped where they are bugging out. They photo shopped belts around her neck. They made comments like, ‘Hey Rehtaeh how's it hanging'. They would show a picture of a dead body hanging in a tree and it was probably the vilest, sickest most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life. I wrote Facebook and I said, “Look my daughter just died. Her name is Rehtaeh Parsons it's all over the news. It's a huge international story. I want this Facebook page taken down. It's mocking her death. It's insulting and disgusting.” Facebook wrote back to me and said, “We reviewed that page in a dozen violator standards.”
Facebook you've got to be joking. If this is your standard, why don't you just admit you don't have any standards? I wrote something on my website because I know that Anonymous is following the story. I got an email from some weird email address in Russia, somewhere like that and it just said, “Glen read this.” I went and looked at the Rehtaeh Dead Parsons page; this was like a couple of hours after. There was a message there that this page hacked by Anonymous. All the images were gone, there was just one single post there and it said, “The person who made this page is this person.” It was the photograph of the older sister of the boy in that photograph raping my daughter. This was his older sister, she's 21 years old and she made a page like that to mock Rehtaeh's death.
Then what happened, I got a death threat on YouTube. This is my YouTube channel and every video about Rehtaeh, even videos we would do where she was just a child and we were trying to put something out there as a memorial to her. They would show up on there with their filth and their ignorance and abuse and really, really just mean, mean stuff. “You were there her whole life; did you ever try being a good dad? You're talking to me like you're some kind of important dad. You probably raped your daughter her whole life it's no wonder she was so fucked in the head.” They write this stuff to me. “His daughter is a slut. She was all-tight until everyone had sex with her. She sucked and had sex with every guy in the city. Your daughter didn't even one high school credit.” Of course she didn't she fell apart. I don't know where it came from. For somebody to be just so goddamn mean. Their user name was iamkarma902, I took the iamkarma902 thing to mean local person, because our area code is 902.
I also took the fact that they knew a little bit about this case that this may be somebody who is involved here. Here it is here, “Keep talking shit because I know your face, your car, where you live, what you do. Keep getting lippy bud and you might be going to visit your daughter. Have a good day Glen Cunning. You're going to join your daughter.”
I screen captured it and I went to Halifax police department. Police here treated that very seriously. They went to the RCMP in Ottawa. They went to the FBI in Washington DC. The FBI went into Google and with a warrant said, “We want the IP address of the one who made this comment.” From Google it went back to the FBI and then it went back to the RCMP and then it went to the police here and they said, “We made an arrest in this case.” They said his name, which I don't think I can legally say. They told me who it was. The person who it was is the person who's in the photograph with Rehtaeh.
Speaker 4: Same kid doing the thumbs up?
Glen: Same guy doing the thumbs up. Giving the big thumbs up with a big smile. Isn't that sad you did enough damage to our daughter that she ended up without a will to live and you've got to be so filthy on how you go about it you even reach out to us when we are grieving and start insulting us and threatening us too. There's no remorse with this kid at all.
Bullying today is so much far worse and so much more devastating to people. It's not something you can get away from. I was bullied in grade seven. I was beat up in school but I could go home and I'm safe at home. Nowadays the way kids communicate there is no getting away from it. It's everywhere. People take out cell phones and they take a video of you getting beat up or they are all laughing at you and calling you a loser. The next thing you know there’s 100 people telling you to go kill yourself on Facebook and on your profile and sending tweets out with the video on there of you getting beat up.
Bryony: Girls can get away with bullying so much more. More and more young girls are committing suicide because of it, because it's easy to call a girl a slut over Facebook. It's so easy to send her a message and tell her how much of a whore she is. Something needs to be done about it honestly. I see it all the time.
Glen: After Rehtaeh's death, there were some responses by a lot of politicians.
Steven: We're just sickened seeing a story like this.
Glen: Steven Harper said we've got to stop calling this bullying and start calling it for what it is; criminal harassment. I couldn't have agreed more.
Steven: Bullying to me is a connotation of kids misbehaving. What we are dealing with in some of these circumstances is simply criminal activity.
Glen: There's a great big upheaval and screaming about Bill C-13., “Oh my God! It's going to be an invasion of privacy and all our stuff is going to be available to anybody.” No it's not. It addresses a few different things. One of them is the distribution of intimate images without consent. Peter McKay, minister of justice has referred to that as Rehtaeh's law because when that photo was being spread all over the police came up and said, “Well that's not against the law.” You have failed marriage or relationships and they have images of you that would be very embarrassing. Revenge porn I think it's called, and they post them all over the internet to humiliate people, it's not illegal and it should be.
Another one, it's going to address issues of the police being able to go to internet service providers and get information they need when crimes are being committed online and to get that information quickly. Which I think is going to make a huge difference and that's why I support this law. They could have this kid arrested in a matter of days. Hours even if the right laws were in place. It should not take eight/ten months, what it took in my case for a death threat. What if I was a vulnerable person and I was actually really afraid for my life? What if it was like an ex-husband who's been threatening to murder me? You want to wait eight months to hear back from Google? Much rather than be eight hours.
We can't just sit here with the whole, 'We're going to protect free speech crap'. You're not protecting people who are using free speech to make the world better. You're just protecting a bunch of trolls and criminals and pedophiles and child molesters and rapists. These are places you live in too. The boys there live in this kind of communities. What kind of communities do they want? It's not free speech it's hate speech.
Leah: He's found guilty. It actually happened and it's emotional.
Speaker 4: Do you think you're closer to getting justice for Rehtaeh?
Leah: There'll never be justice for Rehtaeh; she just wanted to be validated instead of being blamed for her own crime. The fact that he has plead guilty has part of me built some solace in that.
Glen: His guilty plea here today, tells everyone the police knew, child porn was being spread around Halifax, and they didn't do anything to stop it and also at Cole Harbour High. They knew child porn was being distributed in their halls of their school and they didn't do anything to stop it at all. What that means really is they did nothing to protect the victim. That to me is just wrong. That big question had to be asked: Why wasn't something done while it would have made a difference?
Leah: The stones, I started by painting memory stones for Rehtaeh. It's a way for me to feel calm it's just to paint. We place these everywhere we go. Something very spiritual about the stones.
Glen: She grew up, a part of her, here in this park. It played a big role with Rehtaeh. It's very fitting that this park is so beautiful. It was really nice. People say time heals all wounds, but it doesn't. A big, big part of me died in that hospital room with my daughter.
Leah: I felt like I was having an outer body experience. We already decided we'd be organ donors then they said the recipients aren't all ready and that was a real dilemma for me at that moment. I didn't really feel comfortable keeping her body alive. I almost changed my mind. Lucky we did because one of them was a teenager that received her heart. That child would have died if I would have changed my mind. There's five lives she saved.
Glen: In spite of all this grief and upset, it is nice to know that she is still out there today, some of her anyways, is still out there, very much alive and that has changed people's lives for the better for sure.
Leah: It's happening everywhere. I have 32 countries on my page just because this is a global issue. Rape, suicide, the cyber bullying.
Glen: As long as we let kids do this kind of stuff like that, we're going to get kids get out of high school and go out there into the world and they are just going to be mean. They are going to think getting your way is about bullying, tormenting and terrorizing people who are in your way. That's shit. I don't want to live in a society like that. You think some username like 'iamkarma902' on YouTube means you’re hidden? He's going to be in court for criminal harassment and death threats. You're not anonymous you're not. If you think you're anonymous, Anonymous will get you.
Selena: Rehtaeh's peer group that she grew up with would have the same sex Ed classes as she did; they had never had a word about consent in school.
Bryony: First of all, don't teach women not to wear clothes that are suggest being rape. Teach the boys not to rape, there's a good idea. Secondly, the whole suicide topic nobody really talks about it. Honestly, in the entire three years I was in high school I think the topic was brought up once. That's sad. It should be part of our education. People should know that, there's people they can turn to, to talk to if they’re considering suicide. Whereas we don't have any of that. My school wanted to completely forget that she even existed. No one once ever offered her support or offered her help. I think maybe if they did, maybe she'd have a chance of still being here today.
Speaker 4: Have you ever blamed yourself?
Leah: I probably went through a phase where I felt, not blame myself, but guilty. It wasn't enough, what if. Every time I felt like that, I would feel this almost like a voice over my right ear, “Don't do that. Stop that.” It feels like Rehtaeh's right there like, “Stop doing this.”
Glen: I think this is so important to reach these kids and say, “Look it's never a victims fault, ever. It's not a victims fault for rape or sexual assault and it certainly isn't when it comes to cyber bullying.” It's a crime. It's the criminals fault. Goodbye.