Your Life Can and May be Used Against You
Just in time for the first week of our Ethical Lawyering classes, Lori Douglas recently spoke out about the humiliating experiences that led to her premature retirement. For those of you who don’t recall, Lori Douglas is the Manitoba judge whose career was ruined after nude photographs of her became public knowledge. The photos were posted online without her knowledge by her husband— himself a lawyer— and used to sexually proposition one of his clients, who sued them both for sexual harassment several years later. The case dragged on until she resigned in November and, unsurprisingly, she compared the experience to being repeatedly sexually assaulted. Surprisingly, she did manage to forgive her husband, who died with little fanfare in 2014.
Do you remember his name? If you don’t, that’s okay. His name was Jack King and I had to look it up too.
That’s one of the things I wish to address in this article: a pervasive attitude regarding sexual matters that lingers in almost every corner of our society and culture. Lori Douglas was the victim of an appalling invasion of privacy, but when all was said and done, she might as well have been the party who showed revealing photos of her spouse to a client. If anyone should have become a household name for failure to separate one’s private and personal life, it was Jack King. Believe it or not, I’m not actually going to suggest that she was dragged through the mud specifically because of her gender (though that’s not an unreasonable conclusion). I’m saying that our society is so predisposed to shaming people over their sex lives that some of us will shame a judge who was first and foremost the victim of her husband’s indiscretion. Perhaps he would have been the publicly shamed party if he had more to lose, but for whatever reasons, he escaped mostly unscathed.
The second thing I wish to discuss is the extent to which our personal lives can come under extreme scrutiny in the legal profession. Lori Douglas is a human being, and like a lot of people, she clearly had some kinks. None of them should have ever become public knowledge, and they certainly shouldn’t have led to the end of her career, especially considering they became public knowledge by little— if any— fault of her own. Unfortunately, her private life did become public knowledge and it did ruin her career. It’s not fair and I sincerely hope something changes to protect people in her situation, but as things currently stand, you can be punished for something that was supposed to remain behind closed doors. The phrase “watch your back” is usually viewed as a threat, but in some circumstances, it’s sincerely friendly advice. You don’t have to live in fear of betrayal but you do have to be careful.
I urge this caution as someone who is fairly likely to have his personal life scrutinised at some point during his career. Amusingly enough, the day after laws surrounding bawdy houses were addressed during a criminal law lecture, my band was invited to perform as the musical entertainment at a sex club. I declined to perform due to personal reasons unrelated to the venue, but I have performed there before and will likely do so again in the future. Mostly, it’s because a gig’s a gig and an audience is an audience, but it’s also because there is a strong expectation of privacy in such places. Between two gigs, there’s only one photo of our band within the walls of the club and we’re all wearing suit jackets and dress shirts. We had to assure management that we would record nothing else. For the most part, we got in, played our set, and got out. We were paid in club memberships we never used. It’s not as boring as I make it sound, but it’s nowhere near as crazy as one might expect.
The point is that someone hypothetically could have snapped a photograph of us and used it to extort me. Even our normal gigs can be morally dubious. One of our songs is about an internet predator who gets his comeuppance, but if you only hear the first two verses, you could mistakenly believe we were encouraging such behaviour. If someone really tried, they could likely use my limited musical career against me, and it’s not like I don’t have my days as a teenage dirtbag to worry about. Being a bass player in a raunchy rock band is far from the most questionable thing I’ve done in my life (and I don’t plan on quitting any time soon), but I can still see it being a problem.
That said, I do want to return to how clumsy our society can be when it comes to addressing sexual matters, especially victims of someone else’s indiscretions. Justice Douglas was punished because her husband failed to respect her privacy. Robin Camp showed that even Federal Court judges are willing to “slut shame” sexual assault victims over little more than personal prejudice or ignorance. Even male victims of sexual assault have their experiences trivialised. Without going into too much detail, I once had a guy grope me when I passed out at a party, and people have criticised me for not getting up and fighting him. I was so drunk I hadn’t realised what happened and only vaguely remembered slapping someone’s wrist. The point is that you can be a teenage girl who was too scared to fight back, a powerful woman who had her privacy compromised, or a large young man who only realised what happened the morning after, and some people will find a way to hold it against you. As future legal practitioners, we have an obligation to be aware of this issue, especially considering its pervasiveness in so many levels of our society.
The overarching message here is “be careful and sympathetic.” You don’t want your private life being scrutinised too harshly, so don’t harshly scrutinise the lives of others. Don’t trivialise the victims of crime, lest people trivialise crimes committed against you. Anyone can make a mistake and anyone can be a victim. Even judges aren’t immune to shaming or being shamed. A lot of the time, we can’t do much more than be sympathetic to someone else’s plight, but if that’s all you can do, at least do that.
Also, please support the band Starship Experience, who needed to perform without me for the last two months of 2015.