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A jury hearing the cyberbullying case of Amanda Todd saw screen captures of the Port Coquitlam student flashing her breasts during video chats.
The intimate images, which were not broadcast to the gallery during the fifth day of the trial at BC Supreme Court in New Westminster, were recorded by unknown users who then loaded the videos onto a porn site called motherless.com without Todd knowing.
Prosecutor Marcel Daigle showed portions of the videos, as well as stills from the videos, as part of evidence by the Crown Counsel, which it said were distributed to the teen’s friends and family via email and social media channels.
The videos came as Det. Const. Robin Shook, a digital forensic expert with the Vancouver Police Department, was on the witness stand on Friday morning (June 10).
Daigle pointed to two hyperlinks from the porn site that were sent to her school, Westview Secondary in Maple Ridge, by email, as well as to more than 1,000 of Amanda’s Facebook friends, including her parents.
On Nov. 12, 2011, Daigle told the jury, a Facebook user named “Austin Collins” connected with her family and friends, using a topless image of Amanda as his profile picture.
On his Facebook wall, he wrote he was “going to Westview in a month” and wanted to make friends in advance, to which one of Amanda’s friends commented, “WTF is wrong with you?”
“I’m doing what Jesus would do,” Austin Collins wrote back with a heart emoji, the court heard.
On his Facebook page, Austin Collins — who claimed his birthday was on April 1, 1996 — also posted explicit messages about Amanda, Daigle said, as well as provided URLs to motherless.com and nude photos of Amanda captured from chat websites, one of which had 5,789 views at the time of the screen capture.
Shook said he also examined 18 additional screen capture videos, with the dates and times visible, as part of his investigation and expert report for the Crown.
In her opening statement on Monday (June 6), lead prosecutor Louise Kenworthy told the six men and six women on the jury the Crown will prove one person was behind 22 fake user accounts for a “persistent campaign of online sextortion” against Amanda, between November 2009 and February 2012.
In her address, Kenworthy also alleged that same person had tapped into their neighbours’ router while staying at a vacation home, about an hour south of Amsterdam by car; a phone number was used to verify access, she claimed.
Aydin Coban, a native of The Netherlands, is on trial for five counts. On Monday (June 6), he pleaded not guilty to:
- extortion
- importing and distributing child pornography
- possession of child pornography
- communicating with the intent to lure a child
- criminal harassment
None of the allegations is proven in court.
The seven-week trial continues.
