Graham James, no. 1 Canada pedo,100% AOC-compliant!
by Bernie Najarian
June 21, 2015
Let me start off with a tale.
Once upon a time, back in the land of my ancestors, I was out on a hilltop, looking on, as a distant relative selected a goat from his herd for all of us to have for dinner. It was our welcoming feast.
The goats seemed to recognize that this man’s excursion into the herd was a fateful one, but they didn’t run. They just looked away. A beige-and-white goat was haltered and led off to slaughter within sight of the hilltop the herd was grazing on. The goats kept on looking elsewhere.
I think about those goats these days every time I read a newspaper. Every edition features a purported pedophile being led off to his doom. Sometimes, it’s a grievous offender that I would gladly doom myself; sometimes, it’s just an unfortunate schmo with apparently legal merch that got caught in a surprise judicial twist – such as an Azov film. It’s damned hard to look at the stories where some doctor, or mathematician, or Nobel prize winner, is being plastered with the ‘sick monster’ discourse and sacrificed to the glut of journalistic and child-protectionist self-laud. If the guy did something wrong, I often think, maybe an open minor-attracted community could have led him away from his error before it happened. If there was nothing wrong with what he did, then maybe his motives deserved a more even-minded audience. Same goes for the occasional teen-loving woman caught in the pedo-grinding mill.
Mostly, then, I look away. I marvel at the dozens or hundreds of Twitter feeds and blogs where manically obsessed axe-grinders relentlessly list every child pornography bust they can find anywhere in the world. Is there someone out there documenting every drunk driver who gets charged worldwide, or even all the ones who kill someone? If so, I haven’t run into them. The obsession with sexcrimes is almost sexual itself – but if you don’t happen to have the voyeurism for child porn and child abuse busts, how can you stand to read about them all?
I was barely paying attention, then, on a scan of internet news links, when the latest stories about Graham James, Canada’s king of sports pedophilia, popped up. I’d bypassed many stories in the past about the froggish mini-Sandusky who brought teen-groping to the Canadian sports news desk. This time, in the May/June 2015 news feed, there was a wake-up call. Something caught my eye.
The groomed and suffering victim, the story said, was 18 when the abuse began.
Child abuse at 18+?
Huh?
Here’s a synopsis from Bill Graveland of the Canadian Press [1].
The victim, who was 18 at the time and whose name is under a court-ordered publication ban, said he could no longer live with the "shame, humiliation and lies" and was able to come forward with the support of his wife.
The man, who is now 43, was too emotional to give his victim impact statement to the court, so Queen's Bench Justice Tim Keene read it for him.
"I suffered in silence," the victim wrote of the abuse he experienced while playing for James with the Western Hockey League's Swift Current Broncos.
"He violated my trust. He took away my dream."
Prosecutor Glen Herman told the judge that James worked to build the victim's trust and "groomed him" to take part in the abuse.
Herman said sexual contact started out with touching while clothed and progressed to the victim being naked. The prosecutor said the encounters occurred twice a week.
James confided to the player that he was gay, said Herman, who added the coach told his player that taking part wouldn't make him gay also, but would just be "helping out a friend."
The player "felt he had no choice but to participate in these activities" because James could "crush" his hockey career, Herman said.”
The victim consented, then, for the sake of his career plans. Naively, you might say that this was an adult decision, even if regrettable, given the young man’s age. In Canadian law, however, consent is not a defense against a sexual assault charge, even one involving an adult complainant, if “the accused induces the complainant to engage in the activity by abusing a position of trust, power or authority” (Criminal Code section 273.1).
In legal reality, then, James, was convicted not as a child abuser, but as an authority abuser. Newspapers paid no attention to the difference. These days, an 18 year old victim of a ‘serial pedophile’ (as James is often called by previous complainant Sheldon Kennedy) is a child, whether he’s a child or not. These matters are defined emotionally, not rationally. But don’t imagine here that I’m justifying anything James did with his young hockey player – we’ll get to the nitty gritty about that sort of thing in a few minutes. I’m simply stunned that the crime was universally portrayed in the press as child abuse, even though no child was involved. I know that Graham’s previous accusers had mostly been 14 or 15 years old when Graham began working on them for sexual favors. There was definitely a pattern in his modus operandi. This time, however, he had gone quite high up into his proclaimed range of attractions encompassing males 15 – 25 [2]. That was even though, 25 years ago when the offense occurred, the age of consent in Canada was – wait for it – 14.
When I got this far in investigating the story, I began to notice that the section of the Criminal Code James was convicted under was seldom mentioned in his news stories, whether by number or by name. Some googling revealed that he had always been convicted under the long since rescinded section 246.1, a general sexual assault provision that still applied during the time James was fondling teens, and section 271, the current sexual assault provision.
Much googling disclosed the wording of the long-lost section 246.1 [3]:
"Everyone who commits a sexual assault is guilty of (a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for ten years; or (b) an offence punishable on summary conviction.”
It then went on to talk about further considerations for cases where complainants were under 14 years of age, something that has never applied in any case involving James.
Today’s section 271 says
[4] “Everyone who commits a sexual assault is guilty of
• (a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years and, if the complainant is under the age of 16 years, to a minimum punishment of imprisonment for a term of one year; or
• (b) an offence punishable on summary conviction and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 18 months and, if the complainant is under the age of 16 years, to a minimum punishment of imprisonment for a term of 90 days.
The provision about the complainant under 16 came into force in May 2008, decades after James’s offenses [5]. The raising of the age of consent to 16 does not apply retroactively.
The hidden reality of Graham James, as a ‘convicted pedophile,’ is that he has never transgressed the legal age of consent.
Furthermore, in his own way (see below), he has invariably obtained consent. But consent, in his case, is not a defence.
If there was a Guinness Book of World Records entry for ‘most pedophile contact sex crime convictions amassed by a person who never had sex with a legally defined child,’ James would be the record-holder.
Now, it has to be said, James’ method of obtaining consent was to be authoritative, manipulative and incredibly annoying.
Here’s a passage from the judgment against him in the 2012 case involving another complainant, Theo Fleury [6].
[21] Mr. Fleury was drafted by the Winnipeg Warriors, a team in the Western Hockey League. Mr. James took Mr. Fleury to practices and games and to all his activities. Mr. James gave him material items and provided opportunities, including numerous trips.
[22] Consistent during this time was Mr. James’ promise that he would do everything he could to get Mr. Fleury to the National Hockey League. Given Mr. James’ reputation and the respect Mr. James garnered in the hockey world, Mr. Fleury believed him.
[23] Mr. James persuaded the elderly couple Mr. Fleury was billeting with that, in order for Mr. Fleury to keep his grades up (which was required for him to keep playing hockey), Mr. Fleury needed to spend two evenings a week at Mr. James’ apartment for tutoring sessions, and that the sessions needed to be overnight. Since Mr. James had been a substitute teacher, the couple accepted this and agreed.
[24] No tutoring took place. Instead, Mr. Fleury was sexually assaulted during these times. Mr. Fleury slept on a cot in Mr. James’ bedroom. The bedroom windows had some covering on them so that the room was dark. Typically, Mr. James would come to Mr. Fleury’s cot and grope Mr. Fleury’s buttocks and feet. Mr. Fleury would try to roll himself up in blankets so that Mr. James could not touch him but Mr. James kept trying to pull away the blankets. This would continue through the night. The result was that Mr. Fleury got little sleep and was constantly exhausted. His grades fell.
[25] Mr. James persisted in this behaviour, twice a week, until about May, 1984. Mr. Fleury estimates there were about 80 assaults of this type.
[26] In May, 1984, the assaults escalated. Mr. James made arrangements to take Mr. Fleury on a road trip to the Maritimes. The night before they were to leave, when Mr. Fleury was sleeping at Mr. James’ residence, Mr. James massaged Mr. Fleury’s feet. That aroused Mr. James and Mr. James masturbated himself to the point where he ejaculated on Mr. Fleury’s feet. Mr. James then cleaned the ejaculate off Mr. Fleury’s feet with a towel and performed fellatio on Mr. Fleury. This was the first sexual assault of this type. Mr. Fleury says he was so exhausted from constantly trying to fend off Mr. James’ assaults that he simply could not resist anymore. They drove to Halifax, and then to some other cities in the U.S. Sexual assaults of this same type took place virtually every night of this approximately month long trip. Mr. Fleury learned that it was easier to endure the relatively short time it took for the assaults to happen, because then he could actually get some sleep.
Consent obtained through exhaustion, on background of career aspiration. I can’t imagine remaining sexually interested in someone who was huddling in blankets to get away from me, but apparently, James didn’t find it off-putting in the slightest, even after hours had gone by. Setting Canadian law aside for a moment, what do we think of that as an approach to consent? I ask that because I can see that there is still a lively sense among the sex-advocating fraction of the minor-attracted community that consent, doggone it, should be consent. On June 16, 2015, boychat.org poster ‘Goethe the Feminoidphile’ said,
Consent is consent is consent. To what degree an individual might feel or even express reluctance (if at all) to go along with something is completely immaterial. It still doesn't change the fact that the consent is valid. The important point is that once consent is given, any sense of reluctance, unsureness or mistake (or whatever) in making that decision to consent are nonetheless shortcomings solely on the part of the person themselves giving it. Any such regret should NEVER be allowed to be used to make a convenient scapegoat out of the other party involved. But due to the insane upside down mentalities of these times that is unfortunately no longer how it is. In a just and logical world, only when a person who says "Ok, yes, I'll do it" (who doesn't actually want to do it) is actually under duress should the finger then be pointed at the other party instead.
He went on to clarify in a follow-up post
I am ultimately referring to how things should be legally, not necessarily ethically. For example if someone asked someone else who was suicidal or completely idiotic to jump off a cliff, while such an action could be seen as appalling and unethical, it should nonetheless NOT be subject to legal prosecution, simply because that person did nothing to actually coerce the other person to jump. If he on the other hand had physically pushed him over the cliff, that would be an entirely different story….
Remember though, we are only talking about sex here. It's hardly rocket science and not like we're talking about coaxing a naïve young person into signing some contract that might financially ruin him for life.
Goethe was propounding that viewpoint in relation to sex with children. Wherever he may be situated in his offline life, he is clearly not influential in the Canadian justice system, which doesn’t even apply his rigidity about consent to adults.
Justice Catherine Carlson, in the Fleury case, continued sympathetically,
[27] Mr. Fleury was in an unimaginable situation. He was just 15 years old. There was really nothing for him if he returned to Russell, and his family did not have resources to provide to him. Mr. James continued to tell him that he was a great hockey player and that with his hockey connections, Mr. Fleury would make it to the National Hockey League.
[28] In the summer of 1984, the Winnipeg Warriors team was sold to Moose Jaw, and Mr. James was the head coach. Mr. Fleury was then 16 years old. Mr. James made arrangements for a billet family for Mr. Fleury in Moose Jaw. Mr. James convinced the woman with whom Mr. Fleury was billeting that Mr. Fleury had to spend two nights a week at his residence for tutoring. As before, there was no tutoring. Instead, sexual assaults occurred of the same type – that is Mr. James massaging Mr. Fleury’s feet, becoming aroused and ejaculating and then performing fellatio on Mr. Fleury.
[29] Mr. Fleury estimates he was sexually assaulted by Mr. James while in Moose Jaw about 150 times. At age 16, he remained in this terrible dilemma – whether to spend the time fighting Mr. James off, and getting no sleep, or spend ten minutes to get the assault over with so he could get to sleep. It was easier to get it over with and get to sleep. Mr. Fleury describes that when he was being sexually assaulted he would just “check out” mentally.
He would clearly have to ‘check out’ while still wearing an erection in order to be fellated, but one supposes that’s just part of a teen’s vulnerability.
Take Theo Fleury’s situation across the 18+ border, and nothing changes in Canadian law, or public sentiment.
My own opinion about all this, if I can be so subjective as to interject it, is that if there is to be a law where someone in a position of authority is obliged not to use that authority to gain sexual consent, Graham James was indeed a sexual assaulter. This sort of law may apply to life-or-death situations, not just to career choices – one’s doctor, for example, may make sexual consent a precondition of life-saving therapy. A good case can be made for having a law about sexual assault under the undue influence of authority. Still, I must admit, there is an eerie undercurrent in the James situation, at least for someone from my generation.
In those days – quite some time ago – most of us were raised under the influence of traditional religions. Let me tell you, Armenian Orthodox is by no means the least traditional of these. On sexual consent, however, the religions that held sway in NYC pretty much all held the same view.
You consent to marriage first. Then sex. We all know, the priests would say (and as far as we know, in our church, they tended to live it), that other sexual temptations will come along, but if they do, you say ‘no.’
Outside the church door and back into the less idealistic, ‘real’ world of a North American adolescence, there was an expression for someone who would sleep with a person they weren’t married to in the name of their career ambitions: ‘round heels.’ This meant that unlike the sturdily constructed people of normal, no-saying morality, these people could easily be pushed backwards onto a bed and fucked. We might as well not mince words, since, as kids, we certainly didn’t. Our moral judgments, often heard in scandalous storytelling about what this girl or that boy had done, were not far from Goethe’s when it came to consent. If you didn’t have the balls, or the ovaries, to say ‘no,’ and especially if you said yes for financial consideration, present or future, you were condemned as a slut. No one could force you to be a slut, while if you were actually raped, that was something else entirely. It was the height of rottenness to claim to have been raped when you’d merely been a slut.
Those were simple times. Now, from the mid-20th century point of view, you can commit sluttery and be considered, legally, to have been raped – even retroactively into that very time period. I think many teens who had heard in 1969 about the goings-on of the James boys and people like them would have said, “well, look, he could have said ‘no.’” To allow one’s sacred genitals to be disturbed for something as venal as stardom had no honor whatsoever. The answer to
Mr. Fleury was in an unimaginable situation. He was just 15 years old. There was really nothing for him if he returned to Russell, and his family did not have resources to provide to him.
would be ‘Why couldn’t he have got a job at McDonalds like all the rest of us had to do? Maybe he could have found another coach, but if not, isn’t his honor more important than his career?’
Perhaps the smarting welt of that old-timey judgment is what has made Kennedy, Fleury, and their usually nameless colleagues so passionate about calling the Age-of-Consent-observing James a pedophile.
"By the time a pedophile gets caught he has over 120 victims, not surprised by the news of Graham James," Theo Fleury tweeted as news spread of this year’s charges. He didn’t link whatever bogus piece of pseudo-research his assertion was based on.
Kennedy told reporters [7] that
….he understands why the latest victim was afraid of James.
“When I was abused, Graham James threatened us with a gun. Graham James was a physical presence. Graham James used to let air out of people’s tires right in front of us and throw shopping carts on people’s cars,” said Kennedy.
“He was a mean person. It wasn’t just this nice little guy that abused kids.”
Well, yes, if he could keep it up for boys who were obviously loathing his presence, he had a bit of sadism about him, no question.
"There is no fixing (pedophiles). There's managing," said Kennedy in another quasi-expert response to the current case. On the CTV news network [8] , he criticized James’ current lawyer for his duplicity in defending a ‘serial pedophile’ as a ‘homosexual.’
Absolutely, he tried to downplay what Graham had done because he was a lonely man and he couldn’t come out in this macho game of hockey being a homosexual and, uh, there’s absolutely no connection between homosexuality and pedophilia, and to me that was the most disturbing part of the day”
Kennedy and Fleury have both become prominent activists against sexual abuse. Factuality is clearly not their strong suit. No one has ever credibly asserted that a male who likes males from the age of consent to 25 is not a homosexual. Kennedy and Fleury have been legitimized by their experiences to be significant sources of disinformation on the plurality of minor-attracted people.
James, these days, consistently apologizes and pleads guilty to all charges as they arise, but in the early days, according to his wikipedia, things were different:
Even during his investigation, he was able to secure character references from respected hockey people and former players. He claimed that his relationship with Sheldon Kennedy was consensual and it was not illegal or immoral.
Now, imprisoned in a country where 16 is the age of consent, and every other ephebophile is pretty much in the clear, he clearly wants to see the sun rise overhead again. Sticks and stones won’t break his bones.
The message I take away from all this is that even though James was perhaps the world’s most ridiculously appalling numbskull in his approach to obtaining consent, his case still raises disturbing questions about the wooliness of our attempts to validate this completely subjective action, consenting.
An attitude like Justice Carlson’s is implicitly based on the modern ethos – in a time when most male movie action heroes are supposed to be bedding beautiful women left and right – that the very idea that an unmarried person should be expected to say ‘no’ to a extra-marital sexual inducement is not worth serious consideration. Even the career prospects of a legal adult are legitimately bargained for sex if the authority figure is pushy enough. Naturally, you get good and frightened in your trap between unwanted legal sex and career suicide, and you give in first, then prosecute later. No one would be so hideous as to examine the shape of your heels.
Meanwhile, at a time when even adults can’t regulate their own consent, youths cut off by the change in legal age are trying to.
In another recent Canadian case involving pedo monsterdom, a then 25-year-old, very boyish looking Christian radio host, Jason McIntyre from the town of Gravenhurst, was arrested after making sexual contact with three self-proclaimed gay boys he’d met via the internet. His liaison with a 12-year-old who had a properly vigilant mom doomed him, but the two previous involvements with 14-year-olds were only discovered via police search of his past communications. In the sort of non-standard blip into real reality that you only get in small-town newspapers [9], Roland Cilliers of the Huntsville Forester reported
One of the (phone text) conversations that resulted in a conviction was with a 14-year-old boy when McIntyre was 24. The conversations between the two were described as explicit and often sexual.
When police located that boy, he said that there had been a physical sexual relationship.
“He advised that in January 2014, when he was 14-years-old, the accused drove him to Vaughan and a sexual interaction occurred while inside a parked car that had been driven by McIntyre. The pair engaged in oral sex on more than one occasion,” said (Crown Attorney Lindsay) Jeanes.
That boy was described as “not fully co-operative with police” and he said he didn’t think of himself as a victim. He indicated he held McIntyre in high regard.
The final conversation, which resulted in a conviction, was with another 14-year-old boy who described McIntyre as a ‘role model’ to police. He called him “Jay Mac,” and the pair met through church and would attend Christian events together.
Although commenters on articles about McIntyre were split between those who thought pedophiles should be destroyed and those who thought Christianity should be destroyed (as intrinsically pedophilic), the story, to me, evoked the objections that I could see (5) had been made in 2008 when Canada’s conservative government raised the age of consent.
The Canadian AIDS Society has stated that "increasing the age of consent could result in young people being more secretive about their sexual practices and not seeking out the information they need. This will place youth at an increased risk of contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted infections."
This proposal (to raise the AOC – BN) has received criticism from different organizations and individuals. Andrea Cohen of the pro-choice Canadian Federation for Sexual Health (formerly International Planned Parenthood Federation) said the organization believes the legislation does nothing to keep youth from harm. She talked on CTV News Channel's "Mike Duffy Live" where she stated: "What it will do is infringe upon the rights of youth in terms of their ability to make decisions on their own sexuality". Later (in 2007) her organization issued an official position statement.
Peter Dudding, Executive Director of the Child Welfare League of Canada, criticized the bill's effect of removing judicial discretion in cases involving 14 and 15 year-olds: "When we deal with arbitrary cut-offs, we lose the flexibility to apply the law in a much more specific and individualized kind of way."
What can the law do, other than be an ass, when 14-year-olds are desperately trying to assert their consent while 18-year-olds, 25 years after the fact, are being legally relieved of it, as incompetent due to youth and undue influence?
I don’t think the law is going to accept Goethe’s viewpoint any time soon.
We goats on the hillside need to stop looking away, then, and start doing whatever it takes to find a newer and better solution to this problem.
- A couple of additional notes on this case.[10]
1. Stepping out of the charmed circle
One issue that has emerged is the idea that it seems unfair to suggest that a teenaged boy could simply say 'no' to a masher like James. In my evaluation of this situation, I considered the case of journalist Francis Wheen, who dissuaded the then boysexually rampant Charles Napier. Napier, who was one of Wheen's teachers at the time, later became the treasurer of the Paedophile Information Exchange, something that caused much geysering of bile in later Britrag reports on his pedomonsterdom and legal process.
He says Napier, then in is 20s, charmed the youngsters with his sports car, dashing good looks and claims that he was a professional actor.
Mr Wheen said: “He recruited a few of us, saying ‘spend more time in the gym’ and appointed himself gym master. There was a room off the gym and that became his haunt.
“Four or five of us started regularly going down there, vaulting over horses and things like that, in our gym shorts in all our innocence.
“At the end of it he would take us into his room off the gym and give us beer and cigarettes – bottles of Mackeson’s and Senior Service untipped.
“We thought this was terrifically exciting. Here we were, 11 years old, being given beer and fags – we were thinking he’s on our side not like any of the other masters.
“And of course this was for an ulterior purpose which very soon became clear when he stuck his hand down my gym shorts and I had to sort of fight him off.”
Mr Wheen said: “He said ‘Don’t be such a baby’ and said I wasn’t grown-up enough for that sort of thing. He would point to a couple of other boys, saying ‘They let me do it. You just won’t let me because you’re so babyish.’
“I think he was hoping I’d say ‘no I’m as grown up as them’ and let him get on with it but I didn’t. It meant I was excluded from his ‘charmed circle’ after that – but by then I knew where he kept his beer and cigarettes so I used to break into his room, steal them and go sit in the woods.
“I could enjoy them without being sexually abused.”
A curiously worldly-wise defense, "I'm not grown-up enough for that sort of thing." Perhaps Wheen had some help from the intrinsic arrogance of the very intelligent. Others might be easier to manipulate.
In any case, he stepped out of the charmed circle and became a rebel at that moment. All it took was a 'no.'
Link: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/paedophile-scandal-charles-napier-could-1430365
2. Canadian Criminal Code section 153
Some people wonder if James might have broken the age of consent laws as a person in a position of trust or authority, under the Canadian criminal code's section 153. It applies to teens between the age of consent (initially 14, now 16) and their 18th birthday. It says
153. (1) Every person commits an offence who is in a position of trust or authority towards a young person, who is a person with whom the young person is in a relationship of dependency or who is in a relationship with a young person that is exploitative of the young person, and who
(a) for a sexual purpose, touches, directly or indirectly, with a part of the body or with an object, any part of the body of the young person; or
(b) for a sexual purpose, invites, counsels or incites a young person to touch, directly or indirectly, with a part of the body or with an object, the body of any person, including the body of the person who so invites, counsels or incites and the body of the young person.
It transpires that the reason Sect. 153 has not come up in the James cases is because it emanates from a bill called C-15 that was passed and came into force in 1988. James' offenses with boys under 18 were all prior to 1988. He thus remains consistently compliant with the Age of Consent. That doesn't help him legally as a person judged to have committed sexual assault, which has no age limit, but it relieves him completely of the taint of 'pedophilic crimes.' That is, it relieves him of that label in any rational minds. There apparently are none today, but that's an unrelated issue.
Link: http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/LOP/researchpublications/prb993-e.htm
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