Comedian Mike Ward was back in the Court of Appeal on Tuesday morning: the legal saga that followed his jibes at Jérémy Gabriel is not over yet. The young man’s mother is seeking financial compensation for the defamation and harassment she says she suffered.
The Gabriel family’s allegations against Mike Ward over his popular show “Mike Ward s’eXpose” have been examined by the courts for more than 10 years.
In 2012, Ms. Gabriel filed a complaint with the Commission on Human and Youth Rights. She claimed her teenage son was discriminated against because of his disability. Jérémy Gabriel suffers from Treacher Collins syndrome, a congenital disease characterized by head deformities and severe deafness. The Commission considered the complaint to be well-founded and filed a lawsuit against Mike Ward before the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal on behalf of Jérémy Gabriel and his parents, seeking the sum of $80,000.
The family initially won their case: in 2016, the Human Rights Tribunal ordered Mike Ward to pay $35,000 to Jérémy Gabriel and $7,000 to his mother. Mike Ward was found to have violated the young man’s right to equality by making discriminatory comments based on his disability that violated his dignity.
The case reached the Supreme Court of Canada, which rejected the appeal in 2021 and canceled the award of funds.
The court concluded that the Human Rights Tribunal had no jurisdiction to hear the case because it was not a discrimination complaint. The teenager was not targeted because of his disability, but because of his notoriety, which is not grounds for discrimination prohibited by the Quebec Charter. According to the majority justices, Mike Ward’s comments about Mr. Gabriel did not give rise to a discrimination claim, but rather a defamation claim that the court could not hear.
Shortly thereafter, in January 2022, Ms. Gabriel filed a lawsuit for defamation, harassment and intimidation – not discrimination, according to the Supreme Court ruling. She is demanding the sum of $84,600.
Mike Ward moved to dismiss this lawsuit. The comedian therefore considers the lawsuit to be without merit because it was filed outside the time limits prescribed by law: a person who claims to have been harmed by another person has a maximum time limit to file a lawsuit. And then, he says, this new action is based on the same criticisms as the previous one: There is nothing new and everything has been decided, the comedian pleads through the mouth of his lawyers.
Ms Gabriel replied that the deadlines for her personal claim for damages were interrupted when the Commission brought its case before the Human Rights Court.
In 2022, Justice Manon Gaudreault of the Quebec Court rejected this argument. Ms. Gabriel filed her lawsuit too late, she writes.
For this reason, she appeared before the Court of Appeal on Tuesday morning to have Judge Gaudreault’s decision overturned and to be able to pursue her claim for damages.
But one of Mike Ward’s lawyers, Me Julius Gray, objected: “Can you prosecute a case for decades just by changing courts?” he asked.
The appeal court made the decision during a consultation and will announce its judgment at a later date.
As for Jérémy Gabriel, who also filed a claim for damages for defamation following the Supreme Court ruling, he announced in the media last May that he wanted to put an end to the claim. But he has not yet filed a complaint with the court for this purpose, said his lawyer, Me Stéphane Harvey.