Four new victims want to be added to the class action lawsuit against billionaire Robert Miller, including a woman who would have been eleven years old at the time of the alleged events. Like all other plaintiffs in the case, she requested anonymity and is identified only by her initials.
This brings to 39 the number of women who have joined the as-yet-unapproved class action lawsuit against the Quebec businessman. Three other individual lawsuits have also been filed, all by women who claim Robert Miller sexually exploited them when they were minors. The entrepreneur denies all proceedings and denies all allegations made against him.
The latest alleged victims’ affidavits were filed Monday by the Consumer Law Group, which is leading the class action lawsuit. The stories echo those relayed in the investigative report aired last February, in which women reported being recruited and paid for sexual acts by Robert Miller while they were underage, between the ages of 14 and 17.
However, one of the youngest participants in the class action lawsuit says she was barely 11 years old when she met the wealthy businessman.
In the affidavit, the young woman states that she was recruited in 1999 by two older girls who were looking for virgins for Bob.
“It was summer and I had just finished my sixth grade,” she says, adding that she went to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel with her best friend, who was the same age. When we arrived, before I entered the room, I got scared and started crying.
It was Raymond Poulet, Robert Miller’s matchmaker, who greeted her and then brought her to him. The billionaire is said to have then offered them alcohol. He asked me my age and I told him I was 11, she wrote in her affidavit.
Following the same rituals described by most of the businessman’s alleged victims, the two friends are said to have had full, unprotected sexual intercourse with him. He then allegedly gave each person an envelope containing $5,000 in cash.
Remember that in Canada in 1999 the minimum age for sexual relations was 14 years old. According to the Penal Code, any sexual relationship with a minor aged 14 or over becomes a criminal offense as soon as it is paid. If the victim is 11 years old, consent cannot be given.
After the first meeting, this victim would have seen Robert Miller approximately thirty times at the hotel and his homes in Westmount until he was 20 years old.
According to the affidavit, each encounter resulted in numerous gifts and other envelopes containing $5,000. The billionaire would also have wanted to pay for his trips, but since I was still very young, that was quite complicated.
Convinced that Robert Miller wanted her well-being, she even introduced him to her mother. “I told her I met a gentleman who would help us,” she said. The three of us had dinner together at his house and he gave us an envelope with $10,000 in it.
She says she found herself in a difficult vicious cycle where she had to constantly recruit other young girls for him. She still feels remorseful about introducing her own friends to Bob.
She assumes that she suffered significant psychological aftereffects. “I had a lot of self-esteem issues and was aggressive,” she wrote in the affidavit. I still have nightmares, I can’t sleep well.
The older girls who drew her into the world of billionaires also supplied her with cocaine before her dates starting when she was 11, and she said she became addicted to it.
Then, in 2009, she claims she was approached by police, who she says treated her as a pimp rather than a victim. She says she didn’t want to confide in the authorities out of fear. They tried to contact me two or three times, but eventually “Bob’s” lawyer spoke to them and they left me alone, she claims.
Last February, the show Enquête revealed that Robert Miller had been paying underage girls in exchange for sex for years. According to testimony collected as part of this report and after its broadcast, Mr. Miller’s activities spanned nearly a quarter century, from 1992 to 2016. Robert Miller denies all of the allegations against him.
Since the report’s release, Mr. Miller has been the target of several lawsuits: three individual lawsuits seeking nearly $30 million and a request for approval of a class action suit for which the Consumer Law Group hopes to obtain an average value of $4 million each Victim. The class action lawsuit application has still not been approved.
“We expect at least 50 people will join the class action,” Jeff Orenstein of the Consumer Law Group wrote in an email to Radio-Canada. Taking into account compensatory and punitive damages for each alleged victim, we estimate that we will require $200 million Canadian dollars to comply with a favorable judgment.
Request to freeze assets
On Monday afternoon, lawyers leading the class action lawsuit began steps to freeze the billionaire’s assets to ensure the alleged victims would be compensated if they won in court.
So they filed a Mareva-style motion to set aside $200 million of Robert Miller’s fortune. The application will be heard on November 2nd.
A Mareva injunction restricts a person’s ability to dispose of assets he or she owns anywhere in the world, Mr. Orenstein writes. We ask the court to protect class members from this unfair situation. We believe that we have met all the conditions for granting a Mareva order, but this is for the court to decide.
In this request we learn, among other things, that Robert Miller is still untraceable: the bailiffs who handled the class action lawsuit against the billionaire were unable to reach him and had to contact his lawyers.
The Consumer Law Group also argues that Mr. Miller and his team took steps to hide the businessman’s assets.
Notably, on February 21, 2023, a few weeks after the Enquête report aired, Robert Miller transferred his luxurious $9.5 million Westmount home to a trust run by his son for the sum of $1, listed company.
In particular, we note that a lawyer for Mr. Miller told an alleged victim – with whom he wanted to reach an amicable settlement – that he could only offer her $72,000 because the billionaire’s money was immobilized in his company.
However, the company in question, Future Electronics, was sold in September for more than $5 billion, a transaction expected to close in 2024. However, lawyer Jeff Orenstein claims that this amount is not necessarily deposited into a Canadian bank account, and therefore is not necessarily accessible to victims.
Mr. Orenstein says he has sent a copy of his actions to several government agencies – including the Justice Departments of Canada and Quebec and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Energy – as well as some MPs. He hopes that regulators will force Future Electronics to deposit the proceeds of the sale in Canada.
There are federal agencies that could intervene on behalf of the alleged victims and make this a condition of the sale, explains Me Jeff Orenstein. We assume that if Future Electronics is sold without any conditions or conditions, there is a risk that the plaintiffs will not receive any compensation even in the event of a positive judgment.
At the time of writing, Robert Miller’s lawyers had not responded to Radio-Canada’s questions.