Former judge Lori Douglas opens up about the hurt caused by CJC hearing

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This article was published 05/01/2016 (3744 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Lori Douglas, the family court judge whose career on the bench ended after nude photos were posted online, says she was close to suicide during the height of scandal, one made worse by a long and flawed investigation into her conduct.

“I lost my job. I lost my life. I lost my reputation. If it hadn’t been for my son, there would have been little reason to keep on,” said Douglas, who retired from the Court of Queen’s Bench in May.

Douglas spoke for the first time to Canadian Lawyer magazine in a story published Tuesday.

The saga began in 2010 when Alex Chapman, a former client of Douglas’s husband Jack King, filed a complaint with the Law Society of Manitoba alleging Douglas had sexually harassed him. Chapman later went to the CBC with his story, which included nude photos taken of Douglas by her husband, the late Jack King, in an attempt to interest Chapman in a relationship.

The Canadian Judicial Council launched an investigation into Douglas’s conduct and allegations she failed to disclose the existence of the photos when she applied to be a judge and that the scandal made it impossible for her to continue on the bench. The matter proceeded in a tortuous series of fits and starts, including an initial round of hearings in Winnipeg, that kept the scandal in the headlines. It also landed it in federal court for a time, with Douglas alleging the CJC’s inquiry committee was biased. The original inquiry committee, made up of judges and lawyers, resigned, and a new one was empaneled. But Douglas chose to retire before the new committee could hold substantive hearings.

Douglas said the most difficult part of the ordeal was that many senior judges, lawyers and colleagues looked at the nude pictures during the CJC process, a violation she compared to repeated rape.

That included Alberta’s top judge, who was on the judicial conduct committee, and then-chief justice of the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench Marc Monnin, who was Douglas’s boss.

“I just collapsed when I realized those two people had looked at them,” she said.

Later, when Justice Glenn Joyal became chief justice of Manitoba’s Court of Queen’s Bench, Douglas said he stripped her of her duties with the court.

“That’s when I had the rest of the crash. I got more and more depressed. I was stuck in the house. I had nothing,” Douglas told the magazine. She said her time confined to the house changed her views on house arrest for criminals. “Got to tell you, I’ll never criticize that again. It felt like a prison.”

Douglas says she never actually saw the photos King took during a low point in an otherwise happy marriage, when King became depressed and “difficult.”

Douglas said she was “furious,” at King when she learned he’d posted the photos online.

“All I said was: ‘How could you have done that to me?’ And he had no answer,” she recalled.

Douglas said King apologized every day and she was eventually able to forgive him.

She said her long silence was partly mandated by the CJC, which would not allow her to issue a statement to counter some of the media reports. She said she “endured, in silence, the media storm and the personal invasions of my privacy occasioned by the CJC process, particularly surrounding the two public inquiries struck and even prior to those investigations.”

She said she very much misses being a judge and is now working part-time as a family lawyer at Petersen King, and may also teach at the University of Manitoba’s law school. She said she has found solace over the last five years in close friends, gardening and caring for her horses.

“I feel fine,” she said. “I haven’t been so well now for five years.”

Staff at the CJC said Tuesday afternoon they were still studying the article and consulting with council members over whether to make a comment.