Judge sentences serial indecent harasser to seven years in prison

A Winnipeg man who relentlessly harassed nearly a dozen women with unwanted sexual messages and videos, starting just days after completing a jail sentence for the same crimes, has been sentenced to seven years in prison.

Four of Alexander Beaton’s nearly dozen victims were women he had previously been convicted of harassing.

“His behaviour was calculated, targeted and persistent (and) was brazenly in defiance of an existing (probation) order,” provincial court Judge Malcolm McDonald said Friday.

“It is safe to say Mr. Beaton ranks among the worst offenders committing the worst offences of this nature,” McDonald said.

Court heard Beaton, 30, had just finished serving a two-year sentence for criminally harassing six women when, just two days after his release from custody Dec. 3, 2024, he renewed his campaign of “indecent communications,” targeting victims both new and old.

They included staff at job training centres he had previously utilized, a former co-worker, a childhood friend, a lawyer and a police officer who investigated his earlier crimes.

The childhood friend said Beaton harassed her for nearly a decade, ending in December 2024.

The woman said she had lost touch with Beaton until he sent her a Facebook message including a video showing him masturbating to a picture of her. Beaton continued to send the woman sexually graphic messages and videos for years.

In 2024, he turned his attention to the woman’s mother, sending her a video of himself masturbating to a picture of her daughter.

Beaton targeted a female police officer and several other women with a series of sexually graphic emails and videos in March 2025 that included discussions of sex with underage girls and pedophilia.

Many of his unsolicited emails and videos included comments denigrating himself sexually, with one email containing the subject line: “I just want everyone in Winnipeg to humiliate me.”

Between 2020 and 2025, Beaton repeatedly harassed female staff at a city job centre, leaving voicemails of himself masturbating and sexually graphic messages and videos.

In March 2025, he sent one of the staff members two sexually graphic emails, in defiance of a protection order she had secured prohibiting him from having any contact with her.

A search of Beaton’s phone following his arrest uncovered a photo of him holding his penis in front of the protection order.

“The impact on the victims has been significant,” McDonald said. “Understandably, their sense of dignity and safety has been violated. They rightly fear that the persistent and perverse fantasies of this accused will flip into physical actions.”

Beaton blamed his actions on past substance abuse and recent diagnoses for schizophrenia and depression.

McDonald said he was not convinced there was any significant connection between Beaton’s crimes and medical diagnoses, and noted a court-ordered report indicating he has shown no insight into his offending behaviour.

McDonald rejected a suggestion by defence lawyer Pam Smith that Beaton’s inclusion of a police officer in his roster of victims was a “cry for help.” McDonald said it was instead evidence of his “uncontrolled and brazen need to indecently communicate and seek arousal and humiliation at the hands of virtually any female he had a current or past association with.”

Beaton received credit for time served, reducing his remaining sentence to just over 4 1/2 years.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca