A two-week relationship may not usually end up in a court record, but in the Manukau District Court this week, Judge Mina Wharepouri declined the woman’s applications for a discharge without conviction and permanent name suppression following a guilty plea over a two week relationship. The woman had pleaded guilty to a representative charge under the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015.
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The judge sentenced her to 200 hours’ community work and 12 months’ supervision. Her interim name suppression continues while her lawyer considers an appeal.
The victim was a law student when she had a relationship of about two weeks with a man who was married but separated. The defendant, the mother of his children, contacted her on Facebook and following was abusive messages from the defendant’s sister, and a month later from the defendant herself on Instagram.
The student blocked her and ended the relationship with the man.
Four years later the student was a practising lawyer, and the harassment then resumed with messages reaching her, her mother and her grandmother.
The next day, the defendant emailed the lawyer’s employer with damaging allegations and two nude photographs of the lawyer.
The lawyer suffered a panic attack and severe humiliation and insomnia. The same day the defendant told a friend she was looking forward to the photos arriving at the lawyer’s workplace. The judge called this a “gleeful celebration” of the harm.
Defence counsel Ish Jayanandan said others had sent most of the messages, although her client knew about them and accepted responsibility. The judge found the defendant far more central than she admitted.
The discharge bid rested partly on protecting the defendant’s future employment. Jayanandan said her client had quit her job rather than tell her employer what she had done. Crown prosecutor Kim McCoy noted the irony, and the judge said it was not lost on him either.
He described the offending as a repeated, deliberate campaign to “besmirch” the lawyer, who had played no part in the breakdown of the defendant’s marriage.
A discharge without conviction requires the consequences of a conviction to be out of all proportion to the gravity of the offence, which is an argument that’s hard to make when you deliberately targeted someone else’s career and now fear for your own.
The lesson is practical for employers and needs to be treated as a possible crime, not an HR issue about the employee.
