Lawsuit against Mike Ward: Supreme Court rejects request from Jérémy Gabriel’s mother

The Supreme Court has put an end to the attempts of Sylvie Gabriel, the mother of Jérémy Gabriel, to obtain compensation from comedian Mike Ward.

On Thursday, the highest court rejected Sylvie’s request to overturn an unfavourable decision against her rendered by the Court of Quebec and confirmed by the Court of Appeal.

This decision puts an end to a legal saga of nearly 12 years launched by Sylvie Gabriel and her son after the comedian mocked the young disabled singer who was a teenager at the time in a show presented from 2010 to 2013.

The Supreme Court, as is its custom, did not give reasons for its refusal to hear the case, but it did confirm that the deadline to file the defamation and harassment lawsuit had expired when it did so, even taking into account all the time spent before multiple courts over the past few years.

Sylvie Gabriel was claiming $84,600 from Ward on the grounds that the joke he made at her son’s expense had caused her significant harm.

Jérémy Gabriel suffers from Treacher Collins syndrome, a congenital condition characterized by deformations of the skull and face. According to the Supreme Court, the comedian’s comments about Jérémy Gabriel during a show a few years ago did not meet the discrimination criterion invoked by the applicants.

When Ward mentioned Jérémy Gabriel in his shows, the teenager was a well-known singer who had appeared alongside Céline Dion and the Pope at the Vatican.

This is not the first time the Supreme Court has intervened in this case. The highest court ruled in favor of the comedian in 2021 and overturned previous decisions that had ordered Ward to pay the young man $35,000. In an extremely divided decision of five judges to four, the Supreme Court had ruled that the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal did not have jurisdiction to render a judgment on the discrimination complaint filed by Jérémy Gabriel, since it was instead a defamation case.

Sylvie Gabriel had already suffered a first failure before the legal authorities. At the start of this long legal journey, initiated by a complaint in 2012 before the Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse for discrimination, the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal ordered Ward in 2016 to pay $35,000 to Jérémy Gabriel and $7,000 to his mother, in moral and punitive damages.

The Court of Appeal then upheld the verdict and endorsed the payment of $35,000 to the young man, but cancelled the damages that were to be paid to his mother.

The case went before the Supreme Court, opposing artistic expression, in the form of satirical comedy, to the protection of human dignity. The highest court in the country concluded that the singer and his mother had chosen the wrong court – the Human Rights Tribunal – to file their lawsuit, since it was not a case of discrimination, under the charters, but of defamation.

Like his mother, Jérémy Gabriel had also filed a defamation lawsuit against Ward in Superior Court, claiming damages of $288,000, but it was suspended pending a decision in his mother’s case. However, he abandoned this action in May 2023.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews