MONTREAL (CANADA)
Montreal Gazette
November 20, 2017
By Jesse Feith
Following the guilty plea of a Catholic brother who sexually abused a minor at Collège Notre-Dame decades ago, the victim looks back at his life and what might need to come next.
After waiting seven years for the moment to come, he was anxious the night before. He kept his phone close and waited for the prosecutor’s call: surely, as had already happened so many times, there would be another delay.
But the call never came. So the next morning, he woke early and left for the Montreal courthouse.
He had barely slept and now his brain was racing throughout the hour-long drive. Was he wasting his time? He had gotten his hopes up before only to have them dashed by procedural delays and setbacks. Last spring, he was told it would all be over by September. Now it was November.
It was only once he was sitting in a cubicle at the Montreal courthouse last Tuesday that he realized the wait was finally over. First, there was a warning: the man who abused him so many years ago was in the courtroom next to him. Then, the Crown prosecutor opened the door.
“It’s time,” she told the victim.
On the morning of Nov. 14, Brother Olivain Leblanc, 75, of the Congrégation de Ste. Croix sat before a judge — his health too poor for him to stand — and pleaded guilty to one count of gross indecency for sexually abusing a 13-year-old student at Montreal’s Collège Notre-Dame. The acts, which included oral sex and sexual touching, occurred repeatedly between 1979 and 1981, it was said.
“It’s been a long and tortuous road,” the victim, a man in his early 50s whose name is covered under a publication ban, said a few days later, sipping a coffee while walking along a river.
For decades, he had tried to repress memories of what was done to him. But for the last seven years — the time that elapsed between his complaint to police and Leblanc’s guilty plea — he needed to keep them at surface level, knowing he could be called to testify at any given moment. The stress of it all could be debilitating.
“I was living in this void with no sense of direction,” he said. “I sacrificed seven years of my life because I knew what I was getting myself into. I knew, psychologically, it would be a war of attrition.”
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