A former physical education teacher at a special school for young people with speech or deafness disabilities has been sentenced to 40 months in prison for luring two students using a teenage girl’s fake Facebook account in the purpose of extracting intimate photos of his victims.
The “Machiavellian” scheme put in place by ex-teacher Frédérick Bergeron at the start of 2020 to attract two of the students from the Joseph-Paquin school required a significant degree of planning and manipulation. By creating the false account of a 15-year-old girl in the name of Jenifer Poulin, the accused came into contact with a first teenager.
The boy who suffers from a language disorder and an autism spectrum disorder has developed a romantic relationship via social media with Jenifer, alias Frédérick Bergeron, who asks him for photos of his penis.
Then refusing to provide any other explicit image, the young 14-year-old was threatened by Jenifer to broadcast the photo of his penis to all his contacts if he did not comply. The boy’s mother, emotional, came to tell all the consequences of this extortion on her son.
“He abused his naivety and his vulnerability […] he blackmailed him into not talking,” the boy’s mother told the court. Her son started self-harming and suddenly had suicidal thoughts. “It’s inconceivable to have to fear that your child will commit the irreparable,” said the mother who finally discovered the pot of roses.
However, this whole preamble was aimed at getting in touch with another student. The 29-year-old man, still through Jenifer, then approached the second victim, a 15-year-old girl who suffers from deafness.
The disabled victim who has difficulty making friends saw in Jenifer a confident person by confessing to her in particular that she was in love with her physical education teacher.
Mixing real life and fake account, Frédérick Bergeron encouraged the victim to get closer to him. “You were the first normal guy who was interested in me, a 15-year-old disabled girl,” the victim wrote in a letter read by prosecutor Andréanne Sirois.
“You made me feel my first butterflies, I was ready for anything for you, far from suspecting that these butterflies were poisoned,” she added in her letter. The teenager’s mother also wrote a letter in which she said that her daughter did not feel like a victim and that she wanted to be present for the sentence in order to say “goodbye” to her former teacher.
“Adolescent pain can be dangerously strong, even more so for a disabled person who feels rejected,” explained the mother, speaking of the teacher’s “grip” always present for the teenager he has lured.
Before sending the accused to the shadows for 40 months, Judge Jean-Louis Lemay spoke to the man who now works in construction and who undertook real work on him. “For you, Mr. Bergeron, it was a game, for them it was learning to live,” said the judge, adding, “the following-effects are not erased like a computer file.”
