Featured Image Credit: CBC News
Topics: Canada, Court, Police, Sex and Relationships, Crime
Liv Bridge
Topics: Canada, Court, Police, Sex and Relationships, Crime
A woman who was looking for cooking recipes made a disturbing discovery when she found a video of herself engaged in a sexual act.
Natalie Brown from Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada, went to search the Food Network for a recipe but when the 39-year-old hit the 'F' button, she made a grim discovery.
The search bar directed her to another website starting with 'F', Fetlife, a Canadian social networking site for people interested in sexual fetishes.
Then, she found a video of herself entirely naked and engaging in a sexual act that she didn't know existed.
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Speaking to CBC News, Natalie said: "I was so humiliated. I felt stupid, I felt embarrassed, I felt scared."
Heartbreakingly, Natalie realized her partner had taken the video while she was blindfolded, at his request, before he uploaded it to Fetlife.
"I didn't agree to be filmed like that. I didn't want to be filmed", she added.
Dartmouth Provincial Court heard how Natalie's face and upper body did not appear in the 12-second clip, but her lower body was visible and entirely nude.
Her ex-boyfriend, 43-year-old Conor Dolan, was charged in April last year with voyeurism and the distribution of intimate images without consent.
He initially pleaded not guilty until the prosecution dropped the voyeurism charge in exchange for a guilty plea on the distribution charge.
This spared the case going to trial though the judge said Dolan might have faced incarceration if it had.
Instead, the disgraced man was sentenced to a four-month conditional sentence as of January 6, meaning he is under house arrest and has a criminal record.
When asked by the court if he would like to say anything, Dolan reportedly said he was 'tremendously sorry'.
As well as filming Natalie's naked lower body, the footage was shot in the home of the-then couple, while Dolan was holding her dog in his Fetlife profile picture.
Natalie's voice could also be heard, all of which the judge said amounted to her being reasonably identifiable.
Judge Tim Daley said: "This was an act of intimate partner online sexual abuse. No question of it. It constituted a massive loss of privacy."
Natalie is now keen to raise awareness of such abuse and revenge porn, and how difficult it was to get the intimate video footage of herself removed.
Fetlife reportedly denied her request on the grounds it was Dolan's property and she couldn't verify herself in the footage.
Crown attorney Paul Niefer said that jail time is 'usually reserved for cases that involve revenge porn type situations, where somebody is doing it on purpose to harm the victim or to get back at them for some reason.'
He continued: "In this case, we didn't have that factor."
The court also heard the video was posted two weeks before Natalie discovered it in September 2019, but remained visible online for four years without her knowledge after Dolan told her he had deleted it.
He confessed at the time that he had a 'porn/sex addiction' and the couple decided to part ways in December 2019.
But Dolan reactivated the Fetlife account just five months after he claimed to have taken it down. He finally deleted the footage on January 28, 2024.
In the statement read to the court, he claimed he posted the video to try and attract other sexual partners and was 'not about her'.
Natalie sobbed in court, saying: "The idea that anyone could reduce my body, my autonomy, my dignity, my humanity, to something for their consumption without my consent is unbearable."