Vengeful cyber stalker targeted dozens of Hamiltonians in vicious decades-long smear campaigns

Guy Babcock is not a pedophile. Neither is his brother, Tom, or his brother-in-law Luc Groleau, or Groleau's son.

That may seem an odd way to start a story but this is a story like few others you'll come across.

There are places on the internet where you can find such vile and vicious untruths posted about the Babcocks and the Groleaus, along with about 150 other people - including three dozen or so from Hamilton - who have all been caught up in the same nightmarish web of blind vengeance.

The scandalous posts are the work of Nadire Atas, a one-time Hamilton real estate agent who is now 61 years old, homeless and apparently penniless in Toronto, left with no property other than the clothes on her back," according to a recent court decision.

She has taken a grudge from nearly 30 years ago and transformed it into a relentless cyber-stalking campaign that has shattered the reputations of dozens of people and their family members.

Along the way, Atas has been sued repeatedly, defied court orders brazenly, been declared a vexatious litigant by the judicial system, spent 74 days in jail for contempt and is now facing 33 criminal charges laid Feb. 11 for harassment, conveying false information and publishing defamatory libel.

Among her bail conditions, Atas is prohibited from possessing or using any computers or other device that has access to the internet or other digital network. And there's a list of more than 100 people she's not allowed to communicate with either directly or indirectly.

She's also required to prove that she's made an application for a mental health assessment at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

As part of her recent arrest in Toronto, Atas had her cell phone and laptop computer seized and so for now, at least, there's been a brief respite in the onslaught of malicious posts. But the victims don't expect that will last long.

At some point she'll regain access to something that can connect to the internet and she will resume her attacks," Groleau said.

I've kind of come to the conclusion that the posts will stop when she passes away," he said.

At some point we all expire. I think that's when we'll see a reprieve."

Attempts to reach Atas for comment were unsuccessful.

Extraordinary' campaign of harassment

The strange and disturbing story begins in Hamilton in the early 1990s.

Guy Babcock's father, John, purchased a ReMax real estate brokerage on Upper James Street in 1985, which soon expanded with an office on Mall Road near Lime Ridge Mall and another office in Ancaster.

It was a family business. Guy specialized in information technology (IT) and helped out with office finances and support staff, his sister Julia handled office administration, and their father dealt with legal issues.

In December 1990, the Mall Road office hired Atas as an agent, and at first, all was well. She was among the office's top producers, dealing mostly with lower-priced homes in the lower central city.

Then complaints started to roll in, Babcock claimed. Sloppy paperwork, not handing keys back in a timely manner. Atas was put on probation twice.

Around that time, she was dealing with some family problems. In October 1992, her brother shot their mother in the hand at their east Hamilton home with a .22-calibre rifle.

In the midst of a psychotic episode, he believed his mother was part of a devil-worshipping cult which sacrificed human babies as a ritual. He was found not criminally responsible at his trial in January 1993.

Around that time, one of Atas' clients rang the office, asking why he was still getting calls about selling his house when the listing had expired a month earlier.

A piece of paper showed an extension had been signed. The client said he never signed an extension and a check showed the signatures didn't match.

A little more digging revealed this wasn't the first time it had happened. Atas' contract was terminated.

The next day, Guy Babcock claimed, Atas called his father and threatened him. The elder Babcock contacted police and a report was filed.

And that was that for five years.

In 1998, Guy Babcock's mother died. The following year, a number of Babcock's relatives received anonymous written letters, all stating horrible, degrading things about the deceased Mrs. Babcock.

Around the same time, the west Mountain neighbours of John Babcock received anonymous letters in the mail warning them he was a peeping Tom who hid in bushes, peeking through windows.

The Babcocks suspected it was Atas who wrote the letters. The police interviewed her and she denied it.

And again, that was that for close to another 20 years.

At the end of September 2018, Guy Babcock got a call from his father. By this time, Guy was living in a village near Oxford, England after leaving Hamilton in 2010.

His father told him about a new round of harassment. Now the hateful messages were being sent electronically.

Members of John Babcock's social club were receiving anonymous emails stating his two sons were pedophiles.

The attacks escalated. Soon there were online posts appearing on so-called extortion sites - the wild west of the internet where any unsubstantiated outrageous lie can be posted anonymously and where the defamed are required to pay thousands of dollars to have the posts removed.

Initially it was utter despair," Guy Babcock said. How can I ever get rid of this stuff?

I've got 640 posts out there against me at the moment so it's a little bit overwhelming."

Luc Groleau is married to Guy's sister, Julia. He had no connection to the real estate brokerage but he discovered he, too, had become a target.

At first, he said, the posts were silly things" - his wife had sold some Katy Perry concert tickets online but didn't send the tickets to the buyer. Lies about his consulting work that made no sense.

My initial reaction was to laugh it off," said Groleau, who moved from Hamilton to Montreal in the early 2000s.

I was never going to get involved in this stuff," he said. It's something you can't win.

You'll lose your house, your RRSPs and everything you own trying to fight this for silly, stupid things that were being said about me and Julia."

That was until he did a search and found a post stating his son was a pedophile.

Then I did what I believe pretty much any father would do," Groleau said. I thought OK that's enough. It's not a fight that I want but it's a fight that I'll take on, and I'll take it to the end."

Fortunately for the two families, Groleau, like Babcock, is an IT specialist and he has a background in programming and analysis. That gave them the skills and the resources to conduct a thorough investigation.

They initially found 11 family members who had been targeted with hateful online posts. At first, Groleau suspected the culprit may have been someone who had a previous connection to the family.

One day in mid-October 2018, Babcock was going through some of the defamatory posts when something caught his eye. He hovered over an icon and up popped a picture of Nadire Atas.

She had slipped up. Some of her coding information was dragged along from another site when she made what she thought was an anonymous post.

I just sat there for like two minutes, just staring at it," Babcock said. It was like a lightning bolt to me.

Suddenly everything came together," he said. Now this makes sense. I assumed since it had been 20 years that it just couldn't be her."

They did more searching, suspecting there may be more victims and boy, were they right. Hamilton real estate agents, mortgage brokers, lawyers. And they discovered there were already court cases on the go from a new set of victims who were bearing the brunt of Atas' rage after she lost two heavily-mortgaged properties a decade ago.

When Atas was ordered by the court to cease and desist the harassing online posts of the plaintiffs in those lawsuits, she would target their family members instead.

One of the lawyers suing Atas has a brother who is a reputable cardiologist in the U.S. Atas created online posts calling him a pedophile and a child pornographer along with fake news articles falsely stating the cardiologist had been jailed for three years for uploading child pornography online.

Many of the court actions involving Atas have been shepherded by Justice David Corbett of Toronto's Superior Court of Justice. His lengthy rulings are tinged with a mixture of exasperation, bewilderment, and occasionally anger.

In his most recent judgment released Jan. 28, Corbett called Atas' actions extraordinary campaigns of malicious harassment and defamation."

Atas is destitute and apparently content to revel in ancient grievances, delighting in legal process and unending conflict because of the misery and expense it causes for her opponents," Corbett wrote in his decision.

Cyber-stalking is the perfect pastime for Atas," he continued. She can shield her identity. She can disseminate vile messages globally, across multiple unpoliced platforms, forcing her victims to litigate in multiple jurisdictions to amass evidence to implicate her."

At one point, the judge even tried to understand her motives.

Serious mental illness must underlie this conduct," Corbett stated. What person of sound mental health would throw away more than a decade of her life, her material prosperity, and risk her liberty, for such paltry visceral satisfaction?

What mentally sound person would devote so much time and energy to such negative unproductive activities?" he wondered. Her lack of empathy is sociopathic."

Corbett noted he has previously found Atas guilty of civil contempt for violating court orders and she's spent 74 days in jail for contempt.

She's been found guilty of civil contempt a second time and is facing more jail time once the matter is dealt with at Ontario's Court of Appeal. And she's facing a further charge of criminal contempt later this year for again ignoring court orders.

Because of her abuse of the court system, Atas was declared a vexatious litigant in 2018, meaning she cannot initiate any legal proceeding without first obtaining the court's permission.

Shortly after Corbett's last decision was released - once again, another round of losses for Atas - Groleau said there's evidence that she went right back to posting defamatory material.

In fact, that's what led to her arrest Feb. 9.

In early February, the New York Times published a feature about Atas. The following day, a tattletale site called GossipBlaze.com alerted one of the lawyers fighting Atas that they believed this was the same woman now attempting to flood their site with dozens of posts.

The site provided the lawyer with the internet protocol address where the posts were originating from and the lawyer passed the information on to Groleau.

He investigated and told Toronto police the attempted posts were coming from a Scarborough hotel that has been converted into a homeless shelter.

She was arrested and spent two nights in jail before being released on bail.

Inadequacies' in the law

Unlike Justice Corbett, Luc Groleau hasn't spent much time trying to figure out a motive for why Nadire Atas has done what she's done.

A person like that thinks so differently from me that I can't even begin to put myself in her shoes," said Groleau. If I were to do that, it would also mean having some kind of empathy for the woman. And I don't. I have none.

She's trying to destroy my son when he's just beginning his life."

For more than two years, the lives of the Babcock and Groleau families have been consumed with legal fights and a never-ending game of Whack-A-Mole with extortion websites, constantly trying to identify defamatory posts and then fighting to get them taken down.

In the early days, Groleau said he'd manually go through websites looking for posts, then go through the page coding and log everything.

He estimates he did that for more than 100,000 web pages. He'd be up at 4 a.m. scouring pages until 8 a.m., then do his regular job, have dinner and go back to tracking websites until 11 p.m. or midnight - thousands of hours spent trying to catalogue defamatory posts.

Eventually, he spent hundreds more hours writing a sophisticated program to do all the searching and cataloguing for him, looking for posts related to any of the plaintiffs in the four main lawsuits still active.

According to Corbett's latest decision, Groleau has found more than 3,700 offending posts attributed to Atas across 77 different websites targeting around 150 people.

There's a tendency for people to say Oh just ignore it,'" Groleau said.

Yeah, I'm capable of ignoring it. But is my employer capable of ignoring it? My co-workers? My neighbours? Telling me to ignore it is not realistic."

Babcock said there are days he doesn't want to be connected to the internet. He had to tell his employer what was going on because Atas had included his work information in posts about him.

An email pops up from the lawyer and you're almost sick to your stomach even before you've read it," he said.

Their biggest frustration is the lack of effective legislation around harassment and defamation in the digital space. There doesn't seem to be any legal way to make it stop - something the judge himself acknowledged in his latest decision.

The circumstances of this case straddle the line between civil and criminal law, and it illustrates some of the inadequacies in current legal responses to internet defamation and harassment," Corbett wrote.

It remains to be seen whether there is any way to control Atas' unacceptable conduct other than by locking her up and/or compelling her to obtain treatment," Corbett added.

Whatever the solution may be that brings an end to her malicious unlawful attacks on other people, it is clear that the law needs better tools, greater inter-jurisdictional cooperation, and greater regulation of the electronic marketplace' of ideas' in a world with near universal access to the means of mass communication."

Babcock and Groleau say there's a serious lack of political will in favour of toughening the rules.

Every avenue they've tried runs into the same roadblock - section 230 of an American law called the Communications Decency Act, which states in part No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

In other words, except for certain limited exceptions, online intermediaries such as internet service providers and website hosts can't be held legally liable for third-party content.

It doesn't seem to matter where the computer servers are physically located, Babcock said, it doesn't seem to matter where the content is created, and it doesn't seem to matter whether the various tech companies have offices in Canada.

In fact, none of these things might have anything to do with the U.S. directly, yet Babcock and Groleau say everyone they run across uses section 230 of an American law as the reason why the posts can stay up.

I'm not an American, I can't vote in the U.S., I don't have a congressman to call," Babcock said. Why am I affected by section 230?

Same with all the victims in Canada," he added. Why aren't our governments protecting us against this stuff?"

He said he understands the importance of free speech.

But there's a big difference between freedom of speech and anonymous speech," Babcock said.

Yes, we have to be careful because we want to protect free speech. But we have to somehow stop hate speech."