A B.C. man who was found guilty of tormenting his former wife by creating a so-called revenge website has lost his appeal of two convictions for breaching his probation.
In July 2017, a B.C. Supreme Court jury found Patrick Henry Fox guilty of the criminal harassment of Desiree Capuano, his former wife.
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A website that Fox had set up was designed to denigrate, humiliate and intimidate Capuano and contained private information about her family, friends and associates. His stated goal was to ruin her life and cause her to kill herself.
Fox, a resident of Burnaby, was also convicted of possessing firearms in a place where he was not authorized to do so, after he’d shipped four restricted handguns to California in the midst of a bitter custody battle with his former wife.
He was handed a sentence of 46 months in prison to be followed by a period of probation. The conditions of probation included a ban on publishing, disseminating or making publicly available any information about his former wife.
Fox was released from prison in December 2018 and in March 2019 it came to the attention of the authorities that there was a new website that replicated the earlier website and added allegations of corruption in connection with his criminal harassment trial.
In June 2019, his appeals of his criminal harassment conviction and his sentence were dismissed.
That same month the Vancouver police received a letter from Fox indicating that he’d created a new website hosted in the name of his ex-wife under a new domain and requesting that he be charged with breach of probation and criminal harassment.
In August 2020, Fox was convicted in provincial court of breaching his probation and sentenced to six months in jail and a period of probation. His conditions of probation included that he take down the website within 48 hours of his release from custody.
After his release, he was arrested and charged with breaching the order that he take down the website. At his trial Fox claimed that there was a gap in the evidence and it had not been proven that he’d failed to comply with the order.
But a judge found that there were statements made by Fox that clearly implicated him beyond a reasonable doubt and that, from his own mouth, he’d essentially convicted himself. Fox was sentenced to a year in jail and one year of probation.
Fox raised a number of grounds on his appeal of the two probation convictions but a three-judge panel of the B.C. Court of Appeal found no merit to any of his arguments and has dismissed the appeal.
kfraser@postmedia.com
