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A Vancouver Island grocery store has agreed to pay $750,000 to settle a voyeurism class-action lawsuit brought by women who were secretly filmed in the bathroom by a former employee who uploaded the images to a Russian porn site.
The case was brought by former store employees Jennifer Burke and Mallory Colter against Red Barn Market and Matthew Schwabe, the store’s former assistant manager who was convicted of voyeurism charges in 2021.
The ruling from the B.C. Supreme Court in Victoria dated Dec. 8 also orders Schwabe to hand over all recordings of the plaintiffs to them, and declares all “copyright worldwide” over the material is assigned to them.
In 2016, police began investigating the allegations of voyeurism that took place in the washroom of the Saanich, B.C., market, and Schwabe was charged in 2019.
He later pleaded guilty to unlawfully observing and recording eight young women and unlawfully publishing intimate images of nine women.
Schwabe was sentenced to 15 months in custody followed by two years of probation.
Red Barn at Mattick’s Ltd. was ordered to pay $750,000 within 14 days.
That number includes $85,000 each for five women whose intimate images were distributed online, $25,000 for a woman whose images were not distributed, and a further $15,000 to both Burke and Colter as the representative plaintiffs.
The rest goes to legal fees — which will be reduced by $25,000 for payments to each additional victim who is identified as having been filmed without the images being published.
The plaintiffs are donating a portion of their settlements to a charity in recognition of unidentified victims of Schwabe who filed for bankruptcy in 2018.
