“It feels very surreal.”
Amanda Todd’s mother, Carol, says she is still processing the news that a man charged with harassing and extorting her daughter online in 2012 has now been found guilty.
“Saturday, of course, the adrenaline rush,” Carol told Global News Monday afternoon.
“Sunday, the replaying of the foreperson saying ‘guilty’ and also when the justice asked ‘all jury members if you feel this is unanimous, stand up’ and seeing them all stand up. It just keeps going in my mind.”
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Amanda Todd trial: guilty verdict on five charges for Aydin Coban
Carol said, coming home on Saturday, she went out and had a celebratory glass of wine with her partner and her girlfriend and so many people came up to them because the news reached far and wide, even across the world.
Aydin Coban, 44, pleaded not guilty to five charges, including possession of child pornography, extortion, criminal harassment and communication with a young person to commit a sexual offence.
The jury found him guilty on all five counts.
Carol has been advocating for online laws and safety ever since her daughter took her own life.
“I see it as, I’m a mom, and I will fight for my children no matter what. And in this instance, one of my children is no longer alive but you still fight for them if you need to fight for them,” she said.
“It’s just something that needs to be done and you do it.”
She said there is much more work to be done for advocacy and fighting to protect children around the world. She said that with so much technology and chat functions on almost every platform it is now so easy to send and share information but it can also be more dangerous.
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The trial hinged on the identity of what the Crown has called the “sextortionist” that used 22 online aliases to sexually blackmail Todd over four “episodes” before her dead.
Carol said sextortion needs to become part of the Criminal Code of Canada.
“It needs to be federal, it can’t be provincially,” she said.
Carol added that advocating for this change is on her list of what she must tackle next.
Sexual extortion, or sextortion, occurs when someone threatens to distribute private, often sexually explicit, material online if the victim doesn’t comply with their demands, usually for money.
Statistics Canada released new data last week, showing police-reported extortion cases in Canada rose by nearly 300 per cent in the last decade, but the crime significantly rose during the pandemic.
Amanda’s case became known worldwide with a YouTube video posted shortly before her death having been watched 14 million times.
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Amanda Todd feared extortion would continue for the rest of her life, Crown tells jury
When asked what is most important following Coban’s trial, Carol said the fight continues to keep everyone safe on the internet.
“As I said, you can’t take the big, bad people away, but you can self-educate in order to learn more about what’s out there so you can safely use the technology,” she said.
Coban has not yet been sentenced in this case.
Carol said she will not feel a sense of justice until she learns what his sentence will be.
A hearing is scheduled for Aug. 11, 2022 to set a date for sentencing.
— with files from Rumina Daya and The Canadian Press
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