Girl ‘brainwashed’ into having sex with Canadian

A Canadian man who groomed an Irish teenager before coming here to have sex with her has been jailed for four and a half years.

Jashua Robert Tremblay, aged 34, pleaded guilty to charges including two counts of child luring and one count of sexual interference at a court in Edmonton.

He was sentenced last night. He has also been banned from using the internet for 10 years.

The court heard a victim impact statement by the girl’s father on Tuesday.

Local reporter Paige Parsons of the Edmonton Journal, who covered the court hearing on Tuesday, described the Irish man’s account as “tragic”.

“He wrote about finding out, with horror, about what had been going on with his daughter and her subsequent struggles. He described her as having been brainwashed by this man, that she believed that she was going to be moving to Canada and marrying him on her 18th birthday,” Ms Parsons told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland.

“She was quite traumatised by all this and really became isolated and was struggling emotionally and mentally afterwards.

“It was certainly a strain on his relationship with her, he is her only surviving parent so it is a fairly sad situation.”

Tremblay met the girl online in 2013 and subsequently kept in contact with her through a messaging app. The then-married father of one went on to send explicit pictures and audio messages to the girl, before coming to Ireland to visit her twice.

Tremblay visited the girl twice in Ireland during school holidays, and had sex with her on both occasions.

“He went to some lengths to encourage her to lie to her dad, to say she was going to stay with a friend,” said Ms Parsons.

“He picked her up instead and they stayed in hotels and a campground the first time. Then they rented a vacation home on the second trip.

“People thought they were father and daughter, and then they noticed some inappropriate behaviour. They decided to contact the police and it went from there.”

While there was no trial given that Tremblay pleaded guilty, Tuesday’s court session was a sentencing hearing during which the crown prosecution took issue with a psychologist report submitted on Tremblay.

Psychologist George Pugh wrote that Tremblay’s actions were “primarily a misjudgment regarding the basic rules of courtship” and that he was of the opinion that Tremblay does not meet the criteria to be diagnosed with paedophilia.

“The Crown noted that it seems pretty inappropriate given the really troubling and really disturbing crime that has been admitted to here,” Ms Parsons said.

The Edmonton Journal noted that judge Mary Moreau was to consider noting the inappropriateness of characterising the case as “courtship”before handing down her sentence.

The prosecution had argued that the court impose a five-year prison term, while the defence lawyer had been seeking a more lenient four-year sentence.