According to the summary of facts, the victim had a relationship with a man who was married – but separated – for about two weeks.
The defendant found out and tried to contact the law student on Facebook.
The student blocked her but received messages from the woman’s sister calling her a “homewrecker,” telling her she would “catch her slipping” and she could “have the scraps,” meaning the married man.
The law student severed all ties with him.
The online abuse continued, and a month later she received messages from the woman on Instagram, calling her a “disgusting wh***” with STIs.
“Don’t make me expose you to who you really are,” one message read.
The student again blocked the woman.
Four years later
Four years on, the student was practising as a lawyer and the cyberbullying restarted.
The lawyer received a Facebook message from an account with the same IP address as the mother, telling her to “stay the f*** away” from her man as he was “locked up” and had kids.
The woman suggested the lawyer liked to sleep with gang members and should stick to being “a church girl”.
The lawyer was already fearing for her safety when the messages continued, and the woman wrote to the lawyer’s mother:
“Please tell your sl**** daughter to stop talking to married men!!!”
She sent a similar message to the lawyer’s grandmother and, a month later, commented on one of the elderly woman’s public social media posts.
The lawyer, distressed by the harm these communications were having on her whānau, especially her over-70 grandma, had a panic attack.
An email to her boss
The next day, the mother of two sent an email to the lawyer’s boss, making damaging allegations.
Attached were two nude photos of the lawyer.
This caused extreme humiliation and distress for the lawyer, who suffered from insomnia and was prescribed medication.
The same day, the mother messaged a friend saying: “I can’t wait for [the lawyer’s] job to get the photos and the note. Let’s see what happens hehe. Delete that message please”.
A ‘gleeful celebration’
In court, Judge Wharepouri said that text showed a “gleeful celebration” of the harm caused.
He also noted the woman had a restorative justice meeting with her victim, but during it she barely acknowledged any wrongdoing, blaming the messages on others.
The woman’s lawyer Ish Jayanandan explained most of the messages were sent by others on her client’s behalf, but the woman knew about them and accepted responsibility.
The judge said he could understand the need to differentiate but the woman was far more central to the operation than she was prepared to admit.
Jayanandan said there was a difference between no remorse and not being able to properly express it.
She struggled to speak to her client herself, she said, as the woman was not very forthcoming, and makes statements and “just withdraws”.
“That’s just her personality,” Jayanandan said.
‘Far too embarrassed’
Jayanandan also said her client had quit her job instead of having to tell her employer what she had done.
Talking to her manager would have been required to enable the bid for discharge without conviction, but the woman was “far too embarrassed”, Jayanandan said.
Her client was also offered the alternative justice pathway of Te Pae Oranga, Jayanandan said, but she wasn’t prepared to undergo it as it required being questioned about her behaviour.
Crown prosecutor Kim McCoy noted the irony of the woman seeking a discharge without conviction to protect her future employment, when she had targeted the victim’s.
The judge said the irony wasn’t lost on him either.
He said the woman’s offending was not a one-off nor spur of the moment, but a repeated, deliberate campaign to “besmirch” the lawyer’s name.
An ‘obsessive’ fixation
It could not be overstated, he said, the emotional harm it had caused the lawyer and her family.
The truth of the matter, the judge said, was that the lawyer had no role in the breakdown of the defendant’s marriage.
“However, you fixated on her somewhat obsessively.”
Her guilty plea came nine months after she first appeared, the judge said, but he acknowledged that she had finished 200 hours of volunteer work at a local church and was a young mother.
Despite this, she didn’t meet the threshold for a discharge without conviction nor permanent name suppression, he said.
He sentenced her to 200 hours’ community work and 12 months’ supervision with a special condition to undertake any counselling directed by a probation officer.
“Because I am still without an idea what your rehabilitative needs are.”
Jayanandan indicated she wanted until next week to decide if she wanted to appeal the judge’s decisions.
The woman’s interim name suppression was extended until then.
Ella Scott-Fleming has been a journalist for three years and previously worked at the Otago Daily Times, Gore Ensign and Metro Magazine. She has an interest in court and general reporting. She’s based in Auckland covering justice-related stories.
Join the NZ Herald’s Open Justice team for Case by Case, a video and podcast series examining the disputes and decisions making headlines across New Zealand.