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The Vancouver Island grocery store agreed to pay $750,000. settle 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 opened former store employees Jennifer Burke and Mallory Coulter v. Red Barn Market and Matthew Schwabe, a former assistant store manager convicted on voyeurism charges in 2021.
The Dec. 8 ruling from the British Columbia Supreme Court in Victoria also orders Schwabe to turn over to them all recordings of the plaintiffs' speeches and states that they own all “worldwide copyrights” in the material.
In 2016, police began investigating allegations of voyeurism that took place in a Saanich, British Columbia market restroom, and Schwabe was charged in 2019.
He later pleaded guilty to illegally monitoring and recording eight young women, and illegally publishing intimate images of nine women.
Schwabe was sentenced to 15 months in prison followed by two years probation.
Red Barn at Mattick's Ltd. was ordered to pay $750,000 within 14 days.
This amount includes $85,000 for five women whose intimate images were distributed online, $25,000 for a woman whose images were not distributed, and an additional $15,000 to Burke and Colter as the plaintiffs' representatives.
The rest will go toward legal costs, which will be reduced by $25,000 to pay each additional victim found to have been filmed without the images being released.
The plaintiffs are donating a portion of their payouts to charity in recognition of Schwabe's unidentified victims who filed for bankruptcy in 2018.
