An Alberta judge has awarded SNAILS $1.5 million in a defamation suit he filed against Instagram account creator Michaela Higgins.
More than three years ago, SNAILS was among a handful of EDM DJs accused of a wide range of sexual misdeeds. An Alberta judge has now awarded the Montréal dubstep artist $1.5 million in a defamation lawsuit he filed against Michaela Higgins for sharing such allegations.
Higgins had anonymously created the since-deleted Instagram account @evidenceagainstsnails and used it to post accusations that SNAILS (real name Frédérik Durand) had sexually assaulted women and forced them to drink alcohol. During the pandemic, accounts like these became a popular way for victims to safely share their experiences of abuse. Perhaps the most impactful among them was @evidenceagainstbassnectar, which uploaded an apparent audio recording of Bassnectar admitting to engaging in sexual acts with minors that is being used against him in an ongoing sex trafficking case.
In the case of SNAILS, however, the proof wasn’t so cut and dry. Durand filed a lawsuit against Higgins, who lives in California, in an Alberta court on account of the accusations costing him two gigs in the Canadian province.
Durand has said that the damage didn’t stop there. “It destroyed a big part of my career, of my personal life,” he told CTV News. “It impacted my mental health. It affected a lot of things, my family, my girlfriend. There wasn’t a single area that it didn’t affect.“
According to Justice Nicholas Devlin, who presided over the case, Durand was not required by law to disprove any of the allegations but did so anyway. “In the case here, Michaela Higgins’ [smear] campaign became malicious when she ignored glaring information showing the opposite [of what she claimed],” reads an English translation of his statement, according to Le Journal de Montréal. “Frédérick Durand has demonstrated that Ms. Higgins repeatedly defamed him by republishing unfounded allegations without legal justification that he was guilty of the worst criminal and immoral activities.”
Devlin was able to deliver a summary judgement on the matter without a full trial. Higgins was unable to afford legal council to aid in her defense, arguing that the case shouldn’t be heard in an Alberta court since she lives in California.
While Higgins doesn’t plan to reopen the @evidenceagainstsnails account, she stands by her decision to do so previously. “I don’t have any doubt that what I did was 100 per cent just for the purpose of protecting vulnerable women and girls,” she said according to CTV News, adding that she will declare bankruptcy if Durand tries to sue her in a US court.
