Carol Todd at her home in Port Coquitlam on Oct. 9, 2013 holds a photo of her daughter Amanda who committed suicide on Oct. 10, 2012.John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail
Amanda Todd’s mother says she is pleased a Dutch court has handed out the longest prison term possible to the man who spent more than two years tormenting her teenage daughter to suicide. But this new decision halves the sentence he received last year in British Columbia.
On Thursday, an Amsterdam court converted Aydin Coban’s 13-year sentence given by a B.C. Supreme Court Justice to six years in a Dutch prison, to be served next year after he finishes an 11-year Dutch sentence for similar convictions involving the online sexual extortion of 33 girls and young women, and gay men. Amanda was 15 when she died by suicide at her home in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam in October, 2012, weeks after posting a video describing being harassed and extorted by an online predator.
The YouTube video amassed millions of views in the days after her death and sparked an international conversation about the dangers children and teens face on social media.
Carol Todd, who has spent the decade since her daughter’s death campaigning internationally for better digital literacy, told The Globe and Mail she is satisfied with the six-year sentence considering he received 11 years from the Dutch justice system for tormenting nearly three dozen other victims, most of whom were minors. She said she also understands why she is now seeing a flood of Canadians reacting in anger online to Mr. Coban having the Canadian ruling shortened to this degree after being convicted for sexually extorting her daughter beginning at the age of 12 and bullying her to suicide.
“We can only do what we can do, we can’t rule judicial systems in different countries,” said Ms. Todd, who travelled to the Netherlands in 2017 to observe Mr. Coban’s trial on the other charges. “I would have been angry if it had been zero years or even one year, but we got six years, which is better than nothing.”
Monique St. Germain, general counsel for the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, said Thursday the charity is disappointed, but also understands the need to adapt the punishment to the Dutch legal context.
“We are encouraged to learn that he will serve time specifically in recognition of the immense harm inflicted on Amanda, her family and the wider community,’’ she said. “We are also thankful our government took the necessary steps to have this man extradited to Canada to go through our processes, thus ensuring that the full extent of his crimes were acknowledged in the Canadian justice system.”
An information sheet by the Netherlands’ Ministry of Justice shows Dutch prisoners who are sent home after being convicted and sentenced abroad must not continue serving more time in prison than the maximum sentence for the relevant crime at home.
Mr. Coban wasn’t present in Amsterdam District Court for the brief hearing to announce the sentence. The Dutch citizen was born in 1978, according to court documents, making him 44 or 45.
His lawyer Robert Malewicz had argued his client shouldn’t get any extra time in prison for the Todd case and said after the sentencing that he would appeal the decision to the Dutch Supreme Court. Mr. Malewicz called the Canadian sentence “exorbitantly high, even by Canadian standards,” and said if the Dutch court decided to give Mr. Coban extra prison time, it should be no more than one year with six months suspended.
One month before her death, Amanda had posted a video in which she held up flash cards recalling the many instances of abuse she encountered online and in-person. Part of the video told of a moment of indiscretion – flashing her breasts on a webcam in Grade 7 – and the resulting extortion by a sinister stranger who sent images to her friends, family and classmates after she refused to “put on a show” for him.
The RCMP placed more than 20 full-time investigators on the case to conduct interviews, look through social media and review contributing factors to the teenager’s death. Investigators in B.C. received hundreds of local and international tips and conducted hundreds of interviews until their work grew into a global hunt that touched at least five countries.
In 2014, Mr. Coban was arrested on an array of charges related to other sex extortions and the Todd case, for which he was extradited to Canada in 2020 to stand trial.
Mr. Coban was convicted in B.C. Supreme Court last year on charges of child pornography, child luring and criminal harassment after the court heard he used 22 online aliases to harass Amanda for more than two years.
Amanda’s mother said she still regularly hears from parents about similar cases, noting only some of these deaths make headlines, such as the October suicide of a 12-year-old boy in Prince George, B.C.
Many of the victims of sexual extortion are male, according to a review of 322 cases sent to the national sexual-abuse tip line Cybertip.ca in July last year. The review found that 92 per cent of cases with a known gender of the victim involved boys or young men.
With reports from The Canadian Press and Associated Press