Canadian True Crime - Breach of Trust

Episode Date: October 25, 2026

When a woman receives a text message from a wrong number, she strikes up an unlikely friendship with a man who says he’s a construction contractor. They develop a close relationship over five years – until a single, offhand remark gives her pause. Is this man really who he says he is?Her search for the truth reveals something far more disturbing than she ever expected - and she realizes she isn’t the only one. It triggers a reckoning inside the local police department along with serious questions about privacy, consent, police accountability and whether the justice system is equipped to recognize the harm these women experienced.For this special episode, Kristi Lee sits down with award‑winning investigative journalist Jana G. Pruden to unpack the harrowing story behind the latest season of her acclaimed narrative podcast: In Her Defence: Breach of Trust.LISTEN to the full story nowFind In Her Defence on your favourite podcast app or platform: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and Pocket Casts.READ Jana Pruden's reporting for The Globe and MailVictims of ex-Regina officer describe feeling violated as judge weighs conditional sentenceEx-Regina officer sentenced to two-year conditional sentence in community, house arrestWomen targeted by Regina police sergeant file sexual assault lawsuitsThe man behind the wrong numberSpecial thanks to Jana G. Pruden and producer Kasia Mychajlowycz from The Globe and Mail Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Canadian True Crime, a completely independent project funded mainly through advertising. To listen, add free and early, subscribe to our premium feed on Amazon Music Included with Prime, Apple Podcasts, and Patreon. This podcast often has disturbing content and course language. It's not for everyone. Please take care when listening. Hi there. I hope you're well. This episode is about a case as extraordinary as it is deeply disturbing and infuriating. Imagine this. One day out of the blue, you have a chance encounter with someone. You keep talking, you become close friends, you trust them. But then, several years later, that person makes one small, seemingly out-of-character remark that makes you question everything

you thought you knew about them. What if you discovered that the chance encounter wasn't an accident at all, that this person already knew who you were and also knew some of the most private and vulnerable details of your life. And worse, what if the reason they had access to all of those details was because they held a position of public authority and trust. This story was first broken by Jana Pruden, crime journalist, award-winning feature writer for The Globe and Mail, and the reporter and host of the hit narrative podcast series in her defense. The last time I spoke with Janae was for Season 2, called 50th Street, about the disappearance and murder of Amber Tuckero. The season went on to win three journalism awards, and I heard

from many listeners that you really connected with that case through our episode, so I'm thrilled to have her back to take us through this one. This season of In Her Defense tackles another incredibly complex story and asks all the difficult questions but never lose a sight of the women at the center of it all. And it all starts with just one woman in Regina, Saskatchewan. Because without her curiosity and bravery, we might not know that any of this had been going on and more women would likely have been victimized. This courageous woman had just left an abusive relationship and filed a police report. Jenna, can you tell me about her and what happened next?

Yeah, so that's Carrie, my friend Carrie Benjo. And Carrie was at the lowest point in her entire life. She was in a women's shelter and had a new phone to her because she had fled with literally nothing except for the clothes on her back and her daughter, had lost her job, her home, she was severely physically injured. She would ultimately have to have her leg amputated due to the injuries that she was suffering at that time, really, really serious injury and infection to her foot and, you know, isolated from the rest of her family, from her friends, from her coworkers.

So she had this new phone from the shelter, and she gets this text that says something to the effect of, hey, man, you know, how are you doing? And, you know, Carrie is like a funny, joky person, and she's there lonely, isolated. And so she responded with a joke just by text, you know, oh, I've got news for you. I'm not a man anymore. Something like that. And this chat started. And it started really slowly.

You know, it wasn't that she immediately was like jumping into a friendship with this person. But I think given how isolated she was and given the frame of mind she was in, She was very open to have this conversation with someone and someone totally different. You know, she told me at the time it's like everyone in her life, the people close to her, you know, some of them knew her ex, some of them maybe, you know, there's just a lot resting on everything. And it was nice to just be this person who was just Carrie, just herself, connecting with this contractor who appeared to not know anything about her or anything about her life. and just someone totally different to have a conversation with at a really rough time. So who did Kerry believe she was getting to know? And what kind of relationship developed after that between them?

She had a relationship with him on and off, but it spans on the outside about five years. At the end part of it, you know, they hadn't seen each other for quite a while. It was sort of petering off. But there is this five-year period. And she believed him to be a man. named Jay Lewis, a construction contractor, and they carried on this relationship over the span of years, which was, you know, at times a sexual intimate relationship. But more than that, it was this very close friendship that Carrie really considered Jay at certain points to be one of

the closest people in her life. And she told me there were days they would text from morning until night and she felt that this was someone that she knew really, really well and who was an important friend and support for her. So over the five-year span of their relationship, Kerry knew this man as a contractor in his mid to late 40s named Jay Lewis. But then she has an interaction with him out of the blue that causes her to rethink everything. Can you tell me about that? Yeah. So they hadn't been in touch. for quite a while, and Carrie thought their relationship just kind of had run its course. She's an indigenous woman, he's a white man, and that was part of it, that in the end,

she felt like probably, you know, they just were never going to be able to be long-term partners. And so she was also moving on with her life. She was physically healing. She'd had her amputation, and she had had a lot of rehab, so she was physically doing better. She was in a way better circumstance, you know, she was living in a new home and had a new job as the editor of an indigenous newspaper called Eagle Feather News. And so she was just really kind of back to herself, I think. And he texts her belated, happy new year. And they make plans to meet and he doesn't show up. And it really sort of annoyed her. You know, she'd made time for it. She's really busy woman, she's got kids, she has this job, she had a lot going on. And when she basically,

by text confronted him on that and said, hey, like, why didn't you show up? I made time for you. And he swore. He said, my dad was in the effing hospital. And Carrie came out of an extremely abusive relationship. And like a lot of women who are survivors of domestic violence, she's really attuned to men swearing at her or men being angry. And one thing she'd always noticed about Jay is that he never swore. So when he swore that day and being really like attuned to that kind of language from her ex who used to swear at her quite a lot, it's like a light bulb went off. not only, okay, like suddenly this uncharacteristic language or what she thought was uncharacteristic,

but it just really made her think, wait, what do I actually know about this guy? And she started to really question, I think, everything about, wait, okay, this is my friend Jay Lewis, but how do I really know who he is? And so then she decides to do a reverse image search, which ends up being, the big break in the story. Yeah, she had one picture of him. And she had happened to see on TikTok a thing about this quite sophisticated facial recognition software. And so she put that one photo of him into it and it came back with a hit, you know, she paid her 20 bucks. And what it revealed was a picture of him sitting besides someone who she knew, who, who,

is a police officer. They're sitting together at a desk and she could see a jacket in the background that is a Regina police service jacket. And Carrie's a reporter. I used to work with her at the Regina Leader Post. She's a journalist. She's extremely intelligent. She knows a lot of people. She recognized this one police officer right away because she had done stories, obviously, that involved the police through the years. She ended up taking that page. She ended up taking that page. picture and showing it to someone at the Regina Police Service that she knew and said, oh, hey, do you know who this is in the picture? Because at that point, she told me she originally thought, okay, well, the police station was being renovated. Maybe he was there as a contractor, because that's what she thought he was.

Maybe he was doing work on the police station. But then the person, her contact, came back and said, oh, yeah, that's Sergeant Robert Seminjack. And she realized at that moment, not only did he not have the same name as she thought, and he wasn't a contractor, he was a high-ranking veteran police officer at the Regina Police Service. How did she process that? How did she begin trying to make sense of why he'd approached her in the first place and what his intention was? So she, I think, really was in a state of shock at that point. discovering that, you know, it's extremely scary and terrifying, really.

So as she discovers that this isn't at all who she thought it was, is a really extremely shocking and extremely scary situation. As I said, Carrie's an indigenous woman at that time in the news. You know, a lot of people were talking about indigenous women's bodies in landfills in Manitoba. There were big debates raging about whether, you know, it was worth it to search the landfill for these women. And, you know, also, Carrie has grown up with this kind of violence against indigenous women. So it was really scary on a profound level. And I remember her telling me, you know, that it was so sad because she lost her friend Jay,

who was a really important person to her. And it was really scary because she didn't know this man Bob and couldn't understand why. he would do this. So she talks to another friend who has a bunch of contacts within the police service. And at that time, I think she and that friend

really start to put together, okay, what's the timing of this? You know, it happened within a very short period after she filed charges against her ex. While she was in a women's shelter, on a phone that nobody had the number,

and she really started to wonder, did he get my number? from the police report. And so that is when you first into the story. You and Kerry had known each other for years. And in the podcast, you kind of explain that she decides to tell you this as both a friend and a crime reporter. How did you feel when she first told you that?

What was your first reaction? Yeah, I mean, I know my first reaction because I have been going through those original messages where she said, I've been keeping a low profile and if you want to hear a sorted story about the Regina Police Service, let me know. And I said, of course, and she started to tell me. And I was just shocked. I really was. There's texts of me just saying like, what? Like me trying to wrap my head around this and trying to understand the magnitude. And, you know, she's, told me, like, their relationship spanned years. He would come to her house, you know, dressed like a contractor. Like, this was not some kind of brief encounter. They, they had a very close relationship

over many years. And to think that someone was living this whole assumed identity was honestly really disturbing. And so she did tell me that was this period of time where she was deciding whether or not to go forward and filing a complaint, but also was really wanted there to be a record of this. As a member of the media herself, she really believes in the power of journalism. And it's a horrible thing to say, but it truly was that, like, if something happened to her,

she wanted to make sure that I knew what was going on and that there would be a record of this, because it really was and is quite scary. And then there's the fact that Kerry is an indigenous woman, which adds a whole other layer to this, a long history in Canada of indigenous women being failed by police, whether it be reports of violence not being taken seriously or family struggling to get answers or action when their loved ones go missing. So for Carrie to discover that someone she'd trusted for years was actually a police officer who'd been secretly actually a police officer who'd been secretly actually. accessing her private information using the same system that she herself had turned to for protection after experiencing violence. I mean, I can't imagine how frightening that must have been or how profoundly it would shake her sense of safety. Just to jump in on that, like, I have had a couple of people through the years I've been working on this story tell me that they don't really understand why this is a big deal. Wow.

And I find that really shocking. But people have said that to me. Someone listened to the first three episodes, and they told my husband, who told me that, you know, they just, they don't really see the seriousness of it. Maybe part of that comes from not understanding the amount of information that's in someone's personal file. If you have ever been a victim, there's details of that in there. If you've ever been a victim of a crime as a child that is in there. Also, your address, your phone number, your license. Like, there's so much, even someone that has a limited interaction with the police,

you probably have a lot of information in there. And of course, even people that have had absolutely no interaction, but maybe have gotten a criminal records check to volunteer at their kids' school or something, you know, they have information there. So that's one piece of it is that for someone who has, has been a victim, which we know Carrie has. You know, she was in a women's shelter. She had proceeded with a charge against her ex.

That also can mean that your medical reports are often, you know, accessible because that's part of what may be a criminal case against someone. So when you think of someone having all of that information about you, and police officers are also receive a lot of training on how to manipulate people, and that can be used for a good purpose, right? It's like how do we get this murderer to confess to the murder so they'll be convicted or how do you make a victim feel comfortable enough to disclose a crime? How do you deal with a crowd of people at a party so it doesn't get out of hand? Like there's good uses of it. I'm not saying manipulative in a in a pejorative sense by any means. But when you think of those same skills,

being turned against someone who's extremely vulnerable, and you also have all of this information about things that they've suffered in the past, that is extremely, extremely serious. And I think it's extremely dangerous also. Yeah. So now Kerry has to decide what to do next. How does she make that decision? At first, this, you know, contact of hers who knows some police looks at what it would be like to go forward.

Interestingly, that person goes to a very high-ranking, female officer, and that officer says, I really think your friend should go forward. That officer is now the chief of police that's happened since. That's chief Laura Lee Davies. So I think that's kind of an interesting thing. I think that's worth noting and speaks to the character of the person who is currently the chief. Carrie does go forward. She files her complaint. Professional standards, investigators get in touch with her. But then she actually changes her mind. She has a nightmare and she decides, no, I'm not going to go forward. And she tells Dean Yadlovsky, who's the head of that section at the time, no, I'm not going to go forward. And he asks her to

reconsider and to speak with one of his officers, Lana Heiliger, and they have a conversation. And then Carrie does decide to go ahead. Carrie Benjo files a complaint with the Regina Police Service early in 2003. Robert Seminchuk, a veteran officer with more than 20 years on the force, is suspended immediately with pay. His access to the police database is also revoked. The Professional Services Department is brought in to investigate Seminchuk's use of the police database over a number of years.

Before long, they realize the problem might be much, much bigger than just, one woman. That's coming up after this break. So after Kerry Benjo files a complaint with the Regina Police, professional services starts reviewing Robert Semmenschuk's digital footprint and auditing his activity in the police database. Here's Janipruden. They soon find that there's not only inappropriate use of the computer and the computer databases related to carry, but to a large number of women. Originally, they identify 24. At the time that he is ultimately arrested, they find a notebook that has between 200 and 250 women's names in it.

Yeah, it's shocking. And that's a piece of information that 200, 250 number was never presented in court. that's a piece of information that we found in the course of our reporting. But they quickly identify that he's contacted a large number of women and that in many of those cases have also turned into relationships, in many cases, intimate sexual relationships, and that they're starting the same way, which is through wrong number texts and assumed identities. There's a couple of women, a small number of women who knew him as a police officer. They are victimized as well, even knowing his identity. But the vast majority of the women knew him

under different names and different identities and had no idea that he was a police officer who had accessed their personal information. So now the professional services investigators have to track down these women who have no idea what's going on. to find out more information about their interactions with the police and also whether they encountered Bob Semenchuk, whether they knew him by that name or not. How did investigators go about approaching these women and explaining what they'd uncovered?

The vast majority of the women, I think, if not all, other than Carrie, had no idea that they'd been victimized when they were contacted by the Regina Police Service professional standards investigators. And they were asked to come in as witnesses to a crime. So part of what the investigators told us is that they wanted to be able to deliver this information in person and also get reaction and sort of have all of that take place in the recorded interviews that ultimately could be used as part of a criminal case. Some of these women had been carrying on a relationship with him up until the point that his phone was seized by professional standards.

So from their perspective, what they knew is that this guy, Steve, that they were seeing, just all of a sudden ghosted them and never responded. But in reality, it was this police officer Robert Seminchuk and his phone was seized at a certain point. According to the agreed statement of facts, Robert Semenchuk had searched the names of what was described as an alarming number of women with no legitimate reason that related to his police work. Of those women, investigators identified 33 that Seminchuk had contacted after accessing their personal information in the police database. For most, their first contact with him was receiving a supposedly accidental wrong number text, where he pretended he didn't know who they

were, gave them a fake name, often Steve, and gradually built a connection that often led to an in-person meeting. And his stories were remarkably consistent. He told many of them he was a contractor. He typically claimed to be divorced or separated with two sons. As we'll get to later, neither was true. And the women reported these relationships developed in different ways, from sexual conversations and exchanges of intimate photos to close friendships and long-term relationships that sometimes involved sexual intimacy. So, Jenna, can you tell me about the women and the circumstances of their lives when they first met the man that they now know is Robert Semenchuk?

So the women in this case are just so amazing. And we did see these patterns. You know, we talked about Carrie and the situation she was in when she got this wrong number text. And the women, all of them were, they don't all love the word vulnerable. So, and there's some exchanges about that. But, you know, they all had gone through things. Victims of physical violence, domestic violence, sexual violence, serious mental health problems, suicidal crises, suffered deaths in the family,

and many of them were still in very, very low points in their lives when they received what appeared to be a wrong number text. You mentioned earlier that there were a couple of women who did know that he was a police officer. Can you tell me about those women? So one worked with him, and they started what she believed was a very consensual, casual relationship,

and only later did she learn that he had actually been searching her for seven years before they seemingly happened to meet each other on the job and start this sexual relationship. As someone who had previously been a victim of stalking, she found that very, very scary and very destabilizing. One of the other women, she was the victim of an intimate partner violence, and Robert Semenchuk contacted her later,

saying he was working on another. case. So she knew he was a police officer, but then, you know, he would ask for text her at night sometimes and ask for pictures of her in a bikini and things like that. And, you know, she wasn't really sure. Like she thought that was wrong, but she wasn't given her life experience. And as she put it, that she, you know, really had a lot of problems with boundaries at that time, that she didn't really realize how bad that was until she told her mother. And her mother was like, no, this should not be happening. I think even that, people recognizing, like, that kind of thing should not be happening.

That's really serious. So we know that Kerry Benjo received her wrong number text message from the man we now know as Robert Semenchuk in 2018. But she wasn't the first one to receive a message from him. How far back did this actually go? The charges go back to 2011, I believe. So it goes back some considerable amount of time with, you know, a large number of women. And I should say that another thing that is quite aggravating is that he had been disciplined twice before for misusing the same databases that police have. Now, in those cases, it was looking up members of his family, looking up his son. But, again, again, he was. Again, you know, police are not allowed to do that. I think there has been a culture in the past in some departments and with some officers that, you know, you look up your ex-wife's new boyfriend or you look up the hockey coach.

And those are examples that are often given to us. Many people mention those specific examples to me. But police are not allowed to do that. This is a very detailed databases they have access to and you aren't actually allowed to be surveilling members of your own. own family, even for what might be seen as noble purposes. Robert Semenchuk remained suspended with pay for about a year and a half. By the end of 2024, the Crown decided to proceed with criminal charges, and Semenchuk agreed to turn himself in. That's not what ended up happening.

He was meant to turn himself in to the police that day, and he didn't show us. Dean Yadlovsky, the head of professional standards, texts him to see where he is and he says, you know, I've hurt myself. They're calling an ambulance. And it's revealed that he's made what appears to be a suicide attempt. And so he's not arrested that day. And ultimately, the arrest happens several months later after he's received treatment. So who is Robert Semenchuk? According to Janice reporting for the Globe and Mail, he grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan,

but at some point he moved to Calgary, Alberta, which is where he began his policing career in the late 90s. A few years later, he moved back to Regina and joined the police service there, spending most of his career in plain clothes units dealing with complex investigations, like robbery and car theft. And his work was apparently appreciated. After 10 years with the service, he was promoted to Sergeant. That was in 2013, two years after he began searching women in the police database and contacting them under false pretences. In 2018, Seminchuk received the Governor General's Exemplary Service Medal for Policing.

That's the same year, he sent that wrong number text message to carry Benjubljee. What do we know about Bob Semenchuk's personal life and his mental health? We know, I would say, biographical details. We know about some of the units that he served in at the Regina Police Service. We know he was an officer there for 20 years. We know that he was married. He told many of the women that he was divorced. That was not the case.

He was married. He has two kids, a son and a daughter. For some reason, he told seemingly all the women that he had two sons. We know that from the pre-sentence report, you know, he describes a happy, comfortable childhood and a positive home life. He comes from a large blended family that, by all accounts, was a good home and a good background. We did ultimately in court hear about mental health diagnoses of depression and anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. But the judge did note and specifically note on the record that all of those diagnoses came after this situation was discovered. So, yeah, we do know biographical facts of him, but why he would do this is a question that I never have been able to answer.

and the former police chief, Evan Bray, who's one of six police chiefs who talks to us in the course of this podcast, you know, he said that even officers who thought they knew Robert Semenchuk are realizing that they didn't really know him at all. And, you know, I have still a lot of old contacts within the Regina Police Service. And I've received very little information about what he's like as a person. And I do think that people who thought they know him are realizing that that really they didn't. Yeah. And that brings me to his wife. What do we know about her? And did you try to contact her as part of your own investigation?

Yeah, yeah, I did reach out to her and she's never responded to me, totally understandably. But one of the things is that we heard that he was doing this on his work phone and often in his work hours. This behavior was happening when she thought he was at work, presumably. Certainly when his colleagues and bosses were trusting him, too, that he was working. The current police chief told me, you know, he was in a position that many senior people in their work get to, which is where you're trusted to be doing your work and you're not being monitored all day. And I think that's the case in relationships too. You know, there's, we just trust each other that we're going about our lives in, you know, the usual ways. And, you know, the fact that we have such a large number of women who were really taken in by him, sometimes to very great extents, shows that he was able to get people to trust him and open up to him and to believe him, even when he gave them stories about why he couldn't do something or why he didn't show up for dinner.

A lot of the women feel very, they feel a lot of sympathy for her. And I can't imagine being in a position like that. It must be extremely difficult for her, I'm sure. This is a case involving a large number of women. We keep hearing that phrase. There were more than 200 names in Robert Semenchuk's notebook. An investigator identified more than 30 women that he searched in the police database before contacting them

to pursue personal and intimate relationships. And here's what he was charged with. One count of breach of trust, which applies to officials who use their positions for a dishonest, partial, corrupt, or oppressive purpose, and one count of unauthorized use of a computer. Two charges. That's it.

This is one of the issues Janipruden and her team investigate in her defense, breach of trust. I asked her to explain. Some driving questions that I had throughout this process were, ultimately, there was 33 women captured by each charge. So how come it's only, you know, one count of breach of trust and one count of unauthorized use of a computer? Why isn't it 33 counts? And then also, why are those the charges? Because one thing that we heard over and over and over again from the,

women is I feel like I was sexually assaulted. I feel like I was stalked. I feel the effect that it had on their lives really was not necessarily reflected in, you know, one charge of breach of trust. In the podcast, you say that you contacted the Crown prosecutor and asked for an explanation about how the decision to lay those particular charges was made. And the Crown declined to respond. But for me, when I'm listening, I did not realize that you could just call them up and say, hey, how did you make that decision? Have you ever had a Crown respond positively and talk to you about the decision that they made? Many times. This to me is part of that public accountability piece. You know, in Canada, we have an open court principle that courts are

meant to be open, that people can go in and watch a trial anytime. They can, you know, that is a huge fundamental principle of our democracy. These things don't happen behind closed doors. I've asked multiple times for interviews with the prosecutor, Chris Brown. He's the, he specializes in prosecutions of police in Saskatchewan. And I was repeatedly told no, except for a interview that he did on the courthouse steps with reporters after Bob Semincheck's sentencing. So it was also, you know, minus 40 out there. It was extremely cold. So that's not the greatest environment to have a more in-depth discussion. And as you can imagine, a lot of the reporters in that kind of classic courthouse scrum, you see them on TV. There's all these reporters with their microphones and often getting,

you know, shorter kinds of answers. whereas I really wanted to sit down with him somewhere where it wasn't minus 40 and really have a conversation that I think when you help me understand, it helps other people understand. And I do think that that's an extension of the open court principle. I think in many cases, in my opinion, that's an obligation of the Crown to actually put on the record. Here's why we made this decision.

And, you know, I was a reporter. I covered court for seven straight years. I was in that exact courthouse pretty much every day for seven years. And, you know, there are sometimes when the public doesn't understand or what we think a snap judgment we could have about a case. For instance, why isn't this 33 charges? Why isn't this stalking? I can answer that question.

He wouldn't answer it, but I can answer it. Well, the criminal code doesn't have a charge for stalking. The criminal code has a charge for criminal harassment, which is essentially repeated unwanted behavior that causes someone to be in fear. So if you imagine like an ex-boyfriend calling a million times or texting a million times, well, that doesn't really apply. The way the actual charge is worded doesn't apply here because the women didn't know until after. By the time they knew that they had had this relationship with someone who, you know, had a false identity and who had found their numbers in police databases, it was already old.

over. So that charge, just the actual mechanics of it, doesn't work. So that's an example to me of, you know, we might have an idea from the outside and that it can be really helpful to have someone explain it to you. And sometimes it makes a lot of sense. Okay, I understand why you couldn't charge criminal harassment in that case. But yeah, he declined to do an interview. And I think there's a little bit of a volley that goes back and forth between who actually made the decision, the police or the crown, he just declined to really get into any details about why those decisions were made. His position is they went forward with the charges they felt had the most reasonable likelihood of conviction. And that's exactly what happened, but this case did not go to trial.

In November of 2025, Robert Eric Seminchuk, age 53, pleaded guilty to one count each of breach of trust an unauthorized use of a computer. By this point, he had long since resigned from the Regina Police Service. At his sentencing hearing earlier this year, the court heard 19 victim impact statements from women describing how they were harmed by Robert Semenchuk's actions. Janiprudin noted it took more than an hour to get through all of those statements. And while each woman's experience was different, there were some striking. similarities in what they described. Many spoke about a profound loss of trust in other people

in the police. There were accounts of anxiety, sleepless nights, depression and women withdrawing from friends and family. Others described consequences that completely upended their lives, devastated by the realization that someone they'd trusted, had been secretly using his position as a police officer to access their most private information and deceive them about it. And these weren't just feelings of embarrassment or betrayal. It's profound psychological harm that continued long after the relationships had ended. Many of these women described living in constant fear, wondering whether they were being watched,

who might have had access to their personal information, and whether they would ever feel safe again. They describe losing their confidence, struggling to trust anyone enough to pursue another relationship, and blaming themselves for being deceived. The harm they suffered because of Robert Semenchuk's actions fundamentally changed their sense of safety, their relationships, and the way they went about their everyday lives. Yet the charges of breach of trust and unauthorized use of a computer suggests that the legal system is only able to, a focus on the misuse of police resources and how Semenchuk had obtained the women's information. It didn't come close to capturing the harm he had caused to these women once he had that information. I asked Janna what she took away from exploring that angle.

That was something that's so interesting to me from the beginning of when Kerry first told me about this and then later when we learned what the charges would be, was this disparity between, the experience of the women and the charges. In fact, that's something that the judge herself really keyed on in court. So after hearing the victim impact statements, she said that she just saw this, you know, disparity between what she was hearing in the victim impact statements, this very profound effect that it's had on these women's lives, and what was in the agreed statement of facts.

And I think that also extends to, you know, the charges themselves. having spent all those years in court when I think about people going through life with a sexual assault charge on their record is a lot different than going through life with one breach of trust conviction on your record. So, you know, I think that's one of the things my producer, Kasha Mahalovich and I have always tried to do within her defense is look at a case of an individual woman or in this case women, but also look at the way these broader systems have allowed. this thing to happen, this potential injustice to occur or this potential, this crime to occur. So, you know, in the first season, it was Helen Naslund who killed her abusive husband. And it was very much about her and her family, but also how does the court treat the battered woman defense? And how do courts understand a woman who's lived in serious, you know, physical peril her entire life and then commits a homicide of her husband. The second season about the disappearance of murder of

Amber Tuckero is about her and then also about this broader picture of missing and murdered indigenous women. And so in this case, you know, it was really important to us what happened here specifically in regard to Robert Semenchuk's victims, him as a specific person, but also this broader question. Because as these cases are going on across the country, various versions of this. They're not all the same. Some of them, it's an officer on duty driving a woman home and then later going and trying to initiate sex with her. Sometimes it is looking up women that you see at the gym and pulling them over for a traffic ticket to try to initiate a relationship. What does it really mean to consent? Could these women possibly have consented

when they didn't really know who they were having sex with? And the law, is very, very interesting in this area. The experts we have are some of the top experts on women in the law and the law around consent. But I think... One of those legal experts is law professor Dr. Elaine Craig, whose work I've also cited in previous episodes of this podcast covering sexual assault trials.

In the case of Robert Seminchuk's offending, Janet Prudent and her team explore the legal issues with a number of legal experts. It makes for an incredibly involved topic, but the basic takeaway is this. Under Canadian law, there are circumstances where someone can agree to sex at the time, but that consent isn't legally valid.

One is when someone abuses a position of authority to obtain consent. But in this case, that gets complicated because the women didn't even know Robert Semenchuk, was a police officer, so he technically wasn't in a position of authority from their perspective. Another circumstance is when consent is obtained fraudulently, through deception that exposes someone to a significant risk of serious bodily harm. In her defense breach of trust, Dr Elaine Craig argues that the legal definition is quite narrow, but she believes there may have been grounds to pursue sexual assault charges in Robert Seminchuk's case,

and that the severe psychological trauma these women experienced could meet that threshold for serious bodily harm. But historically, courts have been reluctant to treat deception in sexual relationships as a crime, partly because lying has long been considered an ordinary part of seduction. It sounds a bit wacky, but think about it, pretending to have a fancy job to impress someone lying about how much money you have, claiming to be single when you're actually married. Lies like that can cause real harm and turn people's lives upside down, but they don't automatically invalidate someone's consent to sex under Canadian law. And courts have been cautious about drawing that line,

because where does ordinary dishonesty end and criminal deception begin? And Janipruden makes an interesting comparison here. If someone walks into a bar, falsely claims to work for a charity, and convinces another person to hand over $20 as a donation, they could be charged with fraud. But if that same person lies about who they are to manipulate someone else into a relationship that could lead to sexual intimacy, that deception doesn't seem to count for much under Canadian law.

But here's the thing, Robert Semenchuk wasn't just exaggerating his accomplishments or lying about his marital status. He was deliberately using his position of power and privileged access to private information to manipulate women into relationships. And yet, the charges were breach of trust and unauthorized use of a computer back to Jana. Women in the law and the law around consent. But I think the most important takeaway is that the law can change, it can adapt, and that people need to be willing to push the law in cases where something is clearly wrong. Now, I guess, you know, the crown would argue with me,

but certainly from the women's perspectives, even though the crown says that this was the appropriate charge and the appropriate outcome and, you know, really what they could expect from a sentence, a lot of people's gut is not that. That's what we saw really in season one and is so striking to me that even before the podcast went, came out, if I'd be talking to someone, they're asking me what I'm working on, I tell them,

that people's first question, oh, how long is he in jail for? How much time did he serve? Is he still in prison? Like, that there's a, disparity between what many women really instinctively understand to be the harm of this and the way it was treated in the courts. And I think that's at least worth questioning. Do you ever feel like a deep, like, disappointment in the justice system when you come across cases like this where you can see things could have been done so differently and yet they

weren't? Yeah, you know, I have a like a complicated relationship with. the justice system, I think, because for all of those years in court, I do actually think that it works probably the best of any system in the world, but does it have many flaws? Yes. And are those flaws sometimes devastating and hurtful? Absolutely yes. So it is complicated for me, in a sense. But that's one of the reasons I believe in it so strongly is that I think even for players within the justice system, nobody is infallible. Nobody knows everything. Nobody understands everything. And there can be a gender dynamic to that. There can be a class dynamic to that. There can be all kinds of reasons why a case comes before a prosecutor or a judge. And they see it in a different way than maybe. the victims might experience it. And there's times when those things are just never going to jive, for sure. But when you see a case like this, I think that is why I wanted not only, you know, I did a story early on. We kind of broke the story of what was going on with this case and Robert Semenchuk. But one of the reasons that I really wanted this to be a season of Inher Defense was so that we could get into these issues and look at how could the system treat this differently. And there certainly are cases rightly or wrongly where someone not having all the information about what's occurring in a sexual act results in a sexual assault charge. That ultimately brings me back to why I believe so strongly in people telling their stories and why I'm so grateful that Carrie decided to share her story and trust us with her story, why she spoke out not only to the police, but also in this forum.

It's extremely risky. It's extremely vulnerable. You know, it's very time consuming. It's like one bagillion text from me, you know, 100 hours of interviews from me. And all the women who stood behind her, too. You know, we talked to at least a dozen women on or off the record. Some appear by name. Many of them speak and have their names in the podcast. Some speak with no names. And then others, we've just spoken privately. But that's why their stories are so important because I think that by them speaking out is how other people can hopefully understand the reality of an offense like this. And is it breach of trust? Is it something else? And then how should that be treated? Breach of trust is a serious charge for sure. It can be treated very seriously. But the sexual element of it is not small.

And it is different. It is different to have some steal $20 from you than to have an intimate exchange with someone under false pretences. In February of this year, Regina Provincial Court Judge Mary Lynn Beaton described Robert Seminchuk's conduct as illegal and immoral and handed him a conditional sentence of two years, less a day, to be served in the community, the first six months on house arrest. Among the women he'd harmed, there was a woman he had harmed, there was. a feeling of deep disappointment. They questioned whether this sentence would do anything to prevent

similar misconduct in the future. After all, Seminchuk had previously been reprimanded for improperly accessing police records, but that didn't stop him. He continued doing it for years without anyone detecting the pattern. So what was going to stop other police officers from doing the same thing. How can we trust the police to protect us when the very information we provide while seeking help can be used by a nefarious actor to harm us? As part of her investigation for in her defense, Jana Pruden takes these questions to the software company behind the police database and comes up against a shadowy tech bro who isn't exactly eager to answer them. It results in a tough ethical decision that Jana has to make.

That's coming up after the break. When police officers have access to databases that contain some of our most sensitive personal information, who is making sure they're not abusing that privilege? And what's being done to prevent something like this from happening again? Jana Pruden contacted Niche, the company behind the police database used by the regixt. a police service to find out what safeguards were in place to mitigate this risk.

One of the many parts of the podcast that I found really fascinating was about a rather awkward conversation you ended up having with the head of the software company. And I have to say you handled it incredibly well, especially given how uncomfortable things got. Can you tell us what was going on? Yeah, thank you. that to me is an important aspect of this story. Robert Semenchuk's case is a unique case. It's a very dramatic example of misuse of this database.

But there is a broader issue here because we see similar database misuse in departments across this country. The Calgary Police Service Chief Katie McClellan told me that, you know, officer sexual misconduct is at the top of her list of things to, worry about right now. I mean, that's, that's extremely, extremely serious. So one aspect of that is the databases themselves. And when I was reporting the story and, you know, learned what this database was. And at first I was just trying to figure out, okay, what is in this database, you know, and how does it function? And is it different from the old days where there'd be a file folder of

mugshots, you know, how, what's contained in here? And I found out that. And I found out that, that this company based in Winnipeg is really one of the leaders in this police technology and is used by a very large number of departments in North America, including recently Toronto Police Service signed on, so the biggest municipal police force in the country. This company in Winnipeg. So originally I thought, you know, I'd love to interview them for the podcast, and I think this would be a really interesting business profile.

I'm a writer, you know, a reporter at the Globe of Mail, and normally I write for print. I thought, oh, actually an interview could do double duty and I'll do a profile. It's very interesting. And so we went back and forth on some emails and we got on a call, which I truly thought was just to sort out some last details before the interview. And it became clear very quickly that that was not the case. They, you know, did not want to talk to me at all. And although we have a conversation about them not wanting to talk to me, you know, why we felt that's really important is that there is this public accountability piece. You know, these are private for-profit companies. They get paid a lot of tax dollars. Regina Police Service, it's a, you know, a small city, a small police service. They pay a quarter million dollars a year according to six. City of Regina documents to this database company. And I think it's fair for us as members of the public to ask, how are these working, what safeguards are in place to make sure that there's not misuse?

Is AI being used or can AI be used to identify patterns of misuse? You know, Bob in the past few years, has been in auto theft. Well, middle-aged single mothers are not the classic auto theft suspect. So could a computer database system have flagged, why is he searching so many women? It turns out they're really not prepared to answer any questions about that. Yeah, and I found it really interesting that their excuse was that they were a small company and they don't think it's appropriate to speak out because they're just a little guy. And then I loved how, you know, you went and got their kind of promotional material that said we're a huge global corporation.

that is serving police departments around the world, it just really made them look dodgy. And I wanted to ask you, did they know that you were recording the conversation? You don't have to disclose recording in Canada that changes place to place. I wasn't intending to record that conversation, but then I did start recording it once I saw how it was going.

I turned my recorder on. You know, these are highly sophisticated people. These are the heads of a very powerful business and organization who know they are on the phone with a journalist and they have not said off the record. So to me, all of that is usable. Now, those are different rules than I would use with the victims, for instance. But for people, you know, sophisticated people who are in positions of power and they know that I I'm a journalist. I'm not hiding anything. To me, unless they've said off the record, everything is on the record. And you could imagine, you see this sometimes in, say, the mayor says something scandalous to someone, you know, and it's recorded even though they're not doing the interview at that moment. That is usable. I can think of many cases where someone, again, in a position of power and authority, totally knowledgeable about the relationship here and what's happening, that if they say, something that is reportable and relevant in the public interest, then I think that's reportable and relevant in the public interest. Another example would be sometimes, say, again, there's some kind of scandal involving the mayor. Again, this is not a particular mayor, just the idea of a mayor, you know, say you call the person and they swear at you and hang up the phone. That's usable. That is relevant. But that is very different from, for instance, the women,

I was talking to or people that are less used to dealing with the media or have less power. And that, you know, that's part of our mandate of what we do in the media and what a story like this does is that we're, you know, holding powerful people and powerful organizations, hopefully, to account to protect people who are vulnerable. And so I was not told that was off the record. And I, of course, consulted with my editors and I consulted with some other people, journalists that I like to. talk about ethical issues with, and we determined that that was ethical to use it and that it was very much in the public interest. So given how contextual these situations are and how it's not a one-size-fits-all approach,

and you can't really apply the same rule to every situation, I imagine that it must really help to have other journalists you trust who you can talk about these things through with. I didn't talk to anyone who said, no, you shouldn't use that. The whole reason I wanted to have this conversation is that it's a matter of public accountability. And I think that these tech companies, of course, we see this playing out in many different forums, that tech companies are really not always accountable to the public. And so if that's all they will say to me on the record, then that's what we have from them. In contrast, there's a representative of their rival company was actually quite happy to talk about their work and the safeguards that they're trying to put into place as well.

So that's a decision an organization makes. This wasn't an ambush phone call. You know, we had plenty of emails back and forth that they knew what was happening. And ultimately, we did make the decision to go with it. And everybody felt like, no, this is worth using. But, you know, to your point, these are the complex situations that we come up against in journalism. It's one of the things I love about podcasting. And that's also very vulnerable about podcasting is that people can hear me in my reporting. And you can hear how I talk to people in this company, the police chiefs, police officers, and victims.

And, you know, it's not always exactly the same. And that's for a reason. The more power you have, I think the more that we have a right to ask for accountability from you. And the more, you know, forceful, sometimes I will be about that. Yeah, I thought you handled that conversation so well. You were completely upfront about what you were looking for and why, and you stood your ground without becoming confrontational. I was so struck with their reluctance to answer your questions, especially when compared with your later conversation with a rep from a competing software company

who was willing to discuss those issues. I mean, we're talking about incredibly sensitive personal information here. Why wouldn't a company want to explain what proactive safeguards might be available in their software to flag suspicious patterns like this early on and before it results in more than 30. women being harmed. Yeah, and, you know, I think for us, our thought was, you know, we can put this out there. We can put out there what they said to me. We can put out there what they say in their materials and people can come to their own conclusions about that.

I do think that there is a huge public interest in ensuring that there is some desire to make sure that these tools can also be used to catch misuse. Like, that's in everybody's best interest. And I think maybe some people might think, oh, well, this would never be an issue for me. But as we're seeing in the United States, where there's a lot of questions being raised about flock cameras, which are license plate readers, you know, it can be used against people in a variety of ways. And it's in everybody's best interest that there are safeguards in place. With the criminal case over, legal proceedings have begun in civil court. Kerry Benjo and another survivor, Bridget Sear, who had their publication bans lifted, have each filed lawsuits against Robert Semenchuk, alleging sexual assault, as well as violations of their privacy and abuse of his position as a police officer.

At the heart of their claims is the argument that they couldn't have given informed consent to sexual activity because Seminchuk had deceived them about his identity and used confidential police information to pursue relationships with them. Seminchuk denies the allegations beyond what was established at his trial. I need to say they have not yet been proven at trial. I asked Jana about something I found quite troubling about this whole police database thing. There seemed to be a lack of clarity around safeguards

that could detect and prevent misuse, which to me suggests there's a lot of reliance on trusting individual police officers to use these databases appropriately. But we've seen what can happen when they don't. So if officers are being given access to sensitive personal information, surely there needs to be more than an honour system

to prevent them from abusing it. I asked Jana about the responsibility a police service has to prevent that misuse. The Regina Police Service, so the chief, Lorley Davies, who, again, somewhat ironically, was the police officer who told a friend to tell Carrie that she should go forward is now the one, you know, dealing with the fallout from it,

and it has been substantial. And I do believe that she truly wants to make sure this never happens in her police force again. You know, she is a very, very well-respected police officer and has worked, she told me, she's, I'm a very proud member of the Regina Police Service and that she doesn't want this to be the thing that comes up when you Google the Regina Police Service. So outside of, I think, whether or not there's lawsuits, the chiefs that I've spoken to, you know, in Regina, Edmonton, Calgary, the police chief in Ottawa has recently made statements about this. It's not only, about, you know, are you going to have to pay out some money or deal with a lawsuit? It's, it has a huge effect on public trust. It has a huge effect on the reputation of your police department. And I think for good police officers, and there are many, many good police officers, they hate this. You know, no one hates a bad cop more than a good cop. I think that's absolutely

true. And I think that's an important aspect of this. You know, I'm not, I'm not a police hater. I have called the police for help in my life when I needed the police. And I have seen amazing cases, again, sitting in court. I've seen amazing police work. But we have to be identifying police who are misusing this power or who are engaged in some form of corruption. And that has to be rooted out. So I think the police chief in Regina is very committed to this new process of accountability, including random audits.

And one civilian employee was recently caught with a random audit. So I guess time will tell. But I do know that this is, no police chief wants these cases. They're embarrassing. They're unseemly. And I do believe that they make life a lot harder for good officers on the street. In her defense, breach of trust reveals serious gaps in the way law enforcement agencies in Canada are policing themselves. and the serious harm women are suffering as a result.

It's based on more than 50 hours of exclusive interviews with police officers, lawyers, legal experts, and dozens of very brave women. Many of these women have had very, very hard lives, their whole lives. And so for them to go ahead with the complaint with the police, go ahead with the court process, and then to speak with us, to use their voices, has been really just such a beautiful and powerful thing. You know, gives me chills even as we're talking about it. I get little goosebumps just at how brave and how powerful these women are

to use their voices like that. And they are doing it and putting themselves so much on the line to try to protect other women. And we made a decision from the very beginning that their voices would be front and centered. The whole story is carried by them. And we've done that every place that we could do it, we let them speak. And here they are in this promotional trailer for in her defense, breach of trust.

I just received a text message and it was something along the lines of, hey, are you still doing drywall? I just said, I'm sorry you have the wrong number. He was looking for a drywaller. and because of how long there I was, I decided to respond. And it just snowballed from there where, oh, I hope I didn't message a child. I hope I didn't accidentally text a kid. Oh, you're not a kid, are you? No, I'm not a kid.

I said, oh, no, I'm a mature woman. And then he said, okay, sorry for the mix-up. At least I accidentally texted a female. He was being friendly, and then he's like, I'm in Regina, where are you? Weird, because I'm in Regina, too. He could have been from anywhere. I said, laughing my ass off. Yes, Regina girl you're looking for.

We just kept on texting back and forth, and he says, hey, would you like to get together? And I said, sure. When you're feeling so incredibly unloved for so long, and someone takes interest in you, you kind of think, oh, well, maybe things are good. I received a phone call from one of the investigators asking me to come and speak with them. Then she opens up a folder, slides a picture across, and says, Do you know him? And I said, yes, is he okay? Wait, wait, wait, that looks like Steve the wrong number, man.

And she says to me, you know earlier when you asked me if his name was Steve, and I said, yeah, he says it's not. His name is Bob, and he's a police officer. Bob Simmonschuk. Robert Salmoncheck. This guy is Simonchuk. Robert Semmichuk. Bob Saminjunk.

I think my biggest problem with the whole thing is what made him choose somebody like me. I was so scared that he was going to come. out and find me and kill me and I didn't end up in a landfill because if he could lie that good I didn't know what he was capable of and that was what I was scared of the most. Mr. Seminochuk, do you have anything you'd like to say to the women? The women were asking how you targeted them. Do you have any answers to give them? Why did you choose those women?

In her defense, season three, breach of trust, coming this fall. I think he overestimated himself and underestimated me. But he only met me when I was at my weakest. He didn't know me when I met my best. So, Jenna, where do things stand with this case right now? Whereabouts is Robert Sevenchuk in his sentence? Yeah, so he's, you know, completed. his period of house arrest. He has a period of completing a conditional sentence, which is a sentence in the community, but he's not under house arrest, and then he'll have a period of probation. So assuming he just follows his conditions and doesn't get into trouble, you know, that's concluded. I gather he's working in construction. There are these two lawsuits, Bridget and Kerry have filed. And other than that, it's kind of over, you know, the,

RPS is putting in their safeguards and trying to deal with it from their side. You know, every Tuesday morning I get texts from women. They're all listening. And I think and I hope that there will be some, I don't love the word closure because I'm not sure it exists. But I think I've been really happy that they are happy to hear their stories heard and to hear their stories taken seriously. You know, to see it out there and have other people. responding and understanding what they went through. One woman told me actually that her own daughter didn't understand it until she started listening to the podcast.

So, yeah, I hope that that's helpful. And I hope they feel really proud of themselves. You know, this was a very hard thing for all of them and, you know, even harder for some who've just had so many struggles. So I think it is a story that will help other women because police officers are listening to it and thinking, hopefully, I don't want a whole podcast made about me. You know, there's this whole accountability piece within police departments. And also from the outside, too, that I think women, if they have an encounter with a police officer that they feel uncomfortable about, that they know that there's a framework and that this is a problem and that they feel uncomfortable. about that they know that there's a framework and that this is a problem and that they should go forward.

Thanks for listening. And special thanks to Jana Pruden for joining us with producer extraordinaire Kasha Mahalovich from The Globe and Mail. You can listen to all seven episodes of In Her Defense Breach of Trust right now. There's links and more information in the show notes or visit canadian truecrime.ca. I hope to get this episode out a little sooner, but as many of you know, my parents were coming to Canada to visit us the first time in 12 years since our youngest was born. Turns out we didn't really think things through with the distance when we first decided to move

here. So we did our family road trip to Quebec City to see the four colours. It was amazing. My parents loved the coffee, but man, that place is windy. They've just flown back to Australia. I'm told they met a couple of you at a cafe in Vancouver just by chance with a little white dog. If you're listening, I hope they didn't tell you any of my embarrassing childhood stories. Anyway, it's bittersweet.

Hug your loved ones closely. Audio editing was by Crosby Audio and Eric Crosby voiced the disclaimer. Our senior producer is Lindsay Aldridge, and the theme song was composed by We Talk of Dreams. I'll be back soon with another Canadian Trouble. True Crime episode. See you then.