The Decibel - He preyed on women using a police database. Then they found out

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

For years, Sgt. Robert Semenchuk, a Regina police officer, preyed on hundreds of vulnerable women using information from police databases. He often posed as a contractor named Jay or Steve and sent seemingly wrong-number texts to women. Some of these texts led to intimate relationships. The women had no idea he was deceiving them, until one woman became suspicious.This case is the focus of the new season of In her Defence: Breach of Trust. Globe feature writer Jana Pruden is the host of the podcast. She’s on the show to talk about the women that came forward to hold Semenchuk accountable, and what it tells us about how law enforcement agencies in Canada are policing themselves.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Because even in the beginning, I was like, yeah, I like to meet you, but this is kind of really weird. I felt like it was weird, just meeting somebody over a wrong number. Bridget Sear got a text message from a man, apparently by accident, a wrong number text. It's just very unusual. He's like, yeah, but maybe it's fate. And I was like, maybe, but... Or maybe you're just a creep. and Bridget wasn't alone. 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 I was, I decided to respond. And it just snowballed from there where, Oh, I hope I didn't message a child.

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 was like, I'm in Regina. Where are you?

Weird, because I'm in Regina, too. He could have been from anywhere. This man was texting a number of women in the same way. Sometimes he went by Jay. Other times he was Steve. And sometimes this texting evolved into intimate relationships. But those wrong number texts? It was a fake story.

The man these women were speaking to was actually a police officer. And he used police databases to find them, over 200 women in total. This story and the court case that came out of it is told in the new season of it, of in her defense, breach of trust. It's the Globe and Mail's acclaimed true crime podcast, hosted by Globe feature writer Jana Pruden.

Today, Jana will tell us about the women who came forward to hold this man accountable, and what this case tells us about police abuse of power in Canada. I'm Manika Ramon-Welms, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Jenna, really appreciate you being here. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me on.

So this story that you tell in this new season of In Her Defense, this actually began with something that you heard from a friend. Can you tell us how did this start? Yeah, this story started for me early in 2023 when a good friend of mine, Carrie Benjo, sent me a message on Facebook. And she said she'd been keeping a low profile on social media, but that if I wanted to hear a sordid story about the Regina Police Service, I should let her know. Carrie and I worked together at the Regina Leader Post. She's a journalist, a very well-known person in Regina, and we'd stayed in touch all these years. I've known her more than 20 years. She's currently the editor-in-chief of Eagle Feather News in Regina.

So I obviously did want to hear this story, and I said yes, and she proceeded to tell me a story that shocked me, that disturbed me, and that ultimately became season three of In Her Defense. Wow. And this story that she told you, I believe it actually goes back to 2018, right? This happened a few years ago. What happened to Carrie then? Yeah. So at that time, Carrie was living in a women's shelter.

She'd fled an abusive relationship and she'd fled with virtually nothing, just her daughter and the clothes on her back. And in the shelter, using a new phone, brand new number, she gets a text from someone that says something like, hey man, how you doing? And Carrie is alone. She's in this really difficult situation. And she responds with something jokey. And the person responds.

And a conversation starts. And the person, she would come to know as Jay Lewis, a construction contractor. And it started with this text relationship. that became a friendship, and then at a certain point they met in person. And this relationship, it spanned on the outside five years that included, at times, an intimate, in-person relationship, but also this very close friendship that she says at times that he was one of the most important people in her life of really important support for her. Then early in 2023, they hadn't seen each other for a while, and Carrie was really rebuilding her life. She was back at work. Her health was much better after some serious health problems that arose out of the abuse. Jay gets back in touch and they make plans to meet, but he doesn't show up.

And when he doesn't show up, she kind of asks him why. She was really busy. She made time for him. And he swears at her. He says, this is through text then. Through text. He says, my dad was in the effin hospital. And Carrie just automatically notices because coming out of abuse, she's very attuned to the moods of men, to the anger of men, to her ex used to swear at her all the time.

And that's one thing she had noticed about Jay was that he never swore. So she really notices this. And there's a moment. I think it's truly a light bulb moment where she thinks, what do I actually know about this guy? Okay, so Kara gets this weird feeling about him at this point. What does she do about that? Yeah, so she has one picture of him and she puts it into this facial recognition service that she saw on TikTok. And it comes back with one hit.

And it unveils a picture where there's a police officer she knows from the Regina Police Service. and he's sitting beside this person that she knows as Jay. And she can see that there's a Regina Police Service jacket hanging in the background. She then contacts someone else she knows in the police service and says, do you know this person in the picture? And that person ultimately tells her, yeah, that's Bob Semenchuk. Wow. He's a sergeant with the Regina Police Service.

When she has his name, she talks to another person that she knows that has a lot of police contacts and a lot of knowledge about the police. And then the two of them start to put it together this timing, that this, what appeared to be a wrong number text, arrives a couple of weeks after Carrie files a police report around domestic violence. So what exactly does that tell her then? Or what is she suspecting? That really raises the question, did he find her information from a domestic violence police report? So what does she do after that point when she's starting to connect the dots here? Yeah. So that's around the time that we start talking about this case.

And she didn't understand who this guy was, why he would do that. You know, there was this profound. sense of betrayal, but also real fear. Carries an indigenous woman. Bob is a white police officer. Missing murdered indigenous women is obviously a very big issue on the prairies. And she was really scared. And a big choice that she made in that period was to go forward to the police and file a complaint.

So, yeah, so her complaint leads to this internal police investigation. Through that investigation, what do they end up discovering about what Semmichuk was doing? Investigators start to look into Bob's use of the computer systems, who he's looking up. He was working in auto theft at the time. And pretty quickly, they identify a pattern that he's looking up a lot of women, a lot of women, middle-aged women, not typically who you see, suspects and a lot of auto theft. and people who haven't had a lot of interaction with the police before. So they're noticing when they go and audit some of his searches that it's really unexpected and he's not doing the kinds of searches that they expect to see.

So at some point, relatively quickly, once they can see that there's inappropriate searches taking place, Bob is suspended and taken off the job. And police then embark on a much broader investigation that they've told me, the investigators have told me far bigger than they could have imagined. How big? Well, in a notebook that they find in Bob's desk, they find 200 to 250 names of women. 250 names. Wow. Yes. This is new information that was not presented in court, actually.

Ultimately, the case goes to court with 24 women and then later rises to 33. But in this notebook, there's 200 to 250 names, and police investigators begin trying to track down all of them. We'll be right back. So this is huge. Once this internal investigation starts, they realize the scale of this. And we know Carrie's story, Janet, because we've just walked through what happened to her with this wrong number text and this eventual relationship. Do we know how Semenchuk was targeting these other women? Yes.

in the vast majority of cases, it's in the same manner. Texts saying things like, hey, Rick, are you still doing drywall? And it's interesting, you know, when I first started looking into the women, and I was looking for what are the commonalities between the women, and there are a number of commonalities. But one of them is that they're very nice. They're all the kind of women who would let you know if you got the wrong number. And so many of these women that I've spoken to that are part of the podcast would respond and let him know you have the wrong number.

And in many cases, chatting would begin. And as it did with Carrie, at some point, turn into intimate sexual relationships, meeting in person, sometimes just for coffee and sometimes for ongoing sexual contact and sharing of intimate images, things of that sort. And what did the women tell you about what this was like him contacting them, chatting with him over text? Because I think, you know, some people might say, this is kind of strange. She had a text from a stranger, right? And then have this lead to a meeting and a relationship. Did this raise red flags for them? Yeah, you know, I'm glad to raise that because I think it's easy for people to think, oh, yeah, that's obviously weird.

That's obviously creepy. But it also seemed, you know, it's like kismet or it's like fate or it's like a thing that. happens in a romantic comedy. And also in some cases where women became suspicious, there's one of the women, Sherry, told me a story about, she had a friend who thought she maybe recognized him or something. And when she asked about that, the guy she knew as Steve was like, you know what, if you're not a trusting person, this isn't going to go anywhere. So that's the end. And immediately, you know, it made her feel like she was being distrustful or she was being paranoid. And so she said, no, no, no, you know, and they continued. So I think all of them knew it was weird and they knew

that it was unusual, but also, you know, maybe that's a wonder. Maybe that's the story that you're telling at your wedding, right? I mean, in a way, it's, it's romantic. It feels like it could be fate. So who is this man, Robert Semenchuk? What do we actually know about him? You know, I've spent the last almost four years trying to answer that question. There is basic biographical information that we know. We know he was a sergeant at the Regina Police Service. He worked there for about 20 years. We know that before Kerry went forward, he was married, has two kids.

People who worked with him, I still have a lot of contacts at the Regina Police Service. I worked as a reporter in Regina for seven years. But nobody really seemed to know him or nobody really seemed to know him well. He was described as someone who was pretty quiet and kept to himself. He is a little bit of a black box. Jenna, let's look at the big issue here, which seems to revolve around this idea really of police abuse of power. We know this man, Robert Semmenschach, got into contact with these women by using a police database. And I think we need to understand a little bit about how this system works.

What kind of information is actually available on this kind of database? I think people would be really surprised at how much information is on these police databases. And of course, that's not new. But in like every aspect of our world, the technology has become more and more powerful. And that has allowed for so much more information about each individual person. So, you know, a police officer explained to me, for instance, that you could see a woman with a dolphin tattoo. And there's a good chance that you might be able to find her from her tattoo. Wow, that's powerful.

Yes. You know, obviously phone numbers, license plates, addresses. If, you know, you ever had someone in your family that had a problem, potentially your link to that file. Medical records are often part of, you know, requested by police if you've been a victim of something that. that caused bodily harm. There's another woman, Bridget Sear, she recounted to me this very powerful realization she had when she realized that childhood sexual assault records

would also beat in your record. So when you think of that kind of power imbalance, that kind of knowledge imbalance, it's quite significant. And nearly all of the women, if not all, that I have spoken to do have in their history, a history of being victimized in sexual trauma or domestic violence or mental health problems

or other really significant issues that they were dealing with that in nearly all of the cases would have been in their file. Could this be part of a bigger problem, Jana? Like, could other police officers also be doing something similar and misusing the database in this way? Police officers are misusing the database this way. We know that.

This was something that I have found really shocking since 2023 when Carrie and I first started talking. And I started, I made some Google news alerts around breach of trust, specifically around the use of power and the use of this information to manipulate women into sex, in some cases to prey on women for sex. And there are cases happening across the country at big departments and small. It is not only Robert Seminchuk, it is not only the Regina Police Service. And even if it's only a small percentage of officers, which we're told that it is, the effects of it are huge. And the effects are not only on the victims of these crimes, very scary, also on the police departments themselves. I can tell you I've spoke to, I believe, six. chiefs of police in the course of this work. And they do not want this to be happening. It makes

their jobs way more difficult. It plays a huge role in eroding the trust of the public. So there's a lot of questions about what's going on, why is it going on, and also what can be done to stop it. Do we know the scale of this problem? How many incidents of this misuse are actually happening here? Since I set up those Google News alerts, I've compiled at least 30 cases and many of them extremely disturbing cases. For instance, officers, you know, getting involved in sexually preying on victims of sex trafficking, cases involving teenagers or children, at least three cases where officers have shared pictures of naked women in medical distress or eclos. or even dead. Really disturbing stuff that I think every person would be worried about. And, you know, I think another thing that is really important to note about these databases

is that if you have ever been a victim, you're in there, if you've ever been an accused, you're in there. But also if you've ever just gotten a police check, you're in there. Has anything changed since this case, like to make sure that police are not misusing this kind of information? You know, individual departments are making changes. The Regina Police Service now has a random audit process. The Ottawa Police Jeep, there was a video that went viral. It was even picked up on TMZ, an internal video he made for his police officers telling them you cannot use, you know, you cannot pull over women, run their license plates, pull them over on a traffic stop because you want to get to meet them.

There's a number of cases in Ottawa. So chiefs are taking it seriously. So there is obviously an internal piece to it. And then I think there's a secondary piece, which is what can be done in the technology to ensure that it's not misused. And when we look at the power of AI, I think that that's where some of these companies should be investing time and effort to catch patterns to catch improper use of the databases. So, Jenna, after all of this happened, there was, of course, a court case. Seminchuk was charged. He was charged with one count of breach of trust, one count of unauthorized use of a computer.

He pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to a two-year conditional sentence in the community with six months of house arrest. Given the scale of what these women went through and what he was doing here, I guess what does it say to you that the consequences appear to be relatively minor? Yeah, certainly the women that I spoke to were not happy with this outcome. It was a joint submission. It was a plea bargain. So both the Crown and the defense agreed that this was an appropriate punishment. And I think the broader question that it raises is really, is this only a breach of trust? You know, breach of trust can apply to all kinds of misuse of. authority, including, say, someone claiming too many expenses or, you know, a police officer

stealing drugs or something like that. It's a really wide-ranging thing, then. Very wide-ranging, yes. And so, you know, one of them, the key questions that's come out from the women and sort of in our reporting is, is this a sexual assault? You know, they all say that they consented at the time. But as one of the women said to me, you know, I consented to have a sexual relationship with a divorced contractor named Steve, not with a married police officer named Robert Semenchuk. So many of them do feel that they were sexually assaulted, that they were stalked, that they weren't able to properly give consent to someone where he knew everything about them, and they didn't know anything about him.

Jenna, of course, you're a feature writer for the Globe, right? You mostly write for the paper, but you've looked at the story and you knew it was a podcast and you've done a podcast on this now. What was it about this story and these women's stories that made you want to do it in this form? I had this day where I interviewed, I think, five or maybe six women in one day, one after the other. Everyone was getting back to me because I'd sent out all of these messages in one day. So, you know, I say that it was one of the most intense days I've ever had. the job. It might be one of the most intense days I've ever had as a person. It was so profound to hear these women one after the other tell these stories that mirrored each other so profound.

Honestly, I get like goosebumps, even as I'm saying it, to hear this pattern repeating over and over and over again. And also to hear the women in their own voices, in their own lived experiences with their own things that they were dealing with, that day, I was like, this has to be a podcast because people have to hear from these women directly. I want people to hear their voices and I want them to hear it straight from them. And it's very powerful to hear one after the other. And like you say, the similar stories, the mirroring of those details, it's really quite something. Yeah. And I do just want to make it super clear. These women did not know each other. And yet they're telling stories that are so repetitive that we can knit them together into a continuous narrative seamlessly.

What does Sim and Chuck said about all this, Jana? He has not spoken. I have followed him down the street multiple times now with a microphone and he has not spoken to me. I did send a letter which he has not responded to in asking him if he wanted to speak. in court, we heard that from a pre-sentence report, that he didn't really understand himself why he did this, but that he believed it to be tied to some mental health conditions he's been diagnosed with since he was charged. That's PTSD, anxiety, depression, and obsessive compulsive disorder. He did make a very brief apology in court, which was that he apologizes for everyone who is, was, you know, affected or harmed by his actions and that he's truly sorry. It wasn't much more than that. So that's all that I have heard him say so far.

And the women who have been victimized here, how do they understand all of that? I think it's fair to say that that apology didn't mean much to them. Two of the women, Carrie and Bridget, have proceeded with lawsuits against him. Part of the lawsuit is the allegation that these were non-consensual sexual acts. So that is just that part of the process is just starting and we'll see where that goes as it moves forward. Janet, this is quite a story. Thank you so much for all your reporting here and for taking the time to be here today. Thank you so much for your interest and for having me on.

That was Jana Pruden, a feature writer for the Globe based in Edmonton and host of the In Her Defense podcast. That's it for today. I'm Manica Ram and Wilms. This episode was mixed by Rachel Levy McLaughlin. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, Rachel Levy McLaughlin, and Michal Stein. Our editor is David Crosby.

Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you. next week.