‘I’m obsessed with the truth’ says CMR owner

(CNS): Sandra Hill (née Catron), the owner of the mixed-media website Cayman Marl Road, returned to the dock Thursday to face harassment charges, when she told the court that her “obsession was with the truth” and not local businessman Matthew Leslie. Hill is accused of deliberately targeting Leslie with unpleasant allegations in a podcast and posts on CMR that fall foul of the law.

But Hill has denied the charges, claiming that everything said about Leslie on her site is true and in the public interest. The CMR owner stated several times while on the witness stand that she was surprised she was facing criminal charges over the issue because she believed that this was not a criminal matter but a civil one.

She pointed out that if Leslie had a problem with the podcast or anything else written about him, he could have brought a defamation case that would have been argued in a civil court. Hill said the truth would then have been her defence.

However, the court has held that in this case the truth of the allegations against Leslie are not relevant, only whether Hill genuinely believed them to be true or that she intentionally targeted Leslie for harassment.

Under cross-examination by crown counsel Darllene Oko, Hill repeatedly said that she believed for decades that Leslie had been both a con man when it comes to business dealings and a sexual predator, leaving a stream of victims in his wake. And even though he has never been convicted of any financial or sexual crimes, Hill said that this was because many of his victims were too frightened to come forward.

Hill said the decision to do a compilation podcast on what she believed to be the many allegations about Leslie that stretch back some twenty years came after the documentary, Surviving R-Kelly.

In that three-part series a number of women recounted allegations that they were victims of the popular artist’s sexual assaults. Kelly has denied the allegations and to date has not been charged in connection with the many accusations.

Hill said it was common in the media for women to be able to tell their stories about being victims of sexual predators, even if the person they were accusing had not been convicted.

However, Hill’s podcast did not feature any interviews with victims. It was based on what she said were messages and accounts she had heard as well as other bits of evidence that have merged via social media and other sources.

During cross-examination Hill denied being motivated to harass Leslie but said she felt there was a public interest in warning people about how he operates. Asked about why she had chosen to go so far back into his past, Hill said that it was about establishing a pattern of behaviour.

Oko asked about Hill’s insistence that Leslie had been fired from the RCIPS under a cloud over a scandal involving police officers sexually assaulting women in custody. Leslie had said on the witness stand that it was his boss, not him, that had faced those allegations, but Hill said he was lying.

She said he had given an Oscar-winning performance on the stand and prosecutors had fallen for it without checking out his story. She, on the other hand, had spoken with the actual investigators on the case at the time and they told a very different story from the one Leslie had fed the crown, she said.

Hill spoke about the CMR website and her podcasts as “trying to expose what was going on in the underbelly of Cayman”, but accepted that as well as the news there was an element of gossip.

She said that CMR always said it was 97% accurate because no news media is ever completely right all of the time. However, she denied just taking things at face value and never checking or investigating allegations and said CMR did its best to verify what it could.

She also denied pushing only her view of Leslie and blocking any other opinion. Hill said she blocked people who refused to tell the truth about him and claimed that the only defence ever offered by people for the allegations made against Leslie was to bash her for exposing them.

She said that what she did on the site “was not harassment”, as the crown has alleged, but “newsworthy” stories that were in the public interest and could help warn the community about sexual predators.

The case continues.