Facebook, Inc. v. Guerbuez et al

Filing 14

Declaration of P. Wayne Hale in Support of 13 Notice (Other) filed byFacebook, Inc.. (Attachments: # 1 Exhibit A, # 2 Exhibit B, # 3 Exhibit C, # 4 Exhibit D, # 5 Exhibit E, # 6 Exhibit F, # 7 Exhibit G, # 8 Exhibit H, # 9 Exhibit I, # 10 Exhibit J, # 11 Exhibit K, # 12 Exhibit L, # 13 Exhibit M, # 14 Exhibit N, # 15 Exhibit O)(Related document(s) 13 ) (Hale, Peter) (Filed on 11/10/2008)

EXHIBIT H

Montreal Mirror - The Front Page : Exploitation

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ARCHIVES: Sep 18-24.2003

Vol. 19 No. 14

This issue...

Slapstick gone wrong
>> Local video featuring attacks on the homeless is condemned by police and social workers
by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR A Montreal company that makes and sells videos of people gleefully assaulting local vagrants and persuading them to perform humiliating acts is not only exploitative but is also breaking the law, say local social workers and police. The 90-minute Crazypricks Disturbing the Peace has - according to its creator Adam Guerbuez - sold over "2,000 to 3,000 copies a month" since its June release and was created in conjunction with a Web site that shows other such material to 9,000 paid subscribers who get to see updates every two weeks. The video, which was taped over the last two years, features scenes of two young men with shaved heads dousing unsuspecting vagrants and drug addicts with a liquid. Other sequences feature the men slapping a homeless man, marginals being paid to urinate on passing vehicles, flash their nude bodies on crowded streets, inject various substances and participate in brutal fights. A free sample of the stunts, played to the racist-skinhead anthem "Over the Top" by Bound for Glory (featuring the lyrics "Our time is coming to revolt and cleanse our

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once-Aryan lands"), is available on the site www.crazypricks.com.

Law and disorder
"It's disgusting. I'm disturbed, to say the least," said veteran downtown beat cop John Parker, who was informed about the video by the Mirror and watched the sample. "I don't know what kind of person gets a thrill out of this sort of thing, probably the same type who would torture animals or something. What kind of thrill is it to slap somebody who can't defend himself in the face? It takes a brave man to throw a drink on a man who is sleeping; I wonder if there was an able-bodied football player, would they do the same thing? These are definitely cowardly acts." The video could also lead to criminal charges. "It's illegal. Anytime you throw something in somebody's face, it's an assault. If you give somebody some money to throw something, that's assault too," he says. Parker says the police plan to try to identify the people involved in the videotaped attacks. Guerbuez, however, defends his product. "I could say it's a bit hardcore, but if I ever found out anything isn't legal, I wouldn't put it on." He says he didn't participate in the "milkings" (dousing unsuspecting people with liquids) but that he solicited the footage from others he met on an online chat group who performed the feats and mailed him the tape. "We thought it was pretty hardcore. These guys went out of their way to impress us, so what are we going to do, disregard it? Pretend we never got it?"

Nothing too awful
Guerbuez, who says he had put $10,000 into the video and Web site, was acquitted last year for his involvement in an assault that led to the death of a man in 2000. He had been a longtime participant in racistskinhead groups, although no more, he claims. "I have no time for that" these days, says the self-described businessman. He even says that he's able to empathize with those victimized by his video pranks. "I'm not made of stone. I feel bad for some of the stuff I've seen. But what do I do, do I hide it just because it bothers me? If it moves me, I want to show the world that this has emotion - that's essentially what the nightly news does. "There's one scene I found funny. One guy is standing there dressed really nice and they get him [douse him with a liquid] and the reaction on his face was priceless. I felt bad for him. He looked like, `What's going on?' If it was me, I'd be pissed off. But this guy just had the saddest look on his face."

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Guerbuez says his favourite scenes involve paying desperately poor people to perform for his camera. "What cracks me up is getting the bums to go into the street and strip. We went out on St-Denis at prime time, when the clubs were packed, and paid a guy 20 bucks to moon the Bar Picasso. He pulled out his shlong and let his dick hang out." In another scene, "We went in front of the Eaton Centre and got a squeegee kid to urinate on a driver's windshield while a girl gets on top of the car buck naked." Guerbuez acknowledges that one scene elicited many complaints from the usually faithful. "There's a bum fight showing people getting a beating. One guy bleeds pretty bad, and these other vagrants end up bleeding on each other - we got a lot of people talking about that one." The operation hit a snag last week when Probilling, the company that processes the transactions of the sales of the video, cut ties with the company. "Their exact words were: `We cannot continue to approve transactions coming from Crazypricks.' I think they're just pussies," Guerbuez says.

Human nature at its finest
Not surprisingly, the news of the video featuring the unauthorized participation of many of our local downtrodden has saddened Father Robert Warren, who runs the Old Brewery Mission. "This sort of treatment of helpless individuals might be true human nature at play. Maybe treating people with love and dignity is something you have to cultivate through education," he says. "Maybe it's natural to crush the weak and push them away. Maybe that's a surprise to the liberal West, that we have to learn to have a modicum of compassion for somebody you're not automatically connected to." The Crazypricks video apes the oft-condemned Bumfights, an American video promoted on the Internet that features vagrants fighting each other. The video, which has reportedly sold at least 300,000 copies, is justified by co-founder Ray Laticia as an attempt to "parody the public's general perception of the homeless as subhuman" and "create awareness of the epidemic of poverty, addiction, violence and lack of education." In an e-mail note, Laticia describes the Crazypricks sample video as "the worst thing I have ever seen. No creativity, no editing savvy, no redeeming value, nothing original, just plain mean, stupid and unfunny. They suck."

One more humiliation
Retired Montreal cop John Gauthier says that prosecuting those who abuse marginal and street people might be a difficult task for investigators even with video evidence, because some vagrants might not be lucid enough to testify in court. "The street people walk away from something like this and it'll be just another scar or coffee stain on their coat," he says. "Half of these people probably don't realize they're being assaulted. They deserve equal justice. They're human beings, not animals. Indeed, if they were animals they'd probably get

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more respect." One apparently mentally disturbed man frequently seen downtown was informed of his appearance in the video but refused to believe it. "No, I wasn't in any video," he said repeatedly.

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