Wrongly accused of sex assault, child worker waits for accountability

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It’s been two years since an Oshawa judge acquitted Ashley Jansen of sexually assaulting a student and slammed the police investigation that ruined her life – yet still no one has been held accountable.

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“It’s like having a scarlet letter,” Jansen says. “It’s not like I was accused of stealing a chocolate bar. I was accused of doing something horrendous. I was accused of doing the worst thing you could possibly be accused of.”

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Faced with staggering legal fee debt and suffering from depression, Jansen and her husband Ken tried to sit down with all the players who had wrongly accused her but got nowhere. So they launched a lawsuit, naming Durham Regional Police, the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board and the boy – now an adult – who made what the judge determined were “fabricated or contrived” allegations.

Now Jansen is being persecuted again – the boy’s father filed an “anti-SLAPP” motion that has halted the couple’s legal action for more than a year while he argues that including his son in their lawsuit violates his expression of a matter of public interest.

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Her world fell apart

Jansen’s world fell apart in September 2022 when Children’s Aid came to her door with the shocking news that she was under police investigation and could no longer be trusted alone with her five kids. Three weeks later, police charged her with having intercourse with a troubled 11-year-old student on the last day of class in 2018 – while the Clarington school where she worked as an education assistant was in session.

Charges were laid – and publicized – despite virtually no investigation having been done: the boy’s story changed many times and the investigator never questioned what the judge called “inherent discrepancies” of his story.

“This judgement serves as a cautionary example as to the fact an injustice can occur when appropriate and available investigative steps are not pursued and a criminal prosecution instituted on what is now concluded to be an uncorroborated complaint of criminal misconduct of dubious reliability,” Ontario Court Justice Peter Tetley concluded in November 2023.

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He found that even the most basic of details weren’t checked – the boy claimed the sex happened in a locked room but police never went to the school where they would have seen the door at the time didn’t have a lock; Jansen had a medical condition that would have made intercourse impossible; and colleagues told by the school not to talk to police later testified the boy was “untrustworthy, impulsive, unpredictable, manipulative, and deceitful” and was never left alone with a single staff member because he was considered dangerous and violent.

Judge questioned lack of investigation

The unusual allegations of a sexual assault during school hours “might reasonably have been expected to call for a careful, impartial and comprehensive investigative response,” the judge said.

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“Unfortunately, that did not occur despite the foreseeable consequences of this complaint … Consequences that included a loss of employment, loss of reputation in the community, restrictions on (her) ability to care for her own children, compromises to (her) mental health and physical wellbeing, and marital stress.”

Consequences that continue to this day.

“It crushed her,” her husband Ken says. “She’s a different person, a different wife, a different mother. She’s a shell. She’s taking medication to not kill herself.”

Jansen, 38, is back at work as an alternative care worker assisting children in foster families.

“It’s really unfortunate because I really loved what I did and now I just do it because I have to pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt that I have in legal fees.”

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The couple say they didn’t want to sue – they’re now more than $300,000 in debt – but felt they had no choice if anyone was going to be held accountable.

In their multi-million dollar lawsuit filed in June 2024, their claims – none of which have been proven in court – include damages for malicious prosecution and negligent investigation.

Now they’re out of pocket another $100,000 to fight the motion by the boy’s father to have the claim against him dismissed. A decision is expected next month.

“There’s not an amount of money that is going to settle the brokenness inside me. It’s not going to settle the lack of trust and the anxiety that I have every day in the outside world,” Jansen says.

“I honestly couldn’t tell you what I want at the end of this, except for answers and an apology or acknowledgement that they made mistakes and this wouldn’t happen to someone else,” she says.

“I’m lucky I lived through this,” Jansen says softly. “I’ve seen my darkest days, I’ve seen the days when I didn’t want to be here anymore or didn’t want to wake up.”

And the real victim here continues to be victimized, all these years later.

mmandel@postmedia.com

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