This is Bambi meets The Deer Hunter.
Everywhere one looks in the documents of the case, there are does. There is Jane Doe, who is the plaintiff. There is (I am not making this up) Little Jane Doe, who is Jane's child, or, one might say, fawn. There is John Doe, who is Jane's former lover and who here is one of the defendants.
Little Jane's identity is protected because she is a minor, now nine years old.
Jane's identity is protected because she was once a victim of sexual abuse by her now-deceased husband and is here the alleged victim of John's alleged abuse.
John is protected because Mr. Justice Blenus Wright of the Ontario Superior Court recently ruled that naming him could be embarrassing, which is an interesting threshold for granting anonymity and would, if universally applied, surely result in virtually everyone associated with a court case being similarly known as a Doe, because what is court if not embarrassing?
Frankly, any association with this case is downright humiliating, such that I believe the judge should have insisted he be called Judge Doe and the byline on this column should read Jistie Doe.
"Next time," Jane's lawyer, Barry Swadron, said in an aside outside court yesterday, "I'm going to ask that they be named Ray Me." He paused, then mentioned a familiar ditty and said, "You know, Doe, Ray, Me."
Somewhere at the bottom of the case, there is a serious issue: Jane is suing John, a federal immigration officer, and his employer, Immigration Canada, for $1-million, alleging that in the course of arresting her then-illegal-immigrant husband four years ago (the man was eventually deported to his native Guyana and, some short time later, killed himself), John took advantage of her by having a sexual affair with her, and that Immigration Canada was negligent and breached its fiduciary duty to her.
John has admitted the sexual affair, but cast it as consensual and wholly non-abusive, and government lawyers have argued that the case is about nothing more than two people who had a short-lived relationship, that Jane is out to ruin John, and that none of it has anything to do with the government.
However the serious issue is ultimately resolved, it was difficult yesterday to remember there is one, let alone that it ever got to trial.
"Mr. Doe, I told you about that incident," Jane snapped at one point from the witness box, where John, who is representing himself, was cross-examining her, and from which positions they merrily quarrelled away the afternoon like a long-married couple.
"You did not!" John barked.
"Yes I did!" Jane shrieked.
"You did not!" John shrieked even more loudly, before adding, "Very good. I'll move on."
Or how about this illuminating exchange, wherein Mr. Doe revealed the true nature of the federal bureaucracy, which, as John has acknowledged, is not only faceless, but on occasion pantless.
He was questioning Jane about a message she claimed to have left at an immigration office one Saturday night.
"Ms. Doe," said John, his disbelief evident on his mobile face, "this was a government office you're calling, late at night. Did you expect someone to be there?"
And when Jane replied that early that same morning, "I did speak to someone there," John sneered knowingly, "No one would have been there."
As for the glamour of the illicit affair, how about this?
John: "Ms. Doe, you remember you gave me two love letters dated Aug. 7 and Aug. 8, 2001?"
Jane: "I don't remember the dates."
John: "You don't remember me reading them to you in the car, in the daylight, when we were parked at Tim Hortons?"
Or, for further evidence of the exciting life of the dilly-dallying couple, consider this.
John was questioning Jane about an assignation at a motel later that August. "Ms. Doe, isn't it true," he demanded in his best Clarence Darrow/Clarence Leg Horn imitation, "that we took my car and left your car at the flea market?"
"Correct," said Jane.
He moved next to a movie they saw together on Aug. 31 that year, and went for the coup de grace, "And isn't it true that we left the movie early because you were making sexual advances to me in the theatre and I was uncomfortable and thought it was inappropriate?"
"I didn't know I was with a choir boy," Jane replied.
In the course of attempting to prove that he could not, would not, have called Jane at certain times on a certain day, John introduced into evidence two dated, timed receipts from Canadian Tire and Just Lubes, where, as he noted smartly, "I had an oil change on my car."
How could he, John snorted, have phoned her when he "was out with my wife at Canadian Tire . . . and then went to school to pick up my kids to take them to Harvey's," which was a first-day-of-school tradition? He asked this, incidentally, the way that lawyers, having built up to the smoking-gun question, will cry, "And didn't you then take the knife and plunge it into Bill's back?"
But lo, these are the civil courts, and Jane replied primly, "Well, Mr. Doe, I can tell you I was in Sherway Gardens when you called."
Ahhhhh, who doesn't recall the excitement of the illicit affair: A coffee at the local Tim's; a quickie at a motel; a murmured call between trips to the Canadian Tire and Harvey's with the kids?
John's final question yesterday was a hummer: "Isn't it true, Ms. Doe, that you knew from the very beginning that I was a happily married man?"
"Absolutely not, Mr. Doe," said Jane.
It put me to mind what the comedian Chris Rock, who will host the Oscars, once said about former U.S. president Bill Clinton: "Clinton damn near got impeached and for what? He lied about a blow job so his wife wouldn't find out. . . . Do you need the Supreme Court for that?"