By Chelsey St-Pierre
The Suburban
John Abbott College (JAC) is at the centre of a lawsuit that was filed by a former student who was sexually assaulted in 2021 on the school’s campus. The student is seeking $600,000 in moral and punitive damages as well as the loss of future income. She stated that she needed to drop out of school as a direct result of the sexual assault committed by a supervisor of a volunteer program in connection with a psychology course that she was enrolled in three years ago. The student also claims that she was not able to pursue the career that she was studying towards.
The program supervisor Boris Stanley Paredes, aged 61 years old at present, pleaded guilty to sexual assault at the Montreal courthouse on September 3. As part of his sentence, he will receive a conditional discharge for a three-year period of unsupervised probation. The conditions include 240 hours of community service to be served by the half-point of his probation.
The assailant sexually assaulted the student when she was just 17 years old. A publication ban was placed on the identity of the victim. The lawsuit states that Paredes was an employee of the defendant, namely John Abbott College, since 1999. The victim’s lawyer, Jeff Orenstein, wrote that John Abbott’s insurer replied to a letter stating that Paredes was not employed by the school.
Also employed at the West Montreal Readaptation Centre based in Lachine, Paredes was running a program in connection to JAC as a supervisor of a “buddy” volunteer program through which the student was able to work with adults with special needs in order to produce journal logs to be submitted for one of her classes. He also had a JAC e-mail address and phone number assigned to him. The program took place in the Penfield section of the John Abbott College campus. The special needs participants were transported to the school campus. Student participants were paired with one of the guests. Together they would complete tasks such as cleaning, putting up posters and going for walks while the student would take notes in order to produce a report for a class offered at the school.
According to the lawsuit, a friendly relationship developed between Parades and the young victim. The two would often engage in conversation when the special needs visitors would leave for the day. “While defendant Paredes did not do anything overtly inappropriate, he would often comment on the plaintiff’s body and tell her that she was very beautiful. Defendant Paredes also stated that he knew how to give “pressure-point massages to relieve stress/anxiety and that he had performed this on other volunteers, as well as some of his special-needs clients.”
The victim explained to the courts that Paredes gave her three pressure-point massages while she was seated in a chair and that they appeared to her to have been done professionally. On the day that she was sexually assaulted in November 2021, the victim stated that she was feeling upset about a family matter when she entered Paredes’s office. “Different than the other occasions, defendant Paredes locked his office door, dimmed the lights, put on some music, cleared off his desk and told the Plaintiff to lie down on her back. He (then) began his ‘pressure-point massage’ on the plaintiff’s head, neck, arms and stomach. He then proceeded to massage the student’s buttocks for 15 minutes and breasts for between 30 and 45 minutes. When he was done, defendant Paredes said to the plaintiff things like ‘I can tell that you’re a girl that can’t say no’ and ‘if anything else would have happened, you might not have been able to stop it’, the lawsuit alleged.
In the weeks following the attack, the student would only allow herself to be in the presence of Paredes while taking part in the volunteer program and ensuring that another person was present. She did not immediately establish contact with police authorities to report the incident, however one of her friends informed the chair of the John Abbott College Sexual Assault Resource Team. According to the chair, it met with the student for five hours and prepared a statement that was filed to the Montreal police in December 2021. A warrant for Parades’s arrest was issued, only 10 months later, on Oct. 14, 2022. The chair also made arrangements for the student to consult a psychiatrist, but according to the lawsuit she eventually dropped out of school and attempted suicide.
The claims of responsibility made against John Abbott College and the readaptation centre have not been proven in a court of law to date. The guilty plea of the assailant, however, has been entered.