James Bowie takes stand, admits to tracking and following woman, denies scaring her | CBC News
Suspended Ottawa lawyer James Bowie, taking the stand in his own defence at his criminal trial Tuesday, admitted that he twice placed a GPS tracker on a woman’s car and used it to follow her after she’d stopped communicating with him.
But, he denied that he made her feel unsafe, had ever threatened her, asked her to obtain a firearm for him, or made threats to kill his ex-client Leanne Aubin.
Bowie has pleaded not guilty to charges of harassing the woman — who had been a close friend — and trying to get her to obtain a firearm for him, as well as uttering threats to kill Aubin to her. She cannot be identified because of a publication ban.
Under examination-in-chief by defence lawyer Eric Granger on Tuesday, Bowie said the woman was the “closest person” in his life around the time Aubin had made her sex-for-services allegations against Bowie public in the media and to the Law Society of Ontario.
Bowie testified he was under surveillance by private investigators, that the woman had said she had experience with surveillance, and that they would meet to discuss it. When they were together, he said, they would test out devices and he said he gave her some gadgets.
Promise of ‘smoking gun’ caused him to follow her
He also testified that the woman had “significant involvement” in conducting surveillance and counter-surveillance for him.
He said she’d attended events that Aubin and Aubin’s new lawyer Michael Spratt had also attended, and that the woman told him she had “smoking gun” evidence that Aubin and Spratt were having an affair and “orchestrating” a campaign against him together.
It was Bowie’s desire for the woman to keep her promise to hand over this evidence — which he believed would help him fight the accusations against him — that had caused him to track and follow the woman, call her from different phone numbers, call her former workplace and send her texts after she stopped responding to him in the spring of 2023, he testified.
Bowie said he was suicidal and despondent. In one message to her, he wrote that it was “rock bottom” for him.
Another message asked her to let him know if she wanted to “call it quits.”
Asked by Granger what he meant, Bowie said: “I know the law. I’m a lawyer. I know that this approaches the facts out of cases I have seen, and I’m being cautious, as much as I can — although I admit to following her — that if she just wants to be done here she can say the word, at any time. But she’s telling me the opposite.”
‘Nothing about my existence is threatening’
Under cross-examination by assistant Crown attorney Kerry Watson, Bowie said it was correct that he messaged the woman: “Would you rather talk here or do I need to find you again?” but he denied it was a threat.
“Nothing about my existence is threatening. I don’t accept that as a threat,” he testified.
She testified last week that she was convinced Bowie could harm her, and that she continues to fear him.
Later in cross, Bowie said that chronic insomnia, severe depression and poor mental health is “incredibly normal” for him, and that he’d been angry at times but never toward the woman.
“I don’t believe I did or said anything … to give [the woman] some impression that I had flipped a switch and become some sort of violent psychopath, and there’s nothing in the evidence to suggest that.
“Was I motivated to do something that heretofore I never would have contemplated doing in the form of placing a GPS device on my friend’s car? Yes. But I didn’t do that out of anger, and I certainly didn’t cause fear in [the woman]. [She] had nothing to fear from me, nor has she ever had anything to fear.
“I do my best to remain stoic. I’m generally a stoic person. If she believes it was a descent into darkness for me to believe what she told me and act on what she told me … well, that is something I can reflect on, isn’t it?”
The trial continues.
