injusticebusters 1999 > > Martensville: Marketing the Shame (A review of Frann Harris' book)

A living scrapbook of injustices in progress and the tools to set them right
Restoring reputations to the defamed -- Telling the truth about the undefamable

2005; Year of the David Milgaard Inquiry: 35 years in the making!

Martensville still in the news in 2006 as prosecutors continue to defend their malicious acts

Archives 1999

Marketing Martensville

Frann Harris's book is called Martensville: Truth or Justice. The title signals her confusion; since when are truth and justice mutually exclusive? There is little understanding of either in Harris's book which contains embarrassing anecdotes from her own past intended to show just how empathetic and understanding she is but instead revealing a shallow, sheltered mind. Harris stays in the shallows and although she keeps promising to check out deeper water, she never even gets her ankles wet. Instead she contemplates horrors that never happened, flashes back to examples from her own past and reveals . . .guess what! We live in a society where abuse of many kinds is as common as house dirt and some people, like Harris herself and Claudia Bryden whom she greatly admires, choose to make their livings by exploiting their own past victimization.

Anyone who sat in that courtroom for T.S.'s trial could see that Steven and Curtis were lying. Everyone that is except Frann Harris and Judge Albert Lavoie.

Harris writes of her own mundane brushes with abuse in hush hush tones which suggest she is disclosing the tip of some iceberg too unspeakable to approach. She mirrors and panders to the justice community and the general population of Saskatchewan: her projected readership. Saskatchewan people lap up innuendo but rarely confront the facts regarding anything to do with sex. Coyness is one medium that runs deep in this province! With our mother's milk we learn the code. There are many other places where truly frank discussion is discouraged, but in Saskatchewan we quickly learn that the only way to speak about sex is to chastise and ostracize those who do. Saskatchewan had one of the strictest censorboards in the world for many years. Pretty Baby was not shown when it was released and Last Tango was cut to shreds. Our censorboard became the laughingstock of the country when it refused to release the comedy, Exit to Eden. It chose to protect citizens from these films while the Porky's films, featuring adolescent boys ogling girls through peepholes passed without a blink. In this context, I will grant that Harris's claimed courage is somewhat justified. At least she talks about approaching the subject. But it is still through a peephole.

That Maggie Siggins calls this book an "analysis" suggests to me her mind has gone soft. It is one thing to help a struggling sister writer but quite another to write a blurb presenting shoddy work as seriously researched or containing insights of any kind. Harris whines a lot about how hard it was to write this book. Fudging the truth is always difficult. If the bizarre testimony of the children did not raise some serious doubts in her mind, she has no business calling herself an investigative writer. Yes, this book is presented as an investigative work.

Harris put in her hours in the Courtroom, but apart from that she did no reasearch. Her heartfelt plea to "Believe the children" doesn't lead anywhere. Where did the children hear about such things, she asks. They couldn't have made these stories up! Well, of course the child witnesses didn't make the stories up. Claudia Bryden and Rod Butler fed them the scripts. That was clear to others of us who also put in our hours in the courtroom.

As part of the marketing strategy, Harris has dedicated her book to Martin Kruze and included an afterword by Sheldon Kennedy. This shamefully exploits two people who paid their dues by fighting back.

The subtext of Frann Harris's book is clear. By hitching her cart to some high profile cases of child victimization, she seeks to beef up her own credentials as a victim of something-or-other and build a career as a professional victim watcher.

We are among the people who actually paid $24,99 plus GST and PST for this book. We wasted money which might more wisely have been spent on lottery tickets. Martensville: Truth or Justice adds nothing to understanding what happened in Martensville, or in the Foster Parent case, which she also alludes to, with the same "nudge, nudge, know-what-I-mean" technique. It simply adds more pulp to prop up a provincial justice system which thrives on covering the truth.

Revitalizing the archives

From 1998 until 2002, injusticebusters was in the throes of identity crisis. What was it? What were we doing? We grappled with editorial policy at the same time we were learning the nuts and bolts of building and posting a website. Once we had a secure, paid site I had full editorial control, although I talked regularly to Richard Klassen who was forced to move his family several times and did not always have access to the internet. Rick's pages: one | two

We posted our earliest and later actions.

Early versions of the site can be found on the Wayback Machine.

I began following other threads to stories of police and prosecutorial misconduct and the site's character took on another facet: a newsclipping scrapbook where stories could live longer than they would in print form. I also began picking up other stories of wrongfully convicted people. It was an explosion. By 2003 there were over 700 pages. I also had contact with several other people (Don Smith, Leon Walchuk, Monique Turenne, the Vopnis) and kept these stories going.

It was the story of the Ross children's treatment at the hands of the Saskatchewan government which grabbed the attention of The Fifth Estate. The civil claim (The $10M Lawsuit as we called it) was only mentioned briefly at the end of their show which aired in November, 2000.

When Richard Klassen began to make progress in bringing his civil claim to court, the government and police defendants alleged he was breaking the rules of court by publishing discovery material on the internet.

MacNeil clinic (the document which started it all)
The Thompson Papers
Carol Bunko-Ruys reports

This claim was absolutely false. However, rather than risk being thrown out of his civil claim, Klassen undertook before Judge Mona Dovall to sever all ties with the website.

The court fights:

Les Perreaux report
QB271

These pages have links which lead to other pages from that era. Now that some of the dust has settled, I have been going back through the material we had posted in the early days. In the spirit of keeping the scrapbook alive, I have been reformatting and placing links. The original material remains intact. I hope the information, which chronicles our struggle is useful to you.

The identity crisis is over. We know who we are --Sheila Steele, March 28, 2005

Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell

Truth suppress'd, whether by courts or crooks, will find an avenue to be told. Sheila Steele, injusticebusters.com

If you hold the mouth of Truth, It will burst out its rib-cage. Somali proverb

Publisher : Sheila Steele

Got something to say about this or any other stories on this site? Go to injusticebustersblog Participate!

injusticebusters court advice :
How to walk yourself through the justice system

Why you should dump your preliminary hearing (written July 1998 and still valid)

Sermonette: The Naked Truth -- (You will find links to many more sermonettes in the sidebar on this page

Another target of Dueck's malice: : Wilf Hathway

Our activism contributed greatly to the good vibes which happened around the civil trial.

Index to the stories on this website

This is not regularly updated so if you are looking for a particular story and you have a name or keyword, please use the site search engine(at the bottom of the page) which IS regularly updated

Index to Saskatoon Police stories

This is a pretty good scrapbook for the 1998-2002 period.