B.C. recovery home staff tried to remove social media posts about assault allegations against former employee

This story has been updated to reflect new information about the date of one social media comment.

The New Westminster addiction recovery facility that employed a man charged with assaulting vulnerable women attempted to prevent survivors and community members from speaking publicly, according to posts and messages obtained by CBC News.

And at least two Last Door Recovery Society leaders attempted to remove an online post by a woman who says Adam Haber assaulted her even after police began investigating him in late January.

Last week, Haber was charged with assaulting three vulnerable former clients of the sister, women-only Westminster House whom he met through his time as a client, sponsor and later fitness trainer at Last Door dating back to 2010.

Haber has not yet entered a plea to the charges, and the allegations have not been proven in court. 

"My client is charged with three counts and three counts only. He is presumed to be innocent of each of these allegations and we intend to defend him in court, not in the media," Haber's lawyer, Matthew Nathanson, wrote in an emailed statement to CBC News on Thursday morning.

"The trial process is the appropriate forum to test the credibility and reliability of the charges, not the internet."

The separate, nonprofit addiction recovery facilities collaborate on fundraising, send clients to the same community-based recovery meetings and together constitute New West Recovery, "Canada's addiction recovery community." 

Police say there are at least 11 women who have reported alleged assaults to police and are urging more to come forward.

Multiple former clients told CBC News Westminster House staff ignored at least three reports alleging Haber had assaulted them or another woman and that his predatory behaviour was an "open secret" among staff and clients at both facilities for more than a decade.

In previous statements to CBC News and other media, Last Door has repeatedly denied its staff had any knowledge of the allegations before they surfaced in a private Facebook group in late January. 

Last Door did not initially say when in January it became aware of the allegations, and police did not confirm what day in January Last Door reported it. But in an emailed statement sent after publication, a Last Door representative stated Haber's contract was terminated within 24 hours of two women raising allegations online on Jan. 19.

The allegations were nested under a public Facebook post published the previous month by  Last Door, in which Haber was named. 

The CBC obtained screenshots of the comments after Last Door deleted the post. 

Former client Sarah Burfoot told CBC News she witnessed Haber attempt to assault a friend of hers who had been a former client of Westminster House, but nothing was done when she reported it to a staff member there.

CBC spoke to another former client, who recalled Burfoot mentioning the alleged assault at the time.

When Burfoot saw Last Door's post nearly a decade later, she said she'd had enough. 

"So after all the sexual assault allegations from multiple women and girls in the community, you still decide to keep a sexual predator employed as your fitness trainer… interesting," Burfoot commented on the Jan. 19 post.

The post and her comment were both deleted that day, and Burfoot was blocked by the page administrator, according to screenshots obtained by CBC News. Her follow-up messages to staff went unanswered. 

Witness's comment deleted 

Senior staff at Last Door continued to try to prevent community members from posting about the allegations against Haber or that facilities had looked the other way, even after police began investigating, according to further posts and messages obtained by CBC News.

Burfoot's comment had started conversations among former clients about the allegations, and on Jan. 27, she and several others, including Noah Gelb, started a Facebook group titled "Stop Adam H."

"It was to create a safe space and also like simultaneously to spread awareness that this person is dangerous," said Gelb.

The private group, viewed by CBC News, has more than 1,400 members as of June 7 and hundreds of posts from survivors and former clients — some named and others anonymous — and other community members.

Gelb, who was a client at Last Door in 2015 and then worked at its youth program until 2018, said he "couldn't have imagined" how many people would come forward with allegations about Haber.

"The quantity of people that were coming forward was really shocking," he said.

Some Last Door staff were added to the group the day it was founded, and the facility says it reported the allegations to police shortly after.

But in a series of text messages to Gelb on January 27, Last Door's director of community development, Giuseppe Ganci, called collective efforts to raise concerns about Haber to the society "bullshit."

"It is really sad to see rich white kids like you who can pay for private treatment anywhere in Canada getting a nonprofit charity that helps poor motherf--kers like me to get clean involved in all this bullshit. Think about it," Ganci wrote to Gelb in one text message, viewed by CBC News.

"It's hard enough to deal with all the harm reduction trolls on social media. Now, we gotta deal with our f--king alumni," he said in another.

Last Door has some publicly funded spaces, but the majority are private spaces that can either be paid fully out of pocket or partially with employment insurance, income and disability assistance or extended health benefits from an employer or through a union.

Ganci, who had told Gelb he was not speaking for Last Door, apologized in a follow-up text message on Jan. 29.

"It was a really rough week last week. Finding out on Facebook that I'm part of a system that's being accused of overlooking girls getting raped really [threw] me off the edge," he said.

CBC has contacted Ganci for comment.

In its emailed statement, Last Door said Ganci had not been speaking for the organization in his personal texts.

Posts calling for action reported by Last Door staff

But just 10 days after Ganci apologized, he and Last Door executive director Jared Nilsson attempted to prevent a survivor, whom CBC News called Emma in previous reporting, from speaking out in a public Facebook group.

A Feb. 8 post by Emma invited members in a public New Westminster Facebook group with nearly 20,000 members to sign the open letter and calls to action they had sent to Last Door, Westminster House and Fraser Health.

Ganci and Nilsson reported the post for bullying and harassment in an attempt to have it taken down, according to screenshots of the reports shared by the group's administrator, Iain Carson-Huggins. CBC News has confirmed the accounts belong to the two leaders.

Carson-Huggins said he did not take down the post after he saw who had reported it.

"I was like, 'Why is this person trying to take down an allegation against the company that they're on?' Like it just seemed very suspicious," said Carson-Huggins, who has never been involved with Last Door or Westminster House.

He posted the screenshot of the reports in a comment under the original reports.

"Normally, I wouldn't do something like that, but I thought this was just such an outrageous request that the community deserved to understand, to see what they were trying to do."

Angela Marie MacDougall, the executive director of Battered Women's Support Services, said survivors came to her for help earlier in January after their reports weren't taken seriously.

"For those folks that had come forward, they were very unhappy with the response from the organizations. There seemed to be a minimizing of the concerns," MacDougall said.

MacDougall said it pointed to a pervasive "culture of silence" around sexual assault in the New Westminster recovery community.

And being silenced or dismissed when raising a report can also make a survivor unlikely to seek support or tell someone again in the future, she said, which compounds their trauma.

But social media has also helped "to re-empower vulnerable people and improve the safety of our communities," said Sandy Kovacs, a Vancouver-based lawyer who represents sexual assault survivors in civil complaints.

Gelb, who was clear he does not speak for survivors, said the response from Ganci, Nilsson and other leaders felt like a betrayal of his dedication to the community and his own recovery.

"I lived in that community for a number of years. I worked there. I had friends in that community. I had volunteered at events, and I had mentored people going through the program," said Gelb, who has since moved to Toronto. "To know that someone could flip on a dime like that was, quite honestly, hurtful and shocking."