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Guess, a 43-year-old North Vancouver single mother of two, went on trial May 11 in B.C. Supreme Court, charged with perverting the course of justice by having an affair with accused murderer Peter Gill while sitting as a juror on his 1995 trial, and then persuading the jury to find him (and his five co-defendants) not guilty. By the time Guess herself was found guilty June 19, she had been front-page news as far away as Germany and New Zealand. Her trial received saturation coverage locally; a fascinated (and appalled) public learned about everything from her favourite designer labels, accessories and bargain emporiums, to her taste in popular tunes. Guess will be profiled in the New York fashion magazine Marie Claire; she has been offered a $100,000 book deal (with perhaps better deals to come); several Hollywood studios are reportedly interested in her story.
Guess has made professional spin doctors look to their laurels. A native of England, she changed her name to Guess in 1990 for reasons of numerology and self-actualization—five letters because she was born May 5, 1955, and Guess "like the jeans ad; no apologies"—after her second divorce, from Chilliwack medical researcher Richard Loewan. When she was called to jury duty on the Regina v. Johal et al. case she was counselling victims of crime for the RCMP and studying for a master's degree in psychology at Simon Fraser University.
She obviously learned much about the techniques of media manipulation. Before the trial she launched a website (see story) to justify her actions, gave innumerable interviews against the advice of her lawyers, and preened for the cameras. She arrived in court each day in undersized suits, sporting a Yorkshire terrier named George and a claque of supporters, her 13-year-old son Adam in tow. When court was in session she feigned panic attacks, gasped at prosecutor Joe Bellows questions about her sex life and even demanded the right not to sit in the defendant's box, which she found "demeaning." Later, however, with uncharacteristic reticence, she refused to testify in her own defence.
Choosing to defend herself in the court of public opinion, Guess gave good soundbite. She declared of her jury duty, "After eight months even the trial judge started looking good" and "It didn't matter if I had sex with all the accused and everyone in the public gallery." She compared her travails to Bill Clinton's, and suggested that since the American people had forgiven his trifling sexual indiscretions, the Canadian justice system should treat her likewise. When asked if she thought she might go to jail, she replied insouciantly, "If I have to do community service hours, does that mean I have to go back to dating firefighters?"
Guess' defence was twofold; first, that she was being persecuted for romanticism: "I have been convicted for falling in love" (she admits to a sexual relationship with Gill, but only after the trial); and second, that contrary to the instruction of Justice Raymond Paris, ignorance of the law is an excuse: "What I did was foolish but not illegal." After 14 hours of deliberation, a six-man, six-woman jury disagreed. Free on bail until sentencing August 20, Guess faces up to 10 years' imprisonment. She is appealing the verdict; the Crown may seek a retrial in the Johal case.
Gillian Guess has been found guilty. Now the trial of the media begins. It stands accused of trafficking in a dangerous narcotic-sleaze (see story, page 38, printed edition). But only an editor displaying the self-abnegation of a saint could have resisted the intoxicating ingredients of the cocktail named Regina v. Guess: adultery, celebrities, gangsters and murder. Guess is believed to be the first case in the British Commonwealth in which a juror has been tried for having a sexual relationship with the accused during his trial. Gill and his five co-accused, including cocaine dealer Bindy Johal, were charged with the 1994 murders of Ron and Jim Dosanjh. The six, who had allegedly killed the Dosanjh brothers in a bid to control the east Vancouver drug trade, were acquitted in October 1995, after a jury that included Guess deliberated for only three hours.
According to a report in the Southeast Asia Post, Vancouver police had concerns about a possible relationship between Guess and Gill during his trial, and wanted to investigate her for possible obstruction of justice, but worried such an investigation could result in acquittals on the basis of police jury tampering.
Instead, police waited until after the verdict; they placed wiretaps on Guess' telephone, and interviewed friends, jurors and court clerks. They subsequently testified they witnessed her enticing Gill flagrantly in court. Evidence included tapes of Guess and Gill having sexual intercourse, excerpts from Gill's diary in which he describes flirting with a juror, telephone records revealing a call was made from Gill's father's cell phone to Guess' house two hours after Gill's not-guilty verdict, and conversations between Guess and friends in which she described Gill as "forbidden fruit," and said she "could not help" herself.
Other witnesses included Guess' Vancouver socialite sister Vanessa Bryan, whose 23-year-old daughter Dahn is a model who has dated Vancouver Canuck superstar Pavel Bure and X-Files actor David Duchovny. Ms. Bryan said she warned her sister that she ought to remove herself from the jury. Guess' fellow jurors also testified that they were all either undecided or leaning toward a guilty verdict going into deliberations, and that several of Guess' comments to them had a "chilling effect"—including her repeated (and false) warnings that they would each have to stand up in court and pronounce the accused guilty.
Despite the uncontested facts—that Guess slept with an accused (and married) mobster after being chosen to sit in judgement on his fate, and the verdict of the court—that a sexually-besotted Guess persuaded the jury to set free her lover and five others accused of two bloody murders, Guess remains a heroine to many. The vast majority of e-mails to her website have been supportive; they have included several marriage proposals.
Guess blames her conviction on a straitlaced justice system. In an exclusive interview with B.C. Report, she declares, "Our system is much more covert, versus in the U.S. where everything is in your face. I would've loved to have cameras in the courtroom so that I could get the truth out." The one-time movie extra now casts herself as David versus a prosecutorial Goliath. She characterizes the adulation she has received as the just tribute paid to a woman who "stood up and fought back." "I think Canadians were ripe for that and wanted that," she argues. "And the people who complained the loudest were the first in line to buy papers."
CFUN 1410 radio talkshow host Pia Shandel, who has moderated many discussions on the Guess affair, has a different explanation for this would-be martyr's popularity. "She's a charter member of the Me Generation," she says. "This is what people are lapping up today. It's all part of the breakdown of any code of ethics. As a consequence, the more outrageous the behaviour, the more popular it is." Ms. Shandel is particularly critical of Guess for exposing her son to the trial and its dissection of her sex life. According to Ms. Shandel, Guess sets a wretched example. "Girls and women have gotten entirely the wrong message," she says. "They think that their libidos are the most important thing. As a result, you see these women with their pathetic displays of sexuality."
Yet Ms. Shandel does not believe that the hunger for trash demonstrated in the coverage of the Guess case is novel, noting that the Romans used to feed Christians to lions for public amusement. Nor does she believe that media have fed this appetite, arguing that much of the reporting on Guess was satirical. "The majority of callers to my show universally denounced her," she explains. "I felt badly about some of the coverage, and the unpleasant criticism of her hair and clothes, but it's hard to drum up much sympathy because she pandered to it. That's why people nailed her hard, and why this satirical coverage continued."
But others consider the Guess circus an indictment of North American civilization; it stands accused of a decadence more debilitating than the bloodbaths of the Roman Coliseum. "There is a raw fascination with evil nowadays," argues Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles magazine. "There's been an inversion of values. All that used to be good is bad, and all that used to be bad is good."
The popular celebration of infamy is something new under the sun, according to Mr. Fleming, a classical scholar. He accepts Guess' point that Anglo-American culture has had a longstanding love affair with courtroom drama. He asserts, however, that sensational trials have until now been morality plays; public enjoyment was predicated on the malefactors receiving their just punishment. Even when the masses sympathized with lawbreakers, it was generally because of a noble cause they championed, not their crimes. Jesse James, for instance, was celebrated as a defender of family and honour, an avenging angel serving the vanquished South—not as a bank robber.
Mr. Fleming ascribes the rise of radical individualism to the consumer society. In centuries past, he says, people spent their surplus wealth on building cathedrals or public monuments, and their surplus attention on saints or military heroes. Now our surplus is spent on ephemera, and as a result our heroes are more likely to be from the entertainment industry than those whose works are lasting: scientists, statesmen, artists or priests. "In the advertising world, the illusion of character is more important than the reality," Mr. Fleming says. "O.J. Simpson was the perfect example: a celebrity athlete who had starred in television commercials, and who murdered his wife. Anytime an actor or athlete has a drug problem, it becomes front-page news because the soap opera of self-destruction is the closest we can come to a morality play." And the movies these actors star in are constructed so that the most interesting characters are wicked, Silence of the Lambs and Fargo being recent and honoured examples.
"We've become a society that idolizes celebrities over heroes, and image over identity," says Donald DeMarco, professor of philosophy at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ont. He agrees with Mr. Fleming that notoriety as a positive good is "a relatively new concept in history." The consumer society's "addiction to speed," he argues, is the basis of media cheerleading for criminals like Guess; he adds that today the instantaneous is always preferred over the permanent. He cites the decision of Time magazine in 1973 to bump a cover story on the canonization by the Catholic Church of Mary Seaton, the first American-born saint, a story of considerable historical significance, in favour of a late-breaking assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford. "If you are given only five seconds to make an impression on a person," he says, "it is more effective to hit them than to love them."
According to Prof. DeMarco, the difference between celebrities and heroes is the difference between image and identity. "An image is immediate," he says. "An identity takes time to develop and is based on values that are enduring, such as love and goodness." He says of Guess, "It is characteristic of a person more concerned with identity to have a high regard for justice. One may be sexually attracted to the accused, but a regard for justice precludes a tryst."
Prof. DeMarco concludes that the fatal irony of the Information Society is that in its desperate embrace of the temporal, it has made itself the slave of the very sickness it seeks to escape—boredom. The result is a vicious circle; as consumers seek ever more self-indulgent gratification, they get junk-food highs—and are then tortured by malnourishment.
Gillian Guess offers no apologies. To the media her most serious sin is being mutton dressed as lamb, but she insists in regarding herself as a sacrifice—to her sex, to sex, to Canadian prudery, to her emotions and to her eternal ardour. She rejects the accusation that she is promiscuous. "As far as being highly sexual, this whole ordeal has shocked me into celibacy. I've been involved with three men in the past five years," she confesses.
For many, however, Guess' greatest virtue is her indomitable spirit. Yet this shameless woman surely nurses some regrets. There is a dim realization that her quarter-hour in the sun has left her life in ashes. "This whole thing has shown me how cruel society really is. People are inherently very mean," she says. When asked if she thinks she will be remembered in a year, Guess replies, "Yes, I do." After a pause she adds, "But I don't think it will be positive." BCR
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