Former Toronto theatre technician charged in sexual assault

Even before Jennifer started working for Theatre Passe Muraille (TPM) in 2016, she knew of Christopher Ross. In Toronto’s small indie theatre industry, almost everybody did. As TPM’s Backspace Theatre technician for nearly eight years, he was a people person, Jennifer recalled — well-liked, well-connected and well-positioned in the city’s performing arts scene.

Emerging technicians like Jennifer knew that if they wanted to break through in the industry, they almost always had to go through Ross, as the space he managed was one of only a few venues in Toronto where non-unionized backstage technicians could work.

Following a party in January 2019, not affiliated with TPM and occurring off the theatre’s property, Jennifer was allegedly sexually assaulted by Ross.

Ross, 33, was arrested by Toronto police in August 2021 and charged with three counts of sexual assault in relation to the incidents in January 2019, according to court documents obtained by the Star. The criminal charges against Ross have not been proven in court and the matter is currently set for trial in August 2023.

A Star investigation has found other allegations that have been raised against Ross. Four other individuals wrote a letter to TPM in December 2020 alleging “sexual assault and/or abusive, inappropriate and predatory behaviour.” A separate woman said Ross harassed her and engaged in predatory behaviour.

Ross did not respond to questions about the allegations.

“Mr. Ross cannot comment while the criminal proceedings are ongoing,” said his lawyer, Christi Hunter. “He denies the allegations and has scheduled a trial to defend himself.”

Only the allegations raised by Jennifer have resulted in criminal charges to date.

An undertaking signed by Ross in August 2021, a copy of which was obtained and reviewed by the Star, prohibits Ross from communicating with Jennifer or going to any place he knows that she frequents.

Jennifer is not the woman’s real name. Her identity is protected under a court-ordered publication ban. Because of the personal nature of the complaints, the Star has also agreed not to reveal the identity of the other individuals who spoke with the Star.

Jennifer recalls how thrilled she felt when in 2016, shortly after graduating from college, she was tapped to work at TPM. Soon, Ross was consistently selecting her for various backstage gigs. After a few months, the pair became close friends.

But those memories of her time at TPM are clouded by the events on Jan. 27, 2019, which continue to traumatize her to this day. The incidents spanned several hours, Jennifer told the Star, starting with inappropriate touching and including choking.

In hindsight, the signs were there, Jennifer said. She noticed Ross often picked young women to work for him. And even though hiring was supposed to be handled by TPM’s production manager, Ross would reach out to her via Facebook.

For months after the incident, Jennifer stayed silent, fearing reprisal because of Ross’s position and his connections in the tight-knit industry. She only felt comfortable speaking up when she knew she was leaving the Toronto theatre community.

Soon, however, she realized her experience was not unique.

The four individuals who shared separate allegations in the December 2020 letter to TPM said that they also know of a “larger network of individuals” who have had similar experiences with Ross or who have known about these incidents “as common knowledge” for years. They added that many of them have attempted to address the issues with Ross, but have been met with “bullying and gaslighting behaviour” as a response.

In a statement to the Star, TPM’s leadership team — comprised of artistic director Marjorie Chan, artistic producer Indrit Kasapi and managing director of revenue and strategy Michelle Knight — said it could not “provide comments on or confirm or deny any reports received and/or the identities of parties involved in complaints or the steps taken to address complaints” due to “confidentiality and privacy rules regarding internal TPM HR matters.”

The Star has learned, however, that the alleged incidents stretch as far back as 2011, according to the letter written by the four individuals. In addition to the letter, the document sent to the theatre, detailing the allegations against Ross, also included personal statements detailing the specific allegations. The individuals were not comfortable sharing those testimonies with the Star as they contained sensitive personal information.

Of the four individuals who wrote the letter, three signed off anonymously. One of those individuals spoke with the Star to confirm the veracity of the letter. The Star has agreed not to reveal the identity of this person along with the details of their specific allegation.

The series of allegations, however, have shaken Toronto’s theatre community and forced its members to reckon with how it protects precarious workers in the industry. The events also raise questions about how TPM, one of Toronto’s leading alternative theatre companies, handled the events in the aftermath of the allegations.

Toronto police declined to answer the Star’s questions about the details of the allegations outlined in the court documents, directing the Star to attend the case in court in August for further information.

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Seven months after Ross allegedly sexual assaulted Jennifer, another woman said Ross sexually harassed her at a park in July 2019.

It was well past sunset, Sasha recalled, and the Toronto Fringe Festival’s Postscript Patio at the Scadding Court Community Centre — a hangout spot for audience members and artists like Ross and Sasha — had closed for the evening. Many revellers, Sasha and Ross included, headed over to the nearby Alexandra Park for an informal gathering.

Throughout that year’s Fringe, Sasha, which is not the woman’s real name, noticed that Ross would continuously find her at the Postscript Patio. Despite his stocky figure, he was almost always easily recognizable, with his excitable personality, scruffy beard and hair often tied up into a bun, Sasha said.

But his presence and how he would openly talk about his very personal issues made her feel uncomfortable, she recalled.

“I just remember his eyes, like just always very intense,” Sasha said. “There’s just something unsettling about his energy.”

But because Ross was well connected in the community and Sasha, who also works in the theatre industry, didn’t want to “burn any bridges,” she continued to reluctantly engage with him. She also dismissed Ross’s advances and believed she could trust him because he had told her that he was in a relationship.

That night in the park, however, while Sasha and Ross were sitting together on a bench, she said he allegedly touched her thigh without consent, put his arm around her and pulled her up to start dancing.

“My skin started crawling,” said Sasha. “I remember … blocking it (and) going, ‘This isn’t happening.’ … I just really wanted him to stop touching me.”

After the incident, she was too afraid to speak up or flee, so she remained at the party, where Ross continued to linger. When the pair were alone in the park at around 4 a.m. in the morning, Sasha remembers Ross staring at her before saying that he really wanted to kiss her.

“The bottom of my stomach just dropped out,” she said.

After that evening, she remembers feeling manipulated and betrayed.

“I remember I got home and I just cried because I just felt gross,” Sasha told the Star. “I just felt really dumb and scared and isolated.”

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It would be a year and half later that Ross departed his position at TPM. Ross, who started working for TPM as a technician in 2013, claimed in a Facebook post dated Jan. 22, 2021 that he was terminated from his position without cause two weeks earlier. His departure came about a month after the four other individuals wrote a letter to the theatre company alleging sexual assault or inappropriate behaviour by Ross.

“Those who know me even a little know how much pride I have taken in running that little space, and how much a part of my identity it was,” Ross wrote in that Facebook post from January 2021. “Suffice it to say that I’m heartbroken and will be mourning for a long, long time.”

Ross was a familiar face in the Toronto theatre community. He has about 200 theatre credits to his name, according to The Toronto Theatre Database. He was so well-known in the industry that, for the 2017 Toronto Fringe Festival, an arts publication created a bingo card which included “Christopher Ross sighting” as one of the bingo squares.

In a statement to the Star, TPM confirmed that Ross was no longer employed at the theatre as of Jan. 9, 2021 but did not state the circumstances surrounding his departure.

“Due to confidentiality and privacy rules regarding internal TPM HR matters, we are unable to disclose the types of information you are requesting regarding any current or former employee,” the theatre wrote in a statement to the Star.

“As an organization, Theatre Passe Muraille is committed to creating a safe and respectful environment for all staff (full, part-time and contract), artists and audiences,” the statement continued. The theatre’s leadership added that they will “continue to seek external advice, review and update our policies regularly.”

In a separate statement, the theatre said it had consulted “stakeholders” while updating its policies, including engaging the services of an external firm of employment and human rights lawyers.

But for casual workers like Jennifer, it felt like there were “no protections” in place during her time at TPM, she told the Star. She added that she was never provided with a workplace harassment policy nor made aware of a formal complaint process, despite the province requiring all employers to implement a workplace harassment policy, share it with workers and update it at least annually.

In an April 2022 mediation meeting between Jennifer and the company, a video recording of which was shared with the Star, Chan, the artistic director, acknowledged that the theatre’s existing policy addressed “too wide a range” of issues, and that “some of the language in the document (came) from the ‘80s” and “it’s still there.”

While the theatre has since publicly posted last September its “Policy on Discrimination, Harassment and Violence,” it came more than a year after Jennifer wrote to TPM in August 2021, informing the theatre about the alleged incidents and requesting that the company update its policies and post them publicly.

While the existence of a up-to-date policy may not have prevented the alleged incidents, Jennifer said if she was informed of a proper policy and complaint process, she likely would not have stayed silent for as long as she did. She feared reprisal, she told the Star, particularly because Ross was her direct superior.

The issue was compounded by the fact that Ross appeared to be in charge of hiring her for backstage technical gigs at the Backspace Theatre. Screenshots shared with the Star show that he would reach out to her informally via Facebook messenger for work calls — this despite TPM telling the Star hiring should be the sole responsibility of the theatre’s production manager, not Ross.

“I feared that everything I had worked so hard to achieve in my career would be jeopardized if I spoke up and was not taken seriously,” Jennifer said in the August 2021 letter to the theatre’s leadership team and board of directors, written shortly after Ross’s arrest.

“Eventually, I stopped responding to (work) calls,” she continued in the three-page document, a copy of which she shared with the Star. “This, sadly, felt like my only option, as I did not know who to speak to, to explain why I no longer felt comfortable at TPM or what the consequences of doing so would be.”

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Its name meaning “theatre beyond walls” in French, TPM is one of Toronto’s oldest alternative theatre companies. Founded in 1968, the organization is known for producing Canadian works and for its “collective creation,” a form of playwriting that is actor-driven and focused on collaboration.

In September, the theatre underwent a major leadership shakeup with the introduction of a tri-leadership structure, with Kasapi, Chan and Knight heading the organization. In an email to Jennifer, shared with the Star, Kasapi said the process of updating the theatre policies was delayed in part because of the leadership restructuring.

Allegations of sexual assault in Toronto’s theatre industry are not new. In 2018, in what was one of the most high-profile cases to rock the industry, Soulpepper co-founder and former artistic director Albert Schultz was forced to step down from his roles amid allegations and lawsuits by four women alleging sexual abuse and harassment. Later that year, Schultz’s lawyer said the lawsuits had been “resolved.”

But in a tight-knit industry where connections are key and artists are contractors working for various arts organizations, many allegations of misconduct go unreported. Though these concerns are common in stories of this nature, they’re also heightened in a sector where work is often precarious and based not on quantifiable factors but rather subjective judgment.

For Jennifer, three years after the alleged sexual assaults, the experience and the way it was handled after she shared the allegations continue to have a “huge impact” on her.

She struggles with anxiety and depression, and for a long time felt isolated. And she remains disappointed in how TPM responded to the allegations. She hoped the theatre would promptly address the issues outlined in her letter, specifically updating its anti-harassment policy and ensuring there was a proper reporting process in place if incidents of inappropriate behaviour were to arise. Instead, it took the theatre more than a year after Jennifer’s letter was issued for the theatre to update and publicly share its policies.

“There was just no structure for me to talk about what had happened, and I just felt isolated from the theatre community in general,” Jennifer told the Star. “The actual incident was extremely upsetting, obviously, but I was shocked by the (TPM) community response … and (the) lack of urgency in dealing with the situation.”

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