Day by day: Bill Whatcott’s absurd 5-day “hate speech” re-trial

Re-rial was in May 2026 in Toronto. The judge’s ruling is coming this week!

Unable to prove “hate” by the letter of the law – prosecutors needed to stretch it using aggressive slanderous attacks.

An Orwellian scene that could come to the US.

September 15, 2026

Supreme irony: These plaques - in English and French - are outside the courthouse where Bill was tried twice for hate speech. Titled "Freedom of Expression," they read: "The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees, as a fundamental freedom, that everyone has freedom of thought, belief, opinion, and expression."

Will the Canadian government (“the Crown”) finally force Bill Whatcott to go to prison for handing out a flyer ten years ago that urged homosexuals to abstain from their unhealthy and immoral behavior?

On Wednesday, Superior Court Judge Anne Molloy is scheduled to announce her verdict on Bill’s second trial for the same so-called “hate speech” crime. Did the Crown legitimately make its case in that second trial? You can judge for yourself.

In our previous post we described the flyer that Bill and his friends passed out at the 2016 Toronto Gay Pride Parade, his subsequent trial for “Wilful Promotion of Hate,” his acquittal by Judge Goldstein, and the government’s successful appeal for a second trial. (Double jeopardy is legal in Canada.)

Will the second trial and the new judge prove to be the combination that convicts Bill? This trial was more aggressive and vicious toward Bill personally. The Crown’s prosecution employed a different strategy than in the first trial, which focused on truthfulness and legitimacy of the flyer’s statements.

The second trial took five days between May 25 and June 3, 2026. All the testimony and cross-examination from the first trial was brought in as evidence.

The opposing legal teams

The Ontario Attorney General’s prosecuting team (“the Crown”) consisted of two very aggressive attorneys.

In Bill’s first trial (in December 2021), the Crown had to face John Rosen, considered the top criminal defense attorney in Canada. But Rosen has since retired. This time, Bill’s legal team consisted of an attorney from Rosen’s firm and a highly regarded criminal defense attorney brought in from another firm.

The law Bill’s is charged with violating – and the high bar to convict

Bill Whatcott is being charged under Section 319(2) of Canada’s Criminal Code: “Wilful Promotion of Hatred” (Note the Canadian spelling of “willful.”)

The Supreme Court of Canada has set a very high threshold for conviction (which is why Bill was acquitted the first time around). To secure a conviction, the Crown must prove two distinct elements beyond a reasonable doubt:

• The Act (Actus Reus): The public communication of statements that cross the line into extreme emotion, vilification, and detestation of an identifiable group.
  
• The Intent (Mens Rea): A mental state showing the person acted with a conscious purpose or desire to bring about or foment that hatred, or acted with wilful blindness to it.
  

Furthermore, the Criminal Code explicitly provides a statutory defense of truth: a person cannot be convicted if the statements they communicated were factually true. For example, the testimony from the first trial basically established that the flyer’s medical facts and Christian theology were legitimate.

Heading into the second trial in May 2026, it was expected that the Crown would need to perform significant legal gymnastics to win this case, especially given the skills of Bill’s legal team.

But there were also some major unknowns for his team. The case had not yet been assigned a judge. Would the judge be a hard leftist (like most there seem to be), or a reasonable moderate like Judge Goldstein was? Thus, the defense had to decide whether to have another bench trial or go before a full jury.

Ontario Superior Court, the scene of both of the absurd "hate speech" criminal trials - over the text of a flyer!

Bill’s five-day trial

Unlike at the previous trial and hearing, this judge allowed only a few “established” media to have Zoom access. MassResistance didn’t make the cut. These daily reports are from Bill’s written notes and verbal clarifications.

Monday May 25 – Judge assigned to the case. Opting for a bench trial. Initial proceedings.

At the beginning of the day, neither a judge nor a courtroom had been assigned to the case. Sometime after noon, Justice Anne Molloy was assigned to the case, a courtroom was assigned, and preliminary proceedings began.

According to Bill’s attorneys, Judge Molloy was considered somewhat of a centrist rather than the more common hard leftist. Since the population of that part of Toronto is largely “woke” and far left, it was decided to go with a bench trial rather than risk a jury trial. But as the trial began, that assumption about the judge’s temperament appeared to be mistaken.

When that day’s hearing began, the following facts were established:

1. Bill attended the 2016 Toronto Pride parade as a member of the “Gay Zombie Cannabis Consumers Association.”
2. He registered for the parade under a false name, Robert Clinton.
3. He created and passed out the “Zombie Safe Sex” package with the flyer inside.

Tuesday, May 26 – Prof. Nick Mulé gives his “expert witness” testimony.

The major reason given for the Crown’s appeal of the first verdict was that Judge Goldstein did not allow a prominent homosexual activist college professor, Nick Mulé, to be included as an expert witness. Apparently, Judge Goldstein didn’t consider Mulé’s information to be pertinent or relevant. In this trial, Mulé was the only expert witness.

Mulé was sworn in and gave his testimony about Whatcott and the flyer.

He started by describing Gay Liberation Theory principles and the tenets of Queer Liberation. He said that pride events are very significant for people, especially those “coming out” for the first time.

He said Bill’s flyer included overt and covert messages. It contained numerous “dog whistles” and “tropes.” These not only target the homosexual community, he said, but can cause “internalized homophobia” (self-hatred).

Among the flyer’s “dog whistles and tropes” are:

• Stigmatizing anal and oral sex
• Describing homosexual sex acts as spreading disease
• Accusing members of the LGBT community of recruiting children
• Using religion to characterize homosexuality as immoral
• Referring to God’s law and natural law
• Using terms like “sodomy” and “sodomite” that are pejorative
• Characterizing homosexual medical issues as a “gay plague” with God’s punishment to follow

He said that Bill’s photos of anal warts are “fear inducing” and give a negative connotation to the homosexual subculture.

Under the Crown’s friendly questioning, Mulé was more direct. He claimed that Bill was trying to associate homosexuals with death and pedophilia. He said that Bill’s remarks were full of “microaggressions.” Mulé described criticisms against LGBT behavior as “historical discrimination and injustice.”

Bill’s lawyers brought things back into perspective. They established that Mulé is a radical activist who wants to decriminalize crystal meth and public sex in parks. They demonstrated that he was rightly excluded as a legitimate expert witness in the first trial.

The general feeling in Bill’s camp was that Mulé basically spouted standard Queer Liberation propaganda and did not give the judge much that could be used to convict Bill. But there was certainly the fear that the judge would take it seriously.

Wednesday, May 27 – Bill on the stand

On Wednesday, Bill was on the stand for over two hours.

He was first examined by his lead attorney. They discussed his background, including his conversion to Christ when he was homeless and sniffing glue in a graveyard at age 18, to graduation from nursing school with honors a few years later, then to his work in the oil fields after he left nursing. Then came his arrest for this “hate speech” crime (in 2018) and his more marginal jobs since being out on bail.  

Next, the Crown prosecutor cross-examined Bill. He focused on how Bill “lied” to get into the parade – and that Christianity is clear that lying is a sin. He strongly suggested that Bill is not a true Christian, and thus the Christian content of his flyers was phony.

Bill responded that there are instances where deception is used ethically for the greater good. Two examples are the Biblical account in Exodus where the midwives disobeyed Pharoah’s command to kill the male Hebrew babies, and the Allies’ deception campaign regarding the D-Day landing. Bill said that entering the Toronto Pride Parade, with its tax-funded weird fetishes, nudity, and anti-Christian hate speech was a legitimate use of deception.

Thursday, May 28 - Bill on the stand again

Bill was back on the stand, as the Crown prosecutor resumed his aggressive cross-examination.

For two and a half hours, the Crown prosecutor questioned Bill, attempting to delegitimize him. He pounded the AIDS fatality picture on the flyer, insinuating that Bill didn’t really know what that picture was portraying, and just wanted to invoke strong negative emotions towards homosexuals with it.

Then he brought up Bill’s statistics on sexually transmitted infections in the homosexual subculture. He attacked the flyer’s unflattering description of prominent Liberal Party politicians who had been convicted of child pornography and criminal sexual conduct, along with the Liberal Party holding a vote to lower the age of consent to 14.

The prosecutor weaved all of that into evidence of “Hallmarks of Hatred.”  The “Hallmarks of Hatred” is a concept articulated by the Supreme Court of Canada where one could quote from allegedly credible sources to portray a victim group as a menace, predatory, diseased, associated with death, etc., and thus potentially cause people to hate, detest, and vilify the targeted group.  Therefore a “hate speech” crime is committed.

Bill’s response was consistent: Christians have a duty to warn about eternal and physical consequences related to rebellion against God and his flyer was Scriptural, factual, and grounded in how he perceives truth.

To everyone’s surprise the Crown also asked Bill to reveal the identities of the five other costumed Christian activists who were at the parade with him passing out the flyer packages.

Bill didn’t answer and his lawyer objected. Justice Molloy asked the Crown, “Why do you want that information?” The attorney replied, “The police would like to talk to Mr. Whatcott’s activists.”  Justice Molloy upheld the objection and the Crown was unable to continue with that line of questioning.

Wednesday, June 3 – Closing arguments

The final day was devoted to closing arguments by both sides.

The Crown: The prosecution attempted to portray Bill as an unrepentant hater. They argued that Bill’s flyer tactics are “Hallmarks of Hatred” meant to demean homosexuals — portraying them as a threat to children, associating them with disease, and suggesting they were undeserving of equal treatment. Prosecutors argued since Bill knew from previous run-ins with the law years earlier that this kind of language was harmful, and thus his decision to use similar language again was strong evidence he knew exactly what he was doing. They also pointed to alleged inconsistencies in his testimony and his “admission” that he considered dishonesty acceptable for what they say he called “tactical” reasons. From that, they said, this undermined his credibility and supported the conclusion that his real motive was hostility toward the gay community, not religious expression.

The Defense: The defense countered that the legal bar for a criminal conviction is much higher than in the earlier, non-criminal case the Crown kept invoking: The law requires proof that Whatcott actively intended to stir up hatred, not simply that his flyer might offend or upset people. They argued the setting mattered: the flyer was handed directly, in person, to the very people it supposedly targeted, along with Whatcott's real name and contact information — behavior they said made little sense for someone trying to provoke hatred. They also argued the flyer, taken as a whole, expressed concern for the reader's wellbeing and explicitly offered spiritual redemption, which they said runs counter to the kind of negative message the law is meant to capture. The defense maintained Whatcott had deliberately toned down his language compared to earlier material, believing in good faith that he was staying within the bounds of what the law allowed.

The judge pressed both sides on where exactly the line falls between offensive religious or political speech, which is legally protected, and language that rises to the level of criminally promoting hatred — a distinction that appeared to be the crux of the case going into Wednesday's verdict.

A few weeks later, the Crown and defense filed full written closing submissions with the court, expanding on their oral closing arguments.

The Ontario Court of Appeal in Toronto, where the Crown persuaded the leftist justices that Nick Mulé's testimony was important enough to force Bill to face trial again.

Final thoughts

If judged honestly by the facts and directives of the law and the Supreme Court of Canada, Bill should easily be acquitted again.

The whole idea of spending millions of dollars to prosecute a person for a “hateful” flyer that was passed out a decade ago – that can’t even be legitimately proven as hateful – is Orwellian enough.

Added to that, judicial dishonesty is a big problem across Canada. Judges routinely ignore or purposely broaden the letter of the law and higher courts’ adjudications – especially in cases involving “culture war” issues. It happens in the US and everywhere else, of course, but it has become alarming in Canada.

For that reason, we are sadly not optimistic about the pending verdict in this case.