Description of the Main Players and Events

Thelma Vassel, the books author and main protagonist, was for several years a
licensed exotic dancer working at the Sundowner Gentlemens Club in Niagara Falls,
Canada under the stage name Linda Lee. In 2010-11, she was sued by a customer
namedPaul Dagenais, who claimed she had borrowed as much as $150,000 from
him between July 2009 and January 2010. A judgement in favour of Dagenais
by Superior Court Justice Lococo in August 2011 was subsequently upheld by
the Ontario Court of Appeals in 2012. In both courts, Thelma was represented by
a young lawyer named Zijad Saskin, who turned out to have a close and longstanding relationship to Sundowner owner Chris Rudan.
Represented by Welland attorney Clark Peddle and urged on by his siblings (in
particular his sister Denise) to pursue his claim against Thelma, Paul Dagenais was
able to prevail in court but, in the end, achieved only a pyrrhic victory. Within a few
months of the Superior Court decision, he died of undisclosed causes at the age of
61. Since Paul left no children behind, the Dagenais siblings and their offspring,
with Denise as executor, were the likely beneficiaries of Pauls estate which now
included a court-ordered claim of more than $130,000 on Thelmas assets.
Thelma consistently and vehemently denied borrowing any money from Paul
Dagenais, and went to great lengths to refute his claims. Her self-authored, wellargued and meticulously detailed application to the Supreme Court of Canada for
a review of the case, however, was rejected in late 2012 without explanation.
Although Superior Court Justice Lococo had ordered Thelma to pay Dagenais
$125,000 in restitution, as well as interest, court costs and legal fees, Dagenais
attorney Clark Peddle (a specialist in both estate and real-estate law) failed to
obtain a lien against her main asset, a home in Niagara-on-the-Lake, even after the
appeals process had been exhausted. In the summer of 2013, the finance company
with whom Thelma had been dealing, Home Trust, foreclosed on her mortgage,
citing her failure to make regular payments. As of July 2014, Thelma had yet to
receive a report from this company (a subsidiary of the Toronto-based Home Capital
Group) regarding the disposition of the substantial equity she had accumulated on
her property.
The loss of Thelmas home resulted from an ever-worsening financial situation,
beginning in 2010. As long as she was working regularly at the Sundowner club,
she was able to meet all of her financial obligations, including payments
to Revenue Canada for back (GST) taxes. Her finances became increasingly
unmanageable, however, after Sundowner management started punishing her for

supposed infractions of club rules beginning with her audio recording of a

conversation in which a club bouncer tried to extort money from her. Within a few
months of the latter incident, Paul Dagenais and Thelma experienced a bitter falling
out; the legal proceedings between them commenced; and Zijad Saskin was hired
to represent Thelma.
Soon after, she began to suspect that Saskin was disclosing her legal problems to
Chris Rudan. There are also indications that, in the days or weeks that followed,
Rudan may have come to suspect Thelma of recording a racist outburst he had
made during a bizarre meeting he convened with the Sundowners black dancers,
an incident that was subsequently reported to the Ontario Human Rights
Tribunal. Its unclear whether a serious investigation into the matter was ever
conducted, but it seems highly probable that the tribunal would have questioned
Rudan about the complaint.
Although Thelma was never permanently barred from working at the Sundowner,
management repeatedly ordered her to work at a number of Rudans less-busy
satellite clubs in other centers in Niagara and Southern Ontario. Promised that she
would eventually be able to return to her home club, she nevertheless found herself
unable to earn the kind of money that she was accustomed to making at the
Sundowner. Concurrently, she experienced a series of Stalking Vehicle incidents at
her out-of-the-way home on the shores of Lake Ontario. Her attempts to enlist
serious help and protection from the Niagara Regional Police in connection with
these incidents were repeatedly met with skepticism, indifference and bemusement.
Fearing for her safety, Thelma finally gave up on the idea of returning to the
Sundowner and eventually went into hiding. The mortgage foreclosure and loss of
her home soon followed.
As the book To Kill a Naked Bird makes clear, the connections between the major
players in this drama, while often murky and open to speculation, are nevertheless
very real. Whats more, an unmistakable pattern becomes visible in light of the
major outcome of the unfolding events: Thelmas dispossession of her hard-earned
property by an unscrupulous family, a shady and usurious mortgage company, a
vengeful employer, scheming lawyers, and a justice system that was unwilling to
safeguard the elementary legal rights of a vulnerable black woman seeking to make
a living in an industry deemed morally suspect by a hypocritical mainstream
culture.
Apart from Clark Peddle and the Dagenais family, the central figure in what
amounts to a conspiracy to ruin Thelma, pressure her into selling her home, and
dispossess her of her property was her own lawyer, Zijad Saskin. While feigning
sympathy for her, Saskin systematically undermined her position at every turn.

Most egregiously, Saskin went so far as to encourage her to sell her house and
disappear in other words, to violate the court order against her. Had Thelma
been foolish or desperate enough to do so, the most likely outcome would have
been her incarceration and a court seizure of the proceeds from the sale of her
home, which would then have been made available for distribution to the Dagenais
family, Peddle and Saskin. It strains credulity to believe that Saskin was unaware of
all this when he offered Thelma his confidential advice advice that she had the
foresight and good sense to record on her iPhone.
The closing pages of To Kill a Naked Bird detail Thelmas efforts to expose Saskins
unethical and even criminal behaviour before theLaw Society of Upper Canada,
the regulatory body of the legal profession in Ontario. As it becomes increasingly
apparent that she is no more likely to receive redress from this quarter than from
any other branch of Canadas justice system, she resolves to launch a campaign
to attract public attention to the serious constitutional and human-rights issues that
her extraordinary story brings into such clear focus.