A man who secretly videotaped hundreds of clients at his massage therapy clinic has been sentenced to house arrest and probation – and jail time is still a possibility.
James Ward pleaded guilty last month to two counts apiece of voyeurism and making child pornography.
He was sentenced Monday to 15 months of house arrest followed by two years of probation.
That sentence was for the voyeurism charges only, with sentencing on the child porn offences scheduled for Tuesday.
Ward’s lawyer, Bernard Cummins, says he expects that his client will be sentenced to about six months in jail on those charges.
According to court documents, Ward set up a camera in the room where his female clients undressed before their massages, and secretly recorded more than 1,000 videos of 259 different people.
The camera was discovered last June by one of the clients, who then notified police.
The child porn charges were laid because two of the people recorded were under the age of 18.
Cummins says that his client feels “tremendous remorse” for what he did.
“He understood that he had to face the music, and that there would be consequences for his actions,” he said outside court Monday.
The business Ward ran went by the name Queen Street Business. It operated out of the top floor of a property on Queen Street in Kitchener.
With reporting by Allison Tanner
