In the film The Matrix, Keanu Reeves plays a character who moves in and out of the real world. He might have thought he was having a similar experience while defending a recent legal action in Canada. Reeves was sued by Karen Sala, a woman he said he had never met but who claimed that he had disguised himself as her husband and, over 25 years, fathered her four children.
Representing herself in a paternity lawsuit brought in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice, Sala sought C$3 million a month in spousal support payments for her four adult children and C$150,000 a month in child support backdated to 1988. She claimed that she had known Reeves since she was a child.
She said “I do know for a fact that he is the biological father”. Her children were conceived, she argued, after Reeves used sophisticated disguises in order to make her think she was making love to her husband.
The reason for the delay in bringing the paternity suit, Sala contended, was that although she had had a sexual relationship with Reeves during and after her marriage, she had not realised until recently that Reeves had sometimes impersonated her husband. Additionally, she had not realised her lover was ‘Reeves the film star’ because she knew him as ‘Marty Spencer’.
It is not unprecedented for someone in a court case to claim they had sex with one person thinking it was someone else. In a 1971 case from Colchester, England a woman had invited into her bed a young man who appeared on her outside windowsill one night. Seeing him crouched there in silhouette in an aroused state, she thought it was her boyfriend but only discovered during sex that it was someone else.
The young man was later acquitted of criminal conduct. That, though, was a ten minute relationship. It is more unusual to make a mistake about a sexual partner’s identity for 25 years.
In her affidavit, Sala said that Reeves helped her to move house, told her he would take her to the Academy Awards and said that he would marry her. She testified that she still sees him in her local Macdonald’s and in the No Frills grocery store.
Conversely, Reeves argued that on planet earth he had never met Karen Sala. He agreed to DNA testing but when the results came back proving that Sala’s children were not his, Sala told the court that the results were fake and that Reeves had used his powers of hypnosis to get someone to falsify the results. As Neo in The Matrix, Reeves spoke of “a world where anything is possible”. Was he there again?
Reeves probably perceived the final moments of the case in slow-motion as Judge Fred Graham banged a gavel and brought everyone back to reality. The judge ruled that Sala’s evidence was so incredible that “it is not capable of acceptance by any reasonable trier of fact”. He dismissed the case and ordered Sala to pay $15,000 towards Reeves’ costs.
Gary Slapper’s new book, Weird Cases, is published by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill
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Full article: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/columnists/article7001485.ece
