1. WEIRD CASES
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 recently while defending a
legal action in Canada. He was sued by Karen Sala, a woman he said he’d 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 action 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 hadn’t realised
until recently that Reeves had sometimes impersonated her husband. Additionally, she hadn’t
realised her lover was ‘Reeves the film star’ because she knew him as ‘Marty Spencer’.
It isn’t 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’s 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’d 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 the costs of Mr
Reeves.
Gary Slapper’s new book Weird Cases is published by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill.
These articles were published by The Times Online as part of the weekly column written by
Gary Slapper