One of the little perks of Jess Whittle’s job in a local fitness centre was that she had her own office. It wasn’t fancy, but it was her space, and she appreciated having somewhere private to speak to clients or to change out of her workout clothes after a lunchtime exercise class.
That’s exactly what she had done one day in August 2015. Later in the day, she was sitting at her desk when her partner, who had popped in for a visit, noticed something strange.
“He told me there was a phone under my desk,” Whittle says. “I pulled the chair back, and on top of a box was an old iPod, with the camera facing out.”
Whittle picked it up and turned it around, and saw that it was recording video. She had never seen the iPod before and had no idea how it got there. Upset, she showed it to her manager.
“I said, ‘Do you know who owns this?’ She said, ‘Yeah. It’s Alex’s.’ She had seen him with this old iPod before,” Whittle said.
Alex Seymour was Whittle’s co-worker of about three years, “a little muffin,” she says of how people viewed him. He was young and friendly, and the two always got along well.
“You’d think he was so sweet,” Whittle says.
Whittle says her manager spoke to Seymour privately, then called her into the meeting as well, explaining that Seymour hadn’t seen his iPod in a few days, and the password must have been changed because he wasn’t able to access it. The manager suggested wiping the device of all images without viewing them, but gave Whittle the ultimate say.
Whittle chose to take the device to the RNC.
After some time, investigators retrieved the videos from the iPod, and called Whittle in to look at them. She says she saw Seymour setting up the camera under her desk, standing in different locations, appearing to test the viewing angle before picking up the iPod and seeming to leave, later returning. She saw video of herself taken the day she had found the iPod, changing her clothes in her office.
There were other videos, too, taken in the offices of two of Whittle’s female coworkers.
“I’d like to see him having the punishment of a criminal record. So when some young girl sees him on Tinder or meets him somewhere, she can recognize him and go, ‘Nope.’” — Jess Whittle
One of them was Sherri O’Halloran, a former client of the fitness centre before becoming an employee. She and Seymour had been close since before she started working there, and she and her husband had even given him the key to their home so he could take care of their pets while they were away on holiday.
O’Halloran says she was the subject of three videos on the iPod. In one of them, she was topless.
“It was the most messed-up thing that I could imagine, when I got that phone call,” O’Halloran says of being asked by police to come view the videos. “When I saw I had no clothes on, the vomit came up in my throat.
“(Seymour) knew we changed in our offices because we’d drive him out, saying, ‘Go, we’ve got to get changed.”
Seymour was charged with three counts of unlawfully observing or making a visual recording where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, as well as three counts of publishing, distributing or selling an intimate image of a person without their consent.
He has yet to attend court, entering guilty pleas through his lawyer, but is set to appear at a sentencing hearing in St. John’s this morning.
He didn’t respond to a request for comment sent to his lawyer from The Telegram.
“I was so happy he got charged, but kind of sad, too, that this was someone I had let into my home, had told about my sons, had given dating advice,” O’Halloran says. “It was really a strange feeling of, yes, he’s going to be charged and hopefully will get what he deserves, but how am I so foolish to take him in like that?”
Neither O’Halloran nor Whittle has seen Seymour since the day the iPod was discovered, and both women say the court process, with repeated postponements, has been emotional and exhausting, though they’ve attended every one.
Their lives have changed, they say: they’ve become more private, less trusting of people — and of their own character judgment — and have dealt with feelings of guilt and shame, even though they know they’ve done nothing wrong.
O’Halloran says it took her almost a year and a half to tell her family members what happened, because she was ashamed to talk about it.
Both women are nervous about what will happen in court today. They say they’ve been told not to expect Seymour to receive a jail sentence, and have thought of other ways they might be able to get some closure.
“I just want people to know he did this to me,” O’Halloran says. “This is the guy who did this to his coworkers, his friends.”
“I’d like to see him having the punishment of a criminal record,” Whittle adds. “So when some young girl sees him on Tinder or meets him somewhere, she can recognize him and go, ‘Nope.’”
Twitter: @tara_bradbury
