Sam Cooper (The Province) – At an RCMP hearing into a sex relationship between a high-ranking Burnaby Mountie and a female subordinate, the woman alleged that her boss seemed to operate a sort of “snoop” network within the RCMP, seeking to control both superiors and underlings by gathering “dirt” on fellow officers.
Const. Susan Gastaldo and Staff-Sgt. Travis Pearson — previously a professional standards supervisor — are accused of having sex in a police car and sending sexual messages via an RCMP Blackberry in 2009, while Gastaldo served under Pearson on Burnaby’s “Special O” surveillance unit.
As The Province previously reported, Gastaldo has filed a civil suit in B.C. Supreme Court alleging that Pearson used his power and her vulnerable mental condition to sexually assault her at his home and coerce her into ongoing sex relations.
In Vancouver on Thursday at an RCMP hearing Gastaldo admitted to committing sex acts and sharing messages with Pearson, but she presented a picture of her boss as a scheming manipulator who was potentially involved in “blackmail.”
“He seemed to have an invincible card,” Gastaldo said. “He said he had some sort of [information] that someone said or did around the Air India case … if anybody ever tried to get him in trouble he had that in hand, and no one would ever touch him.”
Gastaldo alleged when she returned to work from medical leave in 2009 Pearson told her it was her “task” to “snoop around to get dirt” on a Lower Mainland RCMP inspector, and “he seemed to have something on so many people [in the RCMP].”
Gastaldo, a brunette, held back tears while testifying about an alleged meeting with Pearson.
In July 2009 she said she wanted to confront Pearson and agreed to meet him behind a garbage dump in an undeveloped area of Burnaby.
Pearson pressured her to enter a bush area with him, where they “did it again,” Gastaldo said, before Pearson left her “lying on a blanket, face down in the dirt.”
“It was creepy, he just got up and started to walk away [after sex] … as if I was part of the garbage pile,” Gastaldo said. “I felt like lying down and closing my eyes and never getting up again.”
She said Pearson was sending pornographic pictures to her phone but she refused to send him anything explicit, first sending photos of objects around her house under his “persistent” pressure, but eventually progressing to sending pictures of her underwear and herself partially naked.
“He was sending naked pictures of himself playing with himself and even ejaculating into dishes,” Gastaldo alleged.
In a bizarre turn of testimony, Gastaldo told three RCMP adjudicators that after disclosing so much personal information, she felt compelled to tell them that Pearson told her “Satan” was his hero, and that he claimed to in fact be the devil.
“Travis told me he was Satan and he could prove it, too,” Gastaldo said, alleging that Pearson told her he had been promoted on the sixth day of the sixth month in 2006.
“It was a very awful, evil feeling I had,” Gastaldo said. “I was scared … part of me kind of thought that could be … true.”
Outside the hearing Pearson, about five-foot-seven with short blond hair, said he could not comment on the allegations. Pearson’s legal counsel is expected to cross-examine Gastaldo Friday as the investigation into both officers’ conduct proceeds.
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