‘Manifestly frivolous’: Convicted of criminal harassment of teenage girls, 34-year-old music teacher’s half dozen Charter applications rejected one by one

Bevin van Liempt’s ongoing legal time wasting continues to torment with vexatious lawsuits against his victims’ mothers, witnesses, third parties

It’s hard to pick which of Bevin van Liempt’s five Charter applications heard in provincial court 11 months after he pleaded guilty to criminal harassment for a relentless romantic pursuit of female teenage music students was most legally ludicrous.

A top contender was the 34-year-old music instructor’s claim that criminal harassment itself is a violation of his right to freedom of expression protected under section 2b of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the Charter).

You read that right, van Liempt believes section 264 of the Criminal Code of Canada should be struck because the law violates free speech. This is the same man who has filed defamation lawsuits against two dozen people, including his victims’ mothers, witnesses, and third parties.  

“You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre,” Crown counsel Jim Barbour pointed out in court last week using the tried-and-true explanation of how freedom of speech is not absolute.

This application was not dismissed as “manifestly frivolous” as others were by Judge Paul Sandhu in provincial court in Abbotsford on Wednesday and Thursday (Jan. 28-29, 2026), but only because it was withdrawn when van Liempt was informed that if he wanted to literally rewrite the criminal code, he needed to get the Attorney General of Canada involved.

Before finally proceeding with a sentencing hearing on Thursday (Jan. 29, 2026) that should have been held in March 2025, Judge Sandhu patiently addressed the self-represented offender’s applications one by one. 

Crown argued that each of them should to be declared as “manifestly frivolous” as per the wording in a relatively recent Supreme Court of Canada decision.

“Manifestly frivolous” is the Supreme Court of Canada’s way of describing applications that should be rejected outright without wasting precious court time on the details. The specific wording comes from the 2023 R. v. Haevischer decision addressing the threshold to summarily dismiss applications in a criminal case. The Haevischer standard now helps lower courts navigate between the essential, if often conflicting, values of trial fairness and trial efficiency. 

“The ‘frivolous’ part of the standard weeds out those applications that will necessarily fail,” the SCC decision explains, “and ‘manifestly’ captures the idea that the frivolous nature of the application should be obvious.” 

If the frivolous nature is not obvious, the application should be heard on its merits. If an applicant is making ridiculous applications out of ignorance or obstinance, they should be summarily dismissed.

’I want to see her phone’

First up on van Liempt’s list of applications was his claim that his Section 7 Charter rights (life, liberty, security of the person) were violated because Crown did not disclose to him a metaphorical haystack of texts and emails from one of his victim’s phones so he could pore over the teenage girl’s communications. In what can only be seen as an attempt to ramp up the harassment with the help of the court, van Liempt wanted to see if he could find a needle of evidence in the haystack that showed maybe, just maybe, she actually liked him.

“Manifestly frivolous,” Judge Sandhu determined, pointing out that his application was asking the court to make inferences on facts that never came out during trial or even after. 

“I also find the asserted facts in Mr. van Liempt’s application to downplay the significance of his guilty plea and his unsuccessful application to withdraw his guilty pleas.”

A fatal flaw riddled throughout van Liempt’s hundreds of pages of time-wasting legal filings is that an offender can’t make Charter applications after pleading guilty and after losing an application to revoke guilty pleas.

“Entering a guilty plea has consequences,” Judge Sandhu told van Liempt. “And one of those consequences is an accused at that time … not only loses the right to trial, but they waive their right to raise Charter issues.”

Charter complaints after a plea are too late

Next up was van Liempt’s complaint that multiple Charter rights were violated after he was arrested for breaching release conditions by repeatedly sending unwanted emails to people at the school from where he was fired from. 

He claimed he was simply trying to tell the individuals that he was going to call them as witnesses at the trial and he might have to subpoena them.

“Manifestly frivolous,” Judge Sandhu determined again asking, if these were supposedly Charter violations, why didn’t he bring them up during the trial in 2024 or before he pleaded guilty in February 2025 or before he fought to have those pleas overturned for other reasons in September 2025?

That ship sailed long ago.

Prophylactic complaints

A close second for the most fatuous application by van Liempt was his third one of the day when he tried to argue that his multiple arrests and bail revocations that led to more than 200 days of incarceration for repeated refusals to follow laws, the advice of police, or court-ordered conditions issued by judges, represented “oppressive state conduct.”

“[I have] already served an extraordinary sentence,” he argued in his application. “Any further proceeding imposed upon conviction now would be unlawful and outrageous as the ‘time served’ already vastly exceeds the moral culpability of the offense [sic].”

Judge Sandhu pointed out the application’s obvious and fatal flaw: He hasn’t been sentenced yet.

Dear Judge, please change your mind?

There was one other application also withdrawn, but van Liempt’s final one in the two-day hearing asking for a summary acquittal was actually his most non-sensical. 

The application was an attempt to re-litigate the criminal case that was resolved 11 months prior with his own willing guilty pleas. He began his 24-page application discussing his “relationship” with his second victim. The application pored over their exchanges and even her rejection of him, which he claims was in an email that she didn’t write.

As Crown counsel Jim Barbour put it, “He is unrepentant. The risk is high. He is taking the position that he is right and everybody else is wrong.” 

Van Liempt has more than once even shared the final email from one victim, an email response that would have shut down any other romantic suitor.

That email in its entirety, which he has repeated in his own court filings: 
“Bevin, I am not interested in you,” she wrote.
“You have created a drunken, insane delusion in your mind.
“I find you a repulsive, pathetic freak. I have no desire to be with you or ever see you again. Your advances make me feel dirty. Unclean. I want to use a pair of salad tongs to peel my skin off from the eyelids down. I have no kind feelings towards you. 
“Do not contact me. Do not reply to this message. 
“Know that you have ruined a happy experience for me, and made this a miserable Christmas. 
“If you make further advances, I will consider it harassment and personally contact the police. 
“I hope you feel every bit the disgusting pervert you are. I hope the truth about you gets out and mothers know to keep their daughters far away from scum like you. You aren't worth the shit on the bottom of my work boots. 
“Go to hell where you belong.”

Despite the overt demand to not reply, he did. Over and over and over and over again. There is what seems to be a thinly veiled threat saying that “the absolute worst thing anyone could do, at this point, is try to protect you.” He demands that the girl “calm down,” and tries to mansplain away her fear by telling her “you are fine” and “there is no danger.” Most confusingly, van Liempt uses backwards logic suggesting that even though his romantic advances were rejected and his relentless pursuit prompted police intervention, it’s OK, he will not make her suffer nor is she in any trouble. 

As with the other applications, Judge Sandhu did not need to get into the disturbing weeds here because a criminally convicted offender can’t make an appeal to a conviction to the same court that convicted him. 

“The Crown argues this court has no jurisdiction to hear an appeal of its own decision,” Judge Sandhu determined. “I agree.”

He pointed again to the Haevischer decision regarding summary dismissal of manifestly frivolous applications. In this example it was because there was “a fundamental flaw in the application’s legal pathway.”

“An application may be manifestly frivolous because the judge has no jurisdiction to grant the requested remedy.”

Sentencing, finally

The frivolous applications of van Liempt heard Jan. 28, 29, 2026, to try to unring the bell of his guilty pleas and failure to have them overturned finally wrapped up one phase of the long process protracted by van Liempt’s self-represented legal shenanigans. 

“The complainants have been enduring ongoing torment with what the Crown submits is vexatious litigation with respect to all these matters,” prosecutor Barbour told the court last Wednesday. 

“The complainant in this matter, as you have seen in their victim impact statements, are essentially tormented and their life is turned upside down as a result of the actions of Mr. van Liempt toward them.”

The ongoing harassment has affected these girls’ lives, the lives of those around them and several third parties as his campaign of harassment now turned to vengeance continues with malicious civil lawsuits. 

“The non-closure of the incident is basically … Mr. van Liempt saying ‘I’m going to make you pay in another way for what you’ve done to me.’” 

The rejection of Bevin van Liempt’s nonsensical applications dressed up in his jailhouse-researched legalese littered with a vainglorious use of Latin and unnecessary verbiage ended the frivolous part of his post-conviction applications, and the sentencing hearing could finally be held.

Because he has spent so much time in custody for his unrepentant, ongoing, yet physically non-violent criminal behaviour he was never going to see more time behind bars. In fact, if he apologized and expressed contrition after admitting his criminal harassment a year ago, even then he would not have received more jail time.

The question now is how much jail time will appear on his record as a sentence and how long he should be on probation to protect the specific victims but also the general community from his high risk for stalking. 

Barbour suggested a fit sentence would be three months jail for each count of criminal harassment (less than actual time he has served) followed by two to three years of probation. Van Liempt argued he should be granted a conditional discharge.

Harassment is far from over

“This matter has gone on for a long time,” Barbour said at the sentencing hearing portion of proceedings. “Mr. van Liempt has not been successful on bail. He is unrepentant. The risk is high. He is taking the position, I would respectfully submit, that he is right [and] everybody else is wrong, and there needs to be an afforded protection for the two complainants in this matter as well as others who potentially may be the subject of Mr. van Liempt’s unwanted attractions.”

In addition to his continued lack of recognition he committed crimes and his lack of contrition, a shockingly relevant detail in the sentencing hearing was his delusional notion that after all the trauma and fear he has incited, he believes these girls want to be with him. When Barbour suggested that van Liempt’s applications were delay tactics or something to torment his victims, his response was that he wasn’t intentionally delaying the proceedings because that is not in his best interests.

“This only hurts me, right?” he said pointing out delays only push the end of his probation period down the road.

“This keeps me away from EG and AY longer.”

Neither Barber nor Judge Sandhu directly addressed this at the time, but it was a shocking declaration that van Liempt still plans on contacting the young women.

Despite what has transpired over the last year and a half, van Liempt speaks of the first complainant EG as if she is a Juliet to his Romeo, as if she loves him as much as he loves her, and when he breaks the bonds of this unjust barrier keeping them apart, created by a society that doesn’t understand their love, it can flourish.

Even when van Liempt himself describes being rejected, he re-characterizes it as a secret love.

“I spent a great deal of time talking about her ability to say no to me, that if we were going to engage in the relationship that I proposed, that it was important that she could know that that she could say anything to me, and I wouldn't get upset, that she would be able to ignore me, and I wouldn't get upset.”

He even suggested with a naive presentation that, “if I had not asked her out, but for that, she would have been spared all that came to fall.”

And despite the criminal proceedings he is in the midst of and two girls who want nothing to do with him, he says the amount of responsibility that weighs on his conscience is “terrifying” and is the motive for much of what he did.

“It haunts me, that her life was so affected,” he said, ignoring the fact that this is all about his actions. “I'm talking specifically about EG here, that it was so affected by what I did in that way. That is why I have fought as hard as I have. That is why I took the things that happened to me in stride because she simply deserves better than what she got, by a lot.”

Still oblivious to the harm he caused and the circumstances he is in as a result of his actions, van Liempt alternates between a saviour complex and his own victim complex.

“My life is ruined,” he said. “You are looking at a smoking ruin of a person.”

Still, no self-reflection or admittance of guilt.

“I don't blame EG,” he said unironically. “I don't blame AY. The person I blame is sitting in this room. It's not those two.”

That person sitting in the room was not himself. He blames Heidi Epp from Bakerview Music Academy who called him on his ongoing inappropriate messaging of girls who he taught music, culminating in his dismissal.

In one of his manifestly frivolous applications to the court, van Liempt describes what he calls the “construction of victimhood” even admitting that while his second victim expressed in her victim impact statement her fear and that he made her a victim, she is wrong. She is not a victim, he said. For van Liempt, and importantly his supportive mother DeWit, they are the victims. 

“She was not a ‘victim’ of any crime,” van Liempt claims in his application.

Any victimhood was not caused by him, it was caused by four parties, presumably in this order: AY’s mother who turned their loving exchanges into a “threat to the family”; the police who arrested him illegally to validate the narrative of danger; the Crown who pursued criminal charges to ruin his life despite the fact that there was “no menace towards the complainant whatsoever”; and lastly to this writer, “Paul Henderson who branded the applicant a ‘sexual predator’ creating the public shame the complainant now feels (‘dirty and stained’)”. 

On this last point, two clarifications are important: Firstly, van Liempt attributes public shame to his victim despite not having seen or communicated with her for over a year and he is simply wrong. His victim has repeatedly pointed out how validated and heard she feels because of the reporting of van Liempt’s criminal behaviour, and she is absolutely thriving in his absence, succeeding greatly in school and advancing with her singing by leaps and bounds after being freed from van Liempt’s tutelage.

Secondly, in more than a dozen stories in this ongoing criminal case, more than 20,000 words of prose, not once was van Liempt described as a “sexual predator.” In fact, the word or variant “sex” appears three times in all those stories: once to explain that a specific email referenced was not about sex; a second time quoting his mother Paula DeWit lying to someone in an email that the coverage talked about his sexual harassment; and a third time referencing van Liempt himself in a lawsuit against his victim’s mother claiming he was described as a “sexual predator.” 

Were they 17 or 18 and does it matter?

In a final moment of clarification, Crown counsel Jim Barbour addressed van Liempt’s repeated assertion about the age of his victims and that he only every pursues adult females who are 18, as if that made the criminal harassment OK.

In trying to claim that, Van Liempt’s own words were telling.

“In terms of AY, it’s true she was 17 and like 345 days and I said, ‘hey, when you turn 18 you want to get dinner?” he said in court. 

“At no material time during the charge period whatsoever was EG younger than 18.”

As the proceedings wrapped up on Thursday at the end of the sentencing hearing, Barbour said he wanted to make a point of clarification for the judge.

“Miss G was 18 during the offence time but the communication occurred when she was 17,” he said.

Again, even van Liempt conceded, “It started when she was 17, yes.”

With that, the hearing ended and was put over to Tuesday (Feb. 3, 2026) at which time a sentencing decision date was scheduled for March 12.

A week before that, van Liempt has a court date scheduled for an application by this reporter to dismiss his civil lawsuit under B.C.’s anti-SLAPP legislation known as the Protection of Public Participation Act.

Even if that is successful, van Liempt has made it clear that he will not stop and he will file an appeal to potential failed civil matters and to his criminal conviction, despite his guilty pleas, and he will continue to keep his victims suffering.

To that end, Barbour put it well, pointing out that in the absence of court orders, and even when he is subject to them, he “is a high risk at harassing young women.”

“This is ongoing harm to at least the two women that are subject of this file,” Barbour said. 

“It doesn’t end with the conclusion of this case. It is ongoing.”

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Paul J. Henderson
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