Navigating the dark web: Surrey RCMP officer's child porn trial delves into nefarious corners of online world

Const. Michael Scoretz charged with accessing child pornography, suggests pedophiles should be part of LGBTQ community

The image appeared on Michael Scoretz’s phone’s screen for just a second, maybe even less.

Ann Fletcher saw the image and immediately said “shut it down, shut it down, shut it down.”

The new couple were lying in bed discussing future plans, travel, shopping, before Fletcher asked Scoretz, an RCMP officer who had worked on national security, what he could tell her about the dark web. He told her a little about its history, how it was created by the U.S. Navy to protect American intelligence online.

“He said at one point, ‘Maybe it’s easier if I just show you,’” Fletcher said on the witness stand in provincial courtroom 203 in Chilliwack on Tuesday (March 25, 2025) morning.

Scoretz downloaded the software needed to access the dark web, Tor, which uses so-called “onion routing” to stay anonymous and hidden. 

“What do you want to see?” Scoretz asked her. It was May 10, 2022.

“Something seedy,” she responded. “Nothing snuff.”

On his phone, he landed at what Fletcher said looked like a chat forum. She described it as looking like Reddit without the icons. He scrolled up and up and up quickly collecting links, copy-and-pasting them on a separete screen.

Then he told her: “Now we wait. You have to wait to be invited in.”

It didn’t take long before the image opened up on the screen. It was a naked pre-pubescent girl with blonde hair who, based on the graphic description Fletcher provided, was clearly the victim of a sexual assault. 

One click to a criminal charge

The entire matter might have ended right there as an awkward situation. If there was an expression of agreed upon-shock? Maybe if he claimed that a mistake was made or that the image wasn’t what she thought it was?

But instead of empathy with Fletcher’s emotional reaction, the officer doubled down and defended the picture. He made arguments that suggested he believed images such as this horrific one that has traumatized Fletcher helps reduce harm to children. He implied pedophilia was a sexual orientiation worthy of acceptance.

“I was in shock,” Fletcher said. “I was upset and he didn’t have any reaction.”

He then began asking questions of her.

“‘Do you think that being able to access this type of forum, this type of material, can be of benefit in that it can protect children from being harmed?’” she said he asked her.

“I said ‘No I don’t.’” she said.

“Do you think a person could be born of this orientation?’ I said ‘No, I think they are sexualized that way.’” 

And on it went.

Fletcher recounted the conversation on the witness stand as part of the criminal case against Const. Michael Scoretz who is charged with two counts of accessing child pornography, one of which is being dropped by Crown counsel Chandra Fisher.

“‘Do you think a person could be of that orientation and not offend against children?'” she said Scoretz asked her, and, "'What do you think the solution is if not having access to this type of material?'”

“I said ‘you have a weapon,’” she testified.

“Another question was, ‘Do you think that they should be a part of the LGBTQ community?’”

“Who is the ‘they’?” Fisher asked Fletcher. “What orientation are you talking about?”

“Pedophile,” Fletcher replied.

The conversation was fraught. Fletcher said she felt “disregulated” and suddenly lost her respect for Scoretz. 

“He said, ‘You are no better than a homophobe and a fascist. You are harming children.’”

Fletcher said nothing and left the room. She came back and found him packing up to leave her house. She said at the door he then started gaslighting her, reversing the role of victim and offender, saying he was upset because she did something to make him leave. 

While the conversation was only recounted by Fletcher in court, not Scoretz, his lawyer did not challenge it on cross-examination.

The onion and the iceberg

“You can’t just accidentally fall onto the dark web,” said an RCMP digital forensic examiner testifying as an expert witness.

“You have to take very specific steps in order to access websites.”

The terms “dark web” or “darknet” are interchangeable. They are part of what is referred to sometimes as the “deep web,” a layer of the internet most people never access that is not indexed with search engines such as Google. The iceberg is the obvious metaphor. Some estimate that 90 per cent of what is on the internet is on the deep web.

A subset of the deep web is the dark web, which is often associated with terrorism or illegal pornography, but has many legitimate uses by governments, research, academia and for whistleblowing and anonymous communication when needed.

The officer gave an example the news outlet CNN whose website on the regular internet is CNN.com. But CNN has a presence on the dark web and, like all dark web URLs, the site is a seemingly random alphanumeric string with nothing to identify it as CNN. It is used to receive anonymous tips, including from government or corporate whistleblowers.

“That is one of the primary uses of the dark web today,” he said.  

Tor is the name of a software program used to access an “overlay that is on top of the internet known as the onion network,” he explained. Dark websites use unique addresses that end in ".onion" instead of the usual ".com" or ".org" and you have to know where you are going.

Tor is the program that was downloaded by Scoretz lying in bed with Fletcher. It was developed by the U.S. Navy to provide secrecy for agents in the event of a serious communications failure. Communication between dark web users is highly encrypted allowing users to chat, blog, and share files confidentially.

All of this was important for Crown to establish to prove to Judge Peter Whyte that the child pornography Scoretz showed to Fletcher was not a pop-up window, it was not stumbled upon accidentally or randomly.

That’s not how the dark web works.

The RCMP expert explained that on the “clearnet,” if want to go to CNN you could type in the url CNN.com, or search CNN on Google. On the dark web, you not only need to have special software, you can’t simply search for websites with a regular search engine. The sites are not indexed. You can’t accidentally bounce around from illegal weapons sales to media whistleblowing forms to child porn.

“You very much need to research the type of information you are looking for,” he explained. 

“If you know what types of images you want to go to see, you use that .onion site and use it like a web browser.”

When Scoretz asked what Fletcher wanted to see, she didn’t say child porn and he didn’t suggest child porn, so when he arrived on a forum with a chat that Fletcher said included sexualized language, he knew exactly what he was doing.

“That was a pedophile forum,” Fletcher testified she said to Scoretz after telling him to shut it down. 

She said she remembered seeing sexually explicit words in the forum, but she couldn’t remember anything specific because she saw it so briefly.

Was it even child porn?

Is Ann Fletcher a naive witness who was swept up in a love affair, who thinks she saw an image of child pornography, and was brokenhearted, turning bitter and vengeful?

Is Michael Scoretz a sociopath interested in child pornography who thinks pedophilia should be part of the LGBTQ+ spectrum?

Or does the truth lay somewhere in between. 

Judge Whyte has a difficult decision to make on a number of levels in the case.  Does the evidence meet the legal test in the criminal code regarding accessing child pornography? As in, did he access the image, does it constitute child porn, did he know the nature of the content, and did he intend to view it?

Crown says “yes.” 

Scoretz says “no.”

“In all the circumstances, the court can be confident that he knew where he was going and he knew what he was doing,” Fisher said in her closing submissions on Tuesday. “If Mr. Scoretz also expressed some shock… it would be more natural in many cases for him to express some sort of sympathy, something more compassionate, but instead we get almost the opposite. She is in a heightened emotional state and he starts arguing the image was ‘fine.’”

Scoretz’s lawyer Anthony Robinson used his closing submissions to attempt to paint reasonable doubt in more ways than one. 

“The evidence in the case is woefully inadequate to the degree of proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said. 

The criminal code lays out the required test for a conviction on accessing child pornography, which is, under section 163.1 (4.2) “a person accesses child pornography who knowingly causes child pornography to be viewed by, or transmitted to, himself or herself.”

Robinson focused on the “knowing” and “causing,” arguing that Scoretz’s actions were reckless as he fumbled around on the dark web and found the image.

“The Crown must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Const. Scoretz knowingly caused child porn to be viewed,” Robinson said. “Why did Parliament set access at such a high bar? The natural inference to draw is because we all know that images can pop up on a browser unexpectedly. Anybody knows you can access something that you don’t want to.

“It may be reckless to search for images on the web. Recklessness is not the test…. it is ‘knowing and causing.’”

Robinson suggested that Scoretz’s strong negative reaction to her and him leaving abruptly wasn’t because he was upset about her reaction to the image, but because of her implication regarding his service revolver.

“It is equally consistent with the reaction that people who create this type of material should be shot by police officers,” Robinson said. “It also should be kept in mind that he is a war veteran.”

He suggested that the breakup hurt her deeply, and she held on to false hope they would get back together. And only then, months later, did she complain to police.

For her part, Fletcher said she was in shock after the incident. For a period of time she hoped Scoretz would reach out and explain it. As a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces and a social worker for two decades, Fletcher said she knew she had a responsibility to report, but she took time to hopefully get that explanation. When she realized it wasn't coming, she got help and support to feel safer, then she acted and reported.

She was also fearful in part because complaining to the police about a police officer can be a terrifying experience for a civilian. 

In his closing submissions, Robinson also tried to create reasonable doubt by talking about the phenomenon of innacurate witness testimony, particularly when something is seen so briefly.

“We have all had the experience of doing a double take,” Robinson said. “That could very well be what’s been happening in this case.”

Robinson also attempted to cast doubt by doubting the image, even as described, meets the legal definition of child pornography. If she was wrong about the age of the girl, if she was wrong about the graphic nature of what she saw, “then it would not meet the definition of child porn.”

“The case is woefully inadequate that it was chid pornography,” Robinson said. “The case is woefully inadequate in that the accused intended to view child porn.”

After his final submissions, Fisher responded to three elements of Robinson's arguments. 

Firstly, suggesting Scoretz could have stumbled upon child porn on the dark web flew in the face of how it works as described in the testimony of the RCMP expert witness.

Secondly, to say the frailties of witness identification can be applied to this case would be an error of law, Fisher said. Those frailties do not involve an inability to observe, it is about putting what is witnessed in context. 

Thirdly, Robinson relied on a very specific definition of child porn involving the sexual organs or anal region of a child. But there is case law, for example, from the highest court in B.C. explaining how images captured via a camera in a bathroom could be considered pornography. The act of being unclothed and bathing may not be overtly sexual but in the context of a hidden camera they might be, if they are used for a sexual purpose.

Decision looms

At the end of the submissions in the morning on Wednesday (March 26), Judge Whyte said that he did think he would be able to use the rest of the day to render his decision as planned, but concluded he needed to take more time. The case was put over to April 1 to fix a date for that decision, which won’t be until the end of May.

Crown counsel originally charged Scoretz with two counts of accessing child pornography, one from the incident with Fletcher in Chilliwack on May 10, 2022, but there was also another charge from Aug. 31, 2022 in Burnaby. The details of the latter case were not explained and Fisher said that Crown was dropping that charge.

Scoretz is also charged with two criminal breaches of his release order from April 15 and May 24, 2023, with location at Bowen Island. That is where Scoretz lives and one of the breaches is an allegation that while he was forbidden from contacting Fletcher, he commented on one of her Instagram posts. It’s unclear what the other breach allegation is about. A trial for those charges is scheduled for Aug. 7 and 8, 2025.  

Scoretz is currently suspended with pay and his duty status is subject to continuous review and assessment, according to RCMP 'E' Division spokesperson S/Sgt. Kris Clark.

“Immediately upon learning of the circumstances, a code of conduct investigation was initiated and remains ongoing,” Clark told me via email on Feb. 2, 2025.

Outside the courtroom, Scoretz approached me to discuss a case he worked on that I reported on several years prior. He told me the RCMP also has a civil case pending against him regarding a piece of evidence from that case that was found in his home that he said he forgot he had. He suggested the end goal of the federal police force was about a criminal conviction and more focused on having him fired.

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Paul J. Henderson
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