Quebec man found guilty of fomenting hatred against Jews asks for new trial

MONTREAL — A lawyer representing a Quebec man convicted of fomenting hatred against Jews is asking for a retrial, arguing the judge was biased against his client.

The case involving Gabriel Sohier-Chaput was heard Wednesday at the Quebec Court of Appeal in Montreal. Sohier-Chaput was not physically present.

Quebec court Judge Manlio Del Negro sentenced Sohier-Chaput in September 2023 to a year and three months in jail followed by three years’ probation. The accused appealed both the guilty verdict and the sentence.

Sohier-Chaput’s lawyer, Antonio Cabral, told the panel of three Court of Appeal justices that Del Negro’s judgment may have been affected by news media headlines at the time about antisemitism.

When he filed the appeal, Cabral also argued the trial judge erred in his analysis of Sohier-Chaput’s credibility as a witness by comparing the defendant to Machiavelli and implied — without citing any concrete evidence — that he had rallied his readers to the “virus of hate.”

At the Court of Appeal, Cabral said Sohier-Chaput’s first trial lawyer, Hélène Poussard, dropped the case after tense interactions with Del Negro. He says the judge “undermined her credibility as a lawyer” and did not seriously consider the defence’s arguments.

The initial trial was marked by debates between the prosecution and the defence over what facts about the Holocaust and Nazi ideology needed to be established by an expert witness and which ones were so well known the judge could accept them without further evidence.

On Wednesday Cabral read a court transcript of an exchange between Poussard and Del Negro in which the judge told the lawyer to “stop speaking” and that she was “out of line” after she attempted to argue that the number of Jewish people killed in the Holocaust was not known.

Cabral said Poussard was simply answering Del Negro’s questions without being able to consult her client and that the exchange proves the judge’s contempt for the lawyer and the defendant.

The three justices repeatedly asked Cabral if that exchange should be taken separately from Del Negro’s guilty ruling, a decision Cabral admitted came after careful reflection. They also asked both the defence and Crown whether the exchange was relevant to the final verdict in the case.

Crown attorney Xavier Lyonnais told the panel that Sohier-Chaput was found guilty beyond all reasonable doubt and that the Crown’s proof was substantial. He said one “difficult exchange” should not be the basis of a new trial.

During sentencing, Del Negro had called Sohier-Chaput a “hate influencer” who represented a continued risk to society because he hadn’t grasped the seriousness of his actions or the harm he had caused.

Sohier-Chaput had testified that his writing was meant to be satire, with the use of irony and exaggeration to offend and attack political correctness. Del Negro rejected those arguments, considering them insincere, opportunistic and lacking credibility.

Sohier-Chaput was a prolific writer for online neo-Nazi sites like the Daily Stormer — named after the Nazi-era propaganda newspaper Der Sturmer — between 2016 and 2017.

In an agreed statement of fact, Sohier-Chaput had admitted to writing between 800 and 1,000 articles under the pseudonym “Charles Zeiger.” However, the trial hinged on a single article presented as evidence saying that 2017 would be the year of “non-stop Nazism, everywhere” and mocking a Holocaust survivor.

Del Negro ruled the wording and content of the article was intended to foment hatred against Jewish people.

Both the Crown and defence had jointly suggested he serve three months in jail, but Del Negro flatly rejected that recommendation because he worried it would trivialize the crime.

The Court of Appeal justices said they would deliberate and render their decision at a later date.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 6, 2026.

Erika Morris, The Canadian Press