The Case of the Scholarship Sabotaging Girlfriend

Today we have the Case of the Scholarship Sabotaging Girlfriend or, to use its correct legal name, the case of Abramovitz v. Lee. It is a story of Eric Abramovitz, a university student and talented young musician, and his girlfriend, Jennifer Lee, a fellow student and musician, and the events that unfolded between them. It deals with promising new career opportunities, deception and betrayal and touches on the civil law of Canada relating to fraud.

The case was decided in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in 2018, but the events of the story occurred some 4 to 5 years earlier.

In 2013, Eric Abramovitz was a student at McGill University in the city of Montreal, Quebec. Eric was a young man in his early twenties and lifelong resident of the province of Quebec in Canada. IN early childhood, he had shown a passion and talent for music, taking up the clarinet at the age of seven years. Since that early beginning, he had practiced with some of the best music teachers in Canada and had won multiple awards. It was therefore not surprising that he had enrolled in McGill University to complete a Bachelor of Music.

In September of 2013, Eric Abramovitz met Jennifer Lee, a fellow student and musician who had moved from Ontario to attend McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. The two soon began dating and the relationship progressed quickly, so that by October of that year Eric had began spending most of his days in Jennifer’s apartment. Eric trusted Jennifer and so he would let her use his laptop and even gave her the password for his email account.

That December, Eric decided to apply for a position in the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles, California, hoping that he could finish the last two years of his bachelor’s degree there. The Colburn Conservatory was part of the Colburn School, an extremely prestigious private performing arts academy.

Every student accepted into the conservatory would receive a full scholarship which would not only cover the full cost of tuition, room and board, but would also come with a yearly stipend of $5,000 US to cover any additional expenses that the student may incur. Even more importantly for Eric, if he was accepted for the position, he would be taught by Yehuda Gilad, a world-renowned musical talent. He was internationally recognized as one of the world’s best clarinetists and he only accepted two students every year.

As part of the application process, in February 2014, Eric and his parents flew down from Canada to Los Angeles. There Eric performed in person before a committee of judges, including Yehuda Gilad, and he was informed that the committee would tell him of their decision on his application by April.

Some time passed and, on March 27th, 2014, Mr. Gilad sent an email to Eric. In his email, Mr. Gilad informed Eric his application was successful and offered him one of the two coveted scholarship positions under his tutelage. However, unbeknownst to Eric, his girlfriend Jennifer was monitoring his email, and she intercepted this message from Mr. Gilad. What she did next would betray Eric’s trust and cause significant repercussions down the road for both him and her.

Jennifer decided that she would intercept the email from Mr. Gilad and hide it from Eric, so he would never know that he had been offered the scholarship. In fact, she went further than that. Using Eric’s email account and pretending to be him, she sent an email back to Yehuda Gilad telling him that Eric could not accept the scholarship.

She then also created a fake email account at gmail.com under the name of Yehuda Gilad and, using this false account, sent an email to Eric for him to discover later. In this false message, posing as Mr. Gilad, Jennifer told Eric that he had been denied for the scholarship but, as a consolation prize, offered him a $5,000 USD scholarship at the University of Southern California. But Jennifer knew Eric’s financial situation, and so she knew that he would not be able to accept this offer. The cost of tuition at the university was around $50,000 USD/year, and he wouldn’t be able to afford to attend with only a $5,000 scholarship.

Why did Jennifer do this? It’s hard to say for sure what goes on in the mind of another person, but later people would speculate that it was out of a desire to keep Eric from leaving her. It is speculated that, since she would not have a scholarship to go attend the conservatory in California herself, she knew that Eric going there would result in damage to their relationship, perhaps ending it.

Jennifer’s deception was successful, as Eric believed the false message she had sent, and believed he had been denied the scholarship. However, if saving the relationship had been Jennifer’s motive for the deceit, well that objective would ultimately fail, because around six months later they ended up breaking up anyways.

Over the course of the next couple of years, Eric completed his Bachelor of Music at McGill University and then ended up travelling south to attend the University of Southern California (or USC). He wanted to take a master’s degree in music there but, due to financial constraints, he was not able to do this and had to settle for the shorter and less expensive two-year graduate certificate program.

As it happened though, Mr. Yehuda Gilad was a teacher in this program at USC and so Eric ended up taking some classes that he taught. This was far less exposure to the master musician than Eric would have had if he had been a student at the Colburn Conservatory though.

When Mr. Gilad encountered Eric, he was surprised to see him, and he approached him to ask why Eric had refused the scholarship that had been offered earlier. Eric was perplexed, because as far as he knew, there had been no scholarship offered.

Eventually, after some time speaking with Mr. Gilad and going over the events of the past in his head, Eric recognized what mast have occurred. He came to believe that the only way to explain events was if his girlfriend Jennifer had intercepted his scholarship offer and then crafted a false email to mislead him. Understandably, this was a distressing thing to realize, not only because it was a betrayal of the trust in their relationship, but also because it had denied him a prime educational opportunity, and the career opportunities that went along with that.

Consequently, in August 2016, Eric Abramovitz decided to launch a lawsuit against his former girlfriend, Jennifer Lee, in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. He sued her for the tort of deception (also known as civil fraud), as well as invasion of privacy, intrusion upon seclusion and infliction of mental suffering. Papers were served on Ms. Lee in September 2016, notifying her of the lawsuit, but she did not respond within the time limit specified by law and therefore, in November 2016, the court noted her to be in default.

If a defendant in a lawsuit doesn’t respond when served papers and is noted in default, this is legally an admission that the accusations in the lawsuit are true. It doesn’t automatically mean that the defendant loses the lawsuit right away – there are further steps the plaintiff needs to take – but it is a significant development to the plaintiff’s advantage.

And Mr. Abramovitz took these necessary additional steps in his court case in October 2017. Pointing out that Ms. Lee was in default, he filed an application for a summary judgment against her. If granted, the judgment would end the court case successfully in Mr. Abramovitz’s favour.

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice had a few questions before taking this step of ruling in his favour. For one, the court inquired why the lawsuit had been filed in the province of Ontario when the incidents in question had occurred in a different province, Quebec. However, Mr. Abramovitz satisfied the court on this point, by noting that Ms. Lee’s family home was in Ontario; she would travel back and forth to Quebec for school, but her permanent home was in Ontario.

Satisfied that the court had jurisdiction over Ms. Lee due to her residence in Ontario, Justice Corbett of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice granted a summary judgment to Mr. Abramovitz as requested. However, the justice decided to only deal with the allegations of deceit (a.k.a. civil fraud), and ignore the allegations about invasion of privacy, intrusion upon seclusion and mental suffering. The justice stated that, in their opinion, the case was primarily about deceit and fraud, and so they would proceed on that basis.

The court ended up awarding a total of $350,000 CAD in damages to Mr. Abramovitz. This included $300,000 in general damages, which was to cover the economic value of the lost educational and career opportunities, and then another in $25,000 in aggravated damages for the personal hardship that this fraud had caused for Mr. Abramovitz and another $25,000 in punitive damages to denounce the conduct of Ms. Lee and express the court’s disapproval for the deception. The court noted that it was possible they could have awarded more than $300,000 in general damages (because it was possible the economic value of the lost opportunities could have been worth more), but they didn’t because Mr. Abramovitz had only asked for $300,000.

And there ends today’s case. It began a sad tale of deception, but in the end, Mr. Abramovitz ended up getting to study with the teacher he wanted, and he went on to a very successful music career. Today, he is a member of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and serves as their principal clarinetist.

Thank you for watching. I hope you found the video interesting and, if you did and you haven’t already, please give the video a like, leave a comment and subscribe for more videos like it. Until next time, take care!

SOURCES:

Abramovitz v. Lee, 2018 ONSC 3684 (CanLII). https://canlii.ca/t/hshs9

Babcock, B. (2022, November 28). What is Civil Fraud? Weilers LLP. https://weilers.ca/2022/11/28/what-is-civil-fraud/

CJN Admin. (2011, December 23). Clarinetist, 18, wins national prize. Canadian Jewish News. https://thecjn.ca/arts/clarinetist-18-wins-national-prize/

Colburn School. (n.d.). Colburn at a Glance. Colburn School. Retrieved June 16, 2024 from https://www.colburnschool.edu/about-colburn/colburn-at-a-glance/

Mervosh, S. (2018, June 15). A Clarinetist’s Girlfriend Didn’t Want Him to Leave. So She Crushed His Dreams. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/arts/clarinetist-ex-girlfriend-rejection-lawsuit.html

Peerani, A. (2018, July/August). Bench Press. Law Now, 42(6), 8. https://www.canlii.org/en/commentary/doc/2018CanLIIDocs57#!fragment/zoupio-_Toc3Page6/

Sacks, B. (2018, June 14). This Clarinetist's Career Was Derailed By His Ex-Girlfriend Who Deleted His Scholarship Letter. BuzzFeed News. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/briannasacks/eric-clarinetist-scholarship-girlfriend

Toronto Symphony Orchestra. (n.d.). Eric Abramovitz – Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Retrieved June 16, 2024 from https://www.tso.ca/orchestra/members-of-the-orchestra/eric-abramovitz/

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