One man’s campaign to inform Penticton of a city councillor’s decades-old sex crimes spurred an investigation and eventual convictions. It also dissuaded an Ontario judge from a guilty finding on every charge.

The man was the first of three complainants in a set of criminal charges laid against James Miller, who was a Penticton city councillor until an automatic disqualification upon last week’s guilty verdicts.

Of the seven criminal charges alleging Miller’s sexual abuse of young boys in the early 1990s, two ended with a not guilty finding.

“I am concerned about the lengths (he) has gone to ruin Mr. Miller’s reputation,” Ontario Superior Court Justice Russel Raikes said.

The man, whose name is protected by a publication ban, was younger than 12 at the time of the alleged abuse. He detailed three incidents where he claims Miller, his former basketball coach, abused him.

Now in his 40s, the man testified that it was after Miller was elected to city council in Penticton that he began publicizing his allegations, claiming to have started a “movement.”

“I couldn’t sit there and not do anything, knowing what he did to me and he’s on the other side of Canada where nobody knows,” he told the court earlier this year.

It started with an email to city council, then he called Miller and had a seven-minute conversation, directly confronting him with his allegations.

Afterward, he took his allegations to social media in an effort to warn the public of Miller’s past, the court heard.

During the trial, he agree with Miller’s lawyer when asked whether his goal was to both “ruin” Miller’s reputation and to have him face criminal charges.

The judge said it was, in part, the man’s effort to tarnish Miller’s reputation that left him feeling uncertain about whether he could find Miller guilty.

“I wish to be clear, it is entirely understandable that a victim of sexual abuse may be angry and wish his or her abuser ill will,” Raikes said. “In this case, however, (his) actions to cause reputational harm to Mr. Miller raise a doubt as to how far he would go to achieve that end.”

He did not deny the man could have been abused, but he was left uncertain about whose account to believe.

The second man accounted for five of the seven criminal charges. Those included four counts of sexual interference and one for invitation of sexual touching.

Those counts all ended with a guilty verdict.

Miller remains on bail while waiting for his sentence, while another judge is yet to deliver his verdict on another set of charges involving a third man.