RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR

Leah Henderson spent 25 days in jail before being released on a hefty, $100,000 bail. The conditions of her release were harsh.

RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR

By Catherine PorterColumnist

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For Leah Henderson, 2010 was the year her life ended. She was arrested at gunpoint, jailed and then trapped in a house. She lost her job and her fiancé because of draconian bail conditions.

The alleged G20 protest organizer hasn’t spoken to some of her closest friends for a year now, even when one’s mother died and another was married. She couldn’t dash out for toothpaste or milk. And most important for a person whose weeks were once packed with as many as 10 meetings to help organize political actions, she hasn’t gone to one single protest meeting.

But 2010 was also the year Henderson’s friends saved her life.

When she was still in a Milton jail awaiting bail, a team of five pals coordinated their schedules and cars to visit her. Once she was released to full house arrest, they’d drop by with the roti she was craving. They slept over on New Year’s Eve, planned wig and martini parties at her home, divided their engagement parties into shifts so she and her co-accused could come without breaching their bail conditions.

One friend moved to a new apartment so she could become Henderson’s surety and live with her.

“In all honesty, I didn’t know I had relationships this deep, this important and that I could count on in this way,” Henderson tells me as we take one of her friend’s golden retrievers for a walk.

Those close to her depict Henderson, 26, as a caring, committed den mother of activists in Toronto — cooking for meetings and mentoring new recruits. The Crown depicts her and her former common-law partner Alex Hundert, as dangerous anarchists with the Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance who intended to attack Metro Hall, Goldman Sachs, The Bay and a number of consulates during the G20 weekend.

Early in the morning of the big, June 26 labour march that ended in disaster, police officers kicked through Henderson and Hundert’s apartment door with their guns drawn.

“I was contemplating getting out of bed to put my pants on,” she recalls. “But then I saw the red laser bouncing down the hall towards me. I just put my hands up and stayed in bed.”

Together with 15 other people, she was charged with three counts of conspiracy: to commit mischief over $5000, to assault police, and to obstruct justice. She spent 25 days in jail before being released on hefty, $100,000 bail. The conditions were harsh. She couldn’t leave her home unaccompanied by a surety. She had a nighttime curfew. She couldn’t help plan or attend a public demonstration. She couldn’t communicate with any of her co-accused, many of whom were close friends. She could see Hundert only if they were supervised by both his and her sureties —awkward, since they were each living with one of his divorced parents.

They broke up in October.

“It was exhausting, the navigating of schedules,” Henderson says. “It was an enormous pressure. We had been such important foundation of support for each other, and now we were going through an incredibly hard thing which we couldn’t go through together.”

Up to that Saturday morning, Henderson worked as a paralegal, making a $100,000 salary. Although her law firm sent a letter to court stating it still wanted her to work there, her bail conditions made it impossible.

Now she lives on welfare.

My question to the Crown: isn’t Leah Henderson innocent till proven guilty?

I watched in horror as stores were smashed and cop cars burned that Saturday afternoon. But there is a wide gulf separating vandalism from violence against people. The Black Block is not the Hell’s Angels. How are these bail conditions reasonable?

Henderson defines herself as an anarchist. To her, that means a commitment to “non-hierarchical locally-driven communities.” She had travelled around North America to protest at previous G20 meetings. To her, Toronto’s event was an opportunity to both protest Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s right-wing measures and to form new networks with activists from across the country. For the past year, she’d spent most nights preparing for the weekend.

“Hands down, the hardest part of this year has been not participating socially the way I think ethical,” she said. “I felt I was being ripped away from my community and isolated.”

In March, after Jaggi Singh — one of Henderson’s co-accused — contested his bail conditions, Henderson’s house arrest was lifted and her curfew softened. She can now go out at night with a chaperone approved of in writing by her surety.

She moved out of Hundert’s mother’s home and into the apartment of a childhood friend, who posted an additional $20,000 bail for her.

She reclaimed some of her activism in very subtle ways. While she used to facilitate events, Henderson now caters them — cooking up vegetarian lasagnas for a Council of Canadians’ meeting and quiche and cinnamon buns for a midwifery event. She babysits for friends and walks their dogs so they can go out to activist gatherings. She transcribes the jotted notes from friends’ meetings into something intelligible.

“It was really important for my self-care and survival to find ways I could support others,” she says. “I’m not going to spend the next how many years just taking.”

Henderson’s trial won’t start for another year — at the earliest. If her bail conditions were meant to smother her activism, they’ve had the opposite effect.

Catherine Porter’s column usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. She can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca