A Langley woman known for her controversial legal and human rights challenges is now suing Fraser Health and the Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA) for allegedly breaching her personal health information.
Jessica Simpson, formerly known as Jessica Yaniv, filed a small claims case in Surrey Provincial Court against the two health agencies on Monday, Jan. 18.
“In 2019, I had a suspicion that there was a breach of my personal health information due to some social media posts threatening the release of my health information,” Simpson wrote in the statement of claim she filed with the courts. “As such, I contacted Fraser Health Authority to put security locks on my information and conduct an audit.”
Simpson claims the audit found breaches of her information by one Fraser Health employee and by one PHSA employee.
She supplied the Langley Advance Times with a copy of a letter from Fraser Health and the PHSA which appeared to confirm that her data had been breached.
“Between May and July, 2019 your medical records were inappropriately accessed by an employee from Fraser Health Authority and an employee from Provincical Health Authority Services,” the letter says.
“Disciplinary action has been taken with respect to the employees in question,” said the letter, without naming the employees.
The Langley Advance Times has reached out to Fraser Health to verify the letter.
The breaches would have taken place around the time that Simpson was contesting a claim before the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, and was embroiled in a couple of other controversies as well.
Her claim said the health authorities would not disclose any more information about who breached her information, or what was breached.
None of Simpson’s claims have been proved in court.
The Langley Advance Times had reached out to Fraser Health for comment, but neither FHA nor PHSA have yet filed response’s to Simpson’s claim in court, according to the Court Services Online system.
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A self-described activist, Simpson is best known for her failed Human Rights Tribunal complaint against multiple Lower Mainland salon owners in 2019 for failing to provide genital waxing services.
The tribunal ruled that the salons had valid reasons to refuse service to Simpson, who is a trans woman, and that those reasons had nothing to do with discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation.
The ruling further found that Simpson had launched the complaints for “improper purposes” and had “engaged in a pattern of filing human rights complaints which target small businesses for personal financial gain and/or to punish certain ethnic groups, which she perceives as hostile to the rights of LGBTQ+ people.”
Simpson was ordered to pay $2,000 to each of the three salons that had presented a defence at the hearing.
The hearings became news both in the mainstream local media, and in far-right media outlets, mostly based in the United States.
Since then, Simpson has also been arrested and found guilty of one charge of possession of an unauthorized weapon after she brandished an electric stun gun-style weapon on a YouTube livestream. She was sentenced to probation and a firearms prohibition in September of 2020.
She has also attempted to sue the Township of Langley over her alleged treatment by Langley RCMP after her arrest on the stun gun charge.