A prominent far-right YouTuber who calls for a white “ethnostate” and makes videos with Richard Spencer is accused of luring and attempting to impregnate a developmentally disabled Hispanic teenager while lawyers contested his U.S. immigration status.
This comes amid a separate legal battle with his wife, who accused him of trying to kidnap their infant to Canada.
Jean-Francois Gariepy is a fast-rising fixture in white-nationalist circles. A former neuroscience researcher at Duke University who left suddenly in 2015, Gariepy now makes videos attempting to prove white superiority, calling for all-white separatist states and a crackdown on immigration. White nationalist Richard Spencer recently appeared with him on a livestream.
Gariepy, a Canadian citizen, also stands accused in two court cases of a pattern of bizarre and abusive behavior toward women—allegations he denied in an interview with The Daily Beast.
A child-custody case with his third wife includes allegations that Gariepy engaged in misconduct with an undergraduate he supervised at Duke. Gariepy’s wife won sole custody of their newborn after presenting evidence that Gariepy had threatened to abduct the baby to Canada while his visa was dependent on their marriage.
While that case was ongoing, Gariepy lost a guardianship dispute over an autistic 19-year-old whom a counselor assessed as having “the social and mental maturity of a 10- or 11-year-old child.” Gariepy, who met the young woman online and entered into a sexual relationship with her, claimed in court that the young woman was his pregnant fiancée, although blood tests revealed that she was not pregnant.
In an interview, Gariepy denied allegations that he had acted improperly and that he had attempted to marry or impregnate women for U.S. immigration purposes, calling the allegations a smear campaign by “leftist women.”
But court records in the guardianship and custody cases suggest a long history of conflict with women.
Gariepy, 34, grew up in suburban Montreal, which he described to a court-appointed psychologist as “like paradise.” He said he spent his childhood surrounded by relatives in a village “dominated by our families.” “I didn’t know disharmony until I met other women at 18-19 [years old],” he said, according to the psychologist’s report included in his custody case against his third wife.
“It was all or nothing—marriage and a baby or I couldn’t stay in the U.S.”
He married his first wife at 18, and divorced at 23. “I wanted a family and she wasn’t into it,” he told the court-appointed psychologist. “She left—she lost interest in me. Also I didn’t know how to satisfy a woman and I was getting fat.” A second marriage, which he claimed was to a woman who was French and “needed to get into Canada,” also failed, he told the psychologist.
He later left Canada to take a series of research positions at U.S. colleges before settling into an associate research role in Duke’s neuroscience department in September 2011, as the university confirmed to The Daily Beast. In a viral Facebook post in September 2015, Gariepy announced he’d quit Duke because he’d grown disillusioned with the academic community. The post earned him a write-up in Slate.
But Gariepy’s motives for quitting came into question during the custody dispute. After Gariepy’s viral Facebook post, one of his former Duke colleagues contacted his third wife, whom he had married earlier that year. The former colleague “contacted her after the Facebook posting, [and said] that Dr. Gariepy was not asked to return to his postdoctoral position and that he had a sexually inappropriate relationship with one of the undergraduate lab assistants,” according to court records filed on Gariepy’s wife’s behalf.
The undergraduate student confirmed the relationship to a private investigator hired by Gariepy’s wife, according to court documents. While they were in a relationship, she told the investigator, Gariepy was her mentor or supervisor at their lab. During their relationship from January until June 2014, Gariepy wanted her to have his child, she told the investigator, according to a sworn affidavit he entered in court. Gariepy “discussed how he would be a stay-at-home father and provide the child all the caring needs for the child,” according to the investigator’s affidavit.
The undergraduate lab assistant told the investigator that she decided against Gariepy’s plan, and that the relationship ended with her “suffering from emotional abuse on the part of” Gariepy.
Gariepy told The Daily Beast that their relationship had been consensual, and that the student had disclosed it to Duke University. “There has never been an investigation against me at Duke for being in a relationship with this woman,” he said.
“Gariepy said he could deliver the child at home and raise it because of his experience working with monkeys in research labs.”
A representative for Duke University confirmed that Gariepy had worked at the university until August 2015, the month before he publicly announced his departure. The school declined to comment on allegations that Gariepy had left as a result of sexual misconduct. “As a matter of policy, the university does not comment on personnel matters beyond confirming employment status,” the university representative said in an email.
Gariepy’s viral Facebook post cited another reason for quitting: “I will soon be a father and want to be spending time with my son at home.”
But that cozy claim was also up for debate. Gariepy and his third wife had separated two months earlier, in July, after fewer than six months of marriage. In a custody case that began the day after their son’s December 2015 birth, Gariepy’s third wife accused him of emotional abuse throughout the pregnancy, and of threatening to abduct their child to his native Canada
