Her Thornhill bondage bungalow was closed in a police raid over five years ago, but Terri-Jean Bedford is back in business downtown.
The 40-year-old dominatrix goes to the Ontario Court of Appeal March 13 to appeal her conviction for operating "a common bawdy house," as the Toronto Sun puts it. Meanwhile, she is also running what's called a charm school for cross-dressing men, the Sissy Maid Academy.
"I believe that what I was doing was not breaking the law," Bedford tells the Sun. "It's been hanging over my head for five years. It's been a long haul."
Bedford was known as Madame de Sade but goes now as Madame or Headmistress. She's been tangled up in a case which started in September 1994, the Sun says, when York police raided her plush Thornhill bungalow.
The paper says the charges were thrown out at first but prosecutors appealed successfully, an appeal which was upheld subsequently by Canada's Supreme Court.
Bedford was fined $3,000 in October 1998, but she insisted - then and now - that her clients paid for fantasies and not sex. "That's what baffled police," she tells the Sun. How can someone pay her $300 an hour and not have sex?"
She dismisses the S&M label, she says, describing her specialties as role playing and escapist recreation and not violence and gratification. Her attorneys say the original case hasn't yet resolved the issue of whether her activities are in fact illegal.
