Megan Savard for the Defence

In February of 2018, the MeToo movement came for Hedley. On Twitter, stories about inappropriate encounters with the pop-rock band’s young fans began multiplying, including claims of sexual misconduct perpetrated by Jacob Hoggard, the lead singer. They soon numbered in the dozens. The band pushed back against the allegations, saying that, while they had, in the past, lived out what they called “certain rock and roll clichés,” there were lines they would never cross. But the tide had already turned. Within days, Hedley’s music was blacklisted from Canadian radio. Their management dropped them, and by the end of March, the band was on hiatus.

Then, in July, police charged Hoggard with three sexual offences involving two women in 2016. One of them alleged that, when she was in her early 20s, Hoggard had raped her and choked her so hard that she’d thought she was going to die. The other said that, when she was 16, Hoggard had slapped her, spit in her mouth and raped her in a hotel room. The singer claimed that the encounters were consensual, but he knew that if he was going to have any chance of rehabilitating his image, he needed a lawyer willing to stand against everyone: the Crown, the judge, the complainants, the media and the public. He needed Megan Savard.

The head of her own firm, Savards, the 39-year-old criminal defence lawyer is known for being brilliant, uncompromising and—though she’d likely grimace at the assessment—eager to take on the cases of unsympathetic men like Hoggard. To Savard, it’s a matter of ensuring that everybody, likable or not, rich or not, famous or not, has access to quality legal representation and a fair trial. Savard sees herself not as a lawyer for accused bad guys but as the defender of something much bigger: the sanctity of the rule of law.

During Hoggard’s four-week trial in May of 2022, both complainants were subjected to Savard’s intense cross-examination. Every question she asked sliced away at their credibility. She argued that the woman who claimed Hoggard had raped her when she was 16 had fabricated the assault because she was embarrassed after the singer had called a car to take her home early. That she’d fallen in love and that Hoggard, who didn’t return the sentiment, had used her for sex. Callous, certainly, but hardly a crime.

Cross-examining the second complainant, Savard again argued that the woman had made it all up—in this case to get revenge. Savard contended that the woman felt hurt because Hoggard had been inconsiderate during sex and that she resented getting dropped by a rock star. She repeatedly questioned the woman’s violent description of the assault, piercing holes in her account. Her takedown culminated in a dramatic reveal: she had a recording of a phone call between the complainant and Hoggard that took place days after their encounter. Fearing the woman would “screw” him, Hoggard had secretly taped the call. It was not, as the woman had claimed, only about 30 seconds. It was at least 15 minutes long, and Savard was going to play it in court.

The judge, Gillian Roberts, was livid. Legislation had been introduced a few years earlier prohibiting precisely this kind of ambush—the sudden introduction of private communications between a complainant and the accused. Savard was well-versed in the changes. She called them unconstitutional and was, at the time, arguing against them before the Supreme Court. It was clear that Savard had violated the spirit of the legislation, a conclusion she didn’t debate; instead, she said that being unable to raise vital evidence mid-trial was a fundamental flaw, as prior disclosure would give a complainant time to map out a response. Roberts called Savard’s approach cruel but knew that disallowing the tape could lead to a mistrial. She gave a begrudging go-ahead.

The recording was far from a smoking gun. It corroborated some of the evidence against Hoggard, and it made the ­complainant—who was clearly distraught during the call—even more sympathetic to the jury. Yet it also proved that she had lied more than once, not only about the length of the call but about needing stitches in her vagina after their encounter, among other details. As the call played, the complainant sobbed so intensely that Roberts offered to adjourn until the next day if it was too difficult. “Tomorrow won’t be different,” the woman responded, shaking. Introducing the recording was a risk, but Savard’s goal was to make the jury question the credibility of the rest of the woman’s testimony. More than anyone, Savard was aware that the tactics she employed to try to win made her one of the most unpopular people in the room, second only to her client.

The jury deliberated for an agonizing six days and was deadlocked twice. On June 5, 2022, Savard came away with a surprise partial win: the jury rendered only one guilty verdict, a count of sexual assault causing bodily harm in the case of the older complainant, but acquitted Hoggard of the two other charges. It was a stunning result, yet Savard was disappointed and genuinely sad for Hoggard. (The judge eventually sentenced him to five years in prison, less than the six to seven years the Crown had requested.) There was no time to dwell, however. Savard’s star was rising, and a growing list of prominent men accused of sexual assault would want her to repeat her performance, including megachurch pastor Bruxy Cavey, fashion mogul Peter Nygård and hockey player Carter Hart, who is currently on trial along with four other former members of Canada’s world junior hockey team.

The 2016 trial of CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi led to a national reckoning, an unofficial referendum on how sexual assault cases should be handled in Canada. Defence lawyer Marie Henein’s bulldog tactics were hotly discussed in the news, on social media and at dinner tables across the country. While Ghomeshi was acquitted of all criminal charges, his case upended the legal system in ways that are still felt today. Notably, it was a major impetus for the so-called Ghomeshi rules, amendments to the Criminal Code introduced by Bill C-51 in 2017 and officially enacted into law the following year. The legislation—the one Savard was objecting to when she wielded the taped phone call in the Hoggard case—is meant to protect complainants from the surprise introduction of personal records that could negatively impact their dignity if made public.

Related: Marie Henein, the lawyer who plans to keep Jian Ghomeshi out of prison

Following his acquittal, Ghomeshi largely dropped out of public view, but the conversation around sexual assault only got louder. In late 2017, the MeToo movement went viral, toppling studio heads and famous comedians and striking fear into powerful men suddenly worried that their private behaviour was about to become very public. Eight years later, it’s clear that MeToo’s successes were limited. The rates of sexual violence in the US remain roughly the same as they were at the height of the movement. Several of those once disgraced comedians are back on tour. In the days after the second election of Donald Trump, young men flooded TikTok with “your body, my choice” videos, a declaration that brutally spoofed the famous women’s rights slogan “my body, my choice” with the threat of violence.

In Canada, Savard is the new legal face of the see-sawing discourse about sexual assault, the inadvertent heir to the legacy of Henein, who has mostly moved on to corporate law and civil litigation. But Savard takes things much further. Where Henein wanted acquittal, Savard seeks a higher order of change: the complete elimination of the prison system. Prison abolitionists like Savard advocate for replacing the existing system with a framework designed to prevent crime in the first place and to rehabilitate those who do offend. The cause gained traction in North America after the 1971 Attica prison uprising in New York, when inmates took control of the facility to demand better living conditions and more rights. The revolt was squashed when state police stormed the complex and 43 people died, but it sparked a movement.

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“She walks into a room and you notice her,” says Brian Greenspan, Savard’s former mentor. “She makes her presence felt. You can’t teach that”

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Savard acknowledges that most people think abolition is a pie-in-the-sky idea. What’s to stop someone from breaking the law if not for the threat of incarceration? But abolitionists say that’s like focusing on the crutch when you can prevent the broken leg. Certain groups are vastly overrepresented in prisons: Black and Indigenous populations, people who are lower-income and precariously housed, women in abusive relationships, drug users. To survive, they’re often stuck between a bad choice and a worse one, and recidivism rates are high. Abolitionists believe that nobody, no matter what they did, deserves to be incarcerated. The impetus to punish violent offenders, Savard maintains, comes more from a desire to get revenge—to inflict as equal a harm as possible—than it does from a concern for public safety. Investing the money we currently spend on prisons and police in better social programming—things that support society’s most marginalized—would be a far more effective way to ensure a safer society.

“There’s this idea that we use prison to stop bad things from happening,” says Savard, “but that ignores the fact that we are causing a bad thing to happen by putting someone in jail.” The criticisms are predictable: How can she live with herself, giving criminals a free pass? She bristles at the idea. “No one asks Crown lawyers how they can sleep at night,” she says, implying that they condemn the guilty to punishments they don’t deserve. To Savard’s mind, prison abolition is about putting a person’s humanity before their punishment. She acknowledges that prisons are a huge part of our legal system, our culture and our moral framework, but she believes she is on the right side of history for trying.

Ultimately, Savard agrees with her detractors that there’s a power imbalance in play. The Crown is well-funded, and those on the defendant’s side—whether they’re a legal aid lawyer or an accused person—often aren’t. Many people caught in the legal system are, like some of her lower-profile clients, struggling to get by. But, even if they’re wealthy, they’re all worth fighting for.

Many lawyers avoid critiquing their industry too bluntly for fear of worsening their chances of a judgeship. But Savard, who wants to fix a broken system, isn’t most lawyers. Problem number one, she says, is prison. Number two? The courts. The justice system is a human invention, and like any human invention, it’s a poor substitute for the ideal humanity is trying to achieve. She thinks it’s perplexing that a judge essentially creates reality with their findings. They have the power to decide what happened in that hotel room where Carter Hart and his former teammates are said to have sexually assaulted a woman, or on that street, or anywhere. It feels archaic to Savard to assume that’s the best way of getting to the truth, or any way at all.

Growing up in Regina, Savard believed in two things: God and rules. Her parents, Stanko and Chris Vuksic, were doctors and devout Christians. To her childhood self, heaven and hell weren’t theological concepts but real, geographical places. The Bible and the church guided her morals, her choices and her social life. On Sundays, she sat shoulder to shoulder in pews with her fellow worshippers. On weekdays, she guarded one of her two younger brothers, Jovan, against bullies.

In high school, she enrolled in an International Baccalaureate program designed, she jokes, to spit out Rhodes Scholars. When she wasn’t studying or hosting events like a Pride and Prejudice movie night, she ran long distance—sometimes with her mom, who was training for the Boston Marathon, but most often with Jovan, who was already setting provincial records. By the time Savard graduated, she was fast enough to make the track and field team at McGill University, where she double-majored in English literature and North American studies.

Related: How Meeting House megachurch preacher Bruxy Cavey allegedly groomed young women for sex

When she realized her degree might help get her a job as a lawyer or a journalist but not much else, she took the LSAT, then picked the top law schools out of Maclean’s magazine and applied. She was ticking boxes and following rules, sure she’d find happiness. It didn’t quite work out that way. Savard arrived at the University of Toronto’s law school and met dozens of students exactly like her: aggressively type-A and effortlessly academic, with the awards shelves to prove it. Instead of finding comfort in the similarities, she felt overwhelmed and out of place. By the end of first year, she was on the brink of dropping out. It was only when she started working at the school’s community legal clinic that summer that she realized there might be a place for her in law after all.

On one of her first cases, she met a tall elderly Rastafarian man. He didn’t have a criminal record, but he’d had a fight with his wife and was facing charges. As he told it, the couple had a heated argument, and his wife attacked him. He called the police, but when they showed up, it was him they placed under arrest. Savard was rifling through the folder of evidence the police had given her when a photo caught her eye. “What is this?” she asked. It was a picture of dreadlocks lying on the floor—his wife had torn them from his head.

U of T had one of just two student-run pro bono legal clinics in the GTA; the other, at York’s Osgoode Hall, didn’t accept men accused of domestic violence as clients, on principle. Savard pushed ahead on two fronts, arguing that the Crown had a duty to drop charges when there was no reasonable chance of conviction and when it wasn’t in the public interest to continue. The charges were eventually withdrawn, but Savard was still filled with indignation—and further motivated to accept cases categorically refused by others because they were unattractive or unpopular. By the end of that summer, she knew her path: she was going to become a criminal defence lawyer.

She planned to move home to Saskatchewan permanently after law school to practise, but that was before she met Phil Savard, a handsome, fiery student in the joint JD/MBA program. While she was ramping up for a job articling for prominent criminal defence lawyer Brian Greenspan, Phil was relocating to New York to join a firm there. In 2011, when she was 25, the couple got married, and she joined Phil in Manhattan. From a tiny apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, she set up coffee meetings with potential employers as she waited to become licensed as a lawyer in the States. She knew she didn’t want to get stuck in junior lawyer purgatory, being a second chair for a decade or more and rarely getting big, interesting cases of her own. She remembered advice that Greenspan had given her: she could more quickly climb ranks in a smaller jurisdiction, a place with plenty of criminal defence work and not enough lawyers to do it. She soon passed the New York bar, but when Phil’s firm opened a satellite office in Toronto, the couple decided to move back. She started searching for a place where she would have the opportunity to take on complex cases, learn a lot and distinguish herself quickly.

Greenspan suggested that Savard move to Hamilton to work for Dean Paquette, a former Crown attorney turned criminal defence lawyer, and he described Savard to Paquette as focused, committed, ambitious. “She walks into a room and you notice her; she makes her presence felt,” Greenspan told me. “You can’t teach that.” Looking back, Savard compares her two years working for Paquette to a boot camp—the cases were challenging, abundant and diverse, and they put her on the fast track. When a position came up for an associate job in Toronto at Addario Law Group, Savard leapt at it.

Even among her fellow lawyers at Addario, Savard stood out. She had always felt most productive in the morning, but she started going to sleep at 8 p.m. and waking up between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. to work. Early to bed, early to rise made sense to Savard, especially once she and Phil had a son, in 2015. But when I asked one of Savard’s oldest friends about her unorthodox schedule, she summed it up succinctly: “It’s insane.” Criminal defence lawyer James Foy, an Addario colleague, pinpointed what makes Savard’s take on the law so particular. Instead of approaching a case by asking, What’s the law? and then trying to figure out a way to get a desired outcome, Savard starts from the other end, he says. “She will ask, What do I need? and What do I want to get? then work backward to accomplish that.”

In August of 2019, seven years after she started at Addario, Savard took on one of her first big files as lead counsel: the retrial of one of the 2015 Via Rail terrorism convictions, where two men were found guilty of a plot to derail a passenger train travelling between New York and Toronto. Savard’s client had a string of fraud convictions and had desperately wanted his case severed from that of his co-accused, who had told the courts that only the Quran could judge him. At the time, Canada was on high alert. The trial for the Toronto 18 had ended in 2010 with more than half of the accused found guilty of terrorism activity, including a plot to form an al-Qaeda-type cell in Toronto. And in 2014, a gunman had taken to Parliament Hill shouting, “For Iraq!” and killed a soldier at the National War Memorial. The Via Rail case crystallized Savard’s skepticism of how high-profile cases are covered by the media, where the reality of what the accused did or didn’t do often takes a back seat to the spectacle. The case has since taken up years of her life: she lost in Ontario’s Court of Appeal last summer but plans to find a route to the Supreme Court.

Savard sees herself as a defender against a stacked system more concerned with making headlines than seeking justice. It’s why she continues to work for people accused of terrorism activity and why defending victims of police misconduct makes up a big part of her practice. And, yes, it’s what motivates her to take on difficult sexual assault cases. Savard’s social media bio describes her as a lawyer “acting for victims of state excess.” She’s the first to acknowledge how wildly frustrating it can be to try to move the needle day by day, case by case.

The pandemic, as it did for so many, pushed Savard to reinvent herself. By 2019, she and Phil had separated, and she had moved into an apartment near Bloor and Dundas with their four-year-old son. A few months after the divorce was finalized, Covid hit, and suddenly Savard was helping her son with Zoom school and running bail hearings from the front seat of her Mazda 3. It was hard not to feel like a failure, and yet there she was, surviving shared custody and a global pandemic. She’d already been thinking about starting a firm of her own, but discovering that she could adapt to the previously unthinkable kicked her plans into gear. Addario was expanding into areas of civil litigation in which she had less interest: corporate crimes, securities, institutional clients. And it was getting harder to ignore the voice in her head telling her to create something from scratch.

In the fall of 2020, Savard learned that her colleague James Foy was also considering a move. When the two compared their visions, they realized they wanted the same thing: to build a democratic firm with social justice as its keystone, one that would take on criminal cases without prejudice to even the most serious of offences—murder, drug trafficking, sexual assault. The firm that emerged through their discussions is founded on a set of principles, like most things in Savard’s life. She and Foy decided not to represent police officers, no exceptions, in deference to their clients who had been persecuted by the system. They would do pro bono work whenever they could. They would be ­transparent about how much the firm makes and encourage their associates to negotiate as a bloc for salaries, bonuses and benefits. They committed to diverse hiring practices. Everyone at the firm would get a say in decisions—what cases they would take, what pro bono work they’d do, even the art they’d hang on the walls.

Savard and Foy leased space within the law chambers at Simcoe and Adelaide and opened for business in January of 2021. Their tiny shared office, filled with mismatched furniture other lawyers had left behind, was so small that Savard had to drag her desk out of the frame during Foy’s virtual court appearances and vice versa. Both newly single parents, the partners often worked part time, trading off casework and child care, one in court and the other supporting their kids through remote schooling and trying to ward off the looming sense of dread that came with feeling like they’d made a mistake. They hadn’t: today, the firm has a team of nine.

It helped Savard’s bottom line that, shortly after the firm’s founding, the Hoggard case thrust her and her practice into the spotlight. After Hoggard, Savard spent time considering the potential impact of the attention she was getting from high-profile cases tied to sexual assault charges. There were some clear positives, including that such prominent cases would bring in enough cash for her to afford to pursue a pro bono, social justice focus. But there were also other things to think about. She considered, for example, what it would do to her career to anger activist groups or take cases where the court of public opinion had already rendered its verdict. She decided that facing off against set minds belonged in the plus column.

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Parishioners of former megachurch pastor Bruxy Cavey who consistently turned up in court said they came mostly to watch Savard work

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Savard assesses cases according to three criteria: Will it pay the bills? Are the legal issues interesting? Is the client sympathetic? The answers to any two of those questions have to be yes in order for her to take on a file. Her cases are more diverse than the headlines suggest. For every high-profile sexual assault case, there are five others that go under the radar. She also works both sides of the fence, representing complainants in sexual assault cases. Not to do so, she says, would be problematic. “Taking one case but not the other is to suggest I align myself categorically with one side in a world where the grey area is extremely large and where I think the black letter of the law is doing a very poor job of trying to distinguish between what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s consensual and what’s not,” she adds.

Still, there’s no denying she has a taste for the cases that draw ire, that appear the most hopeless. Going up against her isn’t easy. The same bullish pre­paration that helps Savard succeed becomes a nightmare across the aisle. As her brother Jovan says, “If I was going to set up the perfect conditions for Megan to become good at something, I would make it very challenging, I would make it anti–status quo, I would probably tell her that she can’t do it, and I would tell her that somebody with a sense of moral superiority thinks she’s wrong.” When Savard defended Bruxy Cavey, the former pastor of Oakville megachurch the Meeting House, against three sexual assault charges in 2023 and 2024, she and the Crown flung pre-trial motions back and forth for months. Former parishioners of the defendant who consistently turned up in court later told me they came mostly to watch Savard work. In the end, one charge against Cavey was stayed when Savard successfully argued that his right to a timely trial had been breached, and the two others were withdrawn.

In January of 2024, Savard’s former mentor, Brian Green­span, walked into court and did something he’d never done in his 50-year career: he asked to be removed from a case. He was representing disgraced fashion mogul Peter Nygård in the lead-up to his sentencing, and the relationship between them had become adversarial in the two months since Nygård was convicted of four counts of sexual assault. Green­span said he could no longer ethically represent him. As an explanation, he offered only that it had nothing to do with fees and that to say more would violate solicitor-client privilege.

Related: Inside the Toronto South Detention Centre, Toronto’s $1-billion hellhole

Nygård was 82 years old, sick and incarcerated at Toronto South Detention Centre, and the Crown was asking for a sentence of 19 years. When he needed a new lawyer, Savard was the natural next choice. He asked, and sure enough, she took the case. “I don’t think anyone deserves to die in prison,” she told a friend—making her one of the few people who’d voiced any empathy for Nygård. With this belief and her client’s poor health in mind, she set out to argue for a significantly lower sentence. The Nygård case had all the hallmarks of a Savard undertaking. It was difficult, caught in a storm of public fury and disgust, with a defendant who many believed deserved whatever was coming to him.

Savard and her associate Kally Ho spent months working to prove that Nygård was as sick as he was claiming to be, and in June it was Savard’s turn to appear in court. Nygård joined from his jailhouse bed via Zoom, telling the judge he had plenty of proof that being physically present for the sentencing hearing would be dangerous to his health. He began to rail against Savard for her supposed refusal to include “volumes of information” pertaining to his health in court filings, but the judge interrupted him. “She’s got a reputation for knowing what she’s doing,” he said. “So you may have a disagreement with her, but if it’s a disagreement about tactics, that’s between you and her.” The judge gave Savard and Nygård a moment to discuss the matter in private over video, and when Savard returned, she was wearing a shaken expression in place of her usual arch demeanour. She announced that, for ethical reasons, she, like Greenspan before her, could no longer represent Nygård. The judge and the Crown looked shocked. In a subsequent written filing, Savard said only that the relationship had broken down irreparably. Apparently, even Savard’s determination has its limits.

No matter how her cases end, Savard’s integrity is regularly questioned on social media. She’s been accused of romanticizing rape. She’s been called “disgusting” and a “trash human.” Angry calls come into the firm. People have said she’s a gender traitor, that she should be ashamed, that she should be worse than ashamed, that she deserves the same fate as the complainants. Savard isn’t doing her job to be liked, but once in a while, it’s nice to find herself among friends. Last year, on a weekend in early May, 80 criminal defence lawyers from across Ontario, all of them women, gathered at the Taboo golf resort in Gravenhurst, on the shores of Lake Muskoka. One attendee likened it to summer camp but with better food. Savard was there to speak on a panel about taking risks and embracing career change.

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The world junior hockey sexual assault trial and its barrage of they-said-she-said details has brought a new round of scrutiny for Savard

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In this milieu, Savard is regarded with a certain amount of awe. Despite being young by most standards, she is one of the more senior female criminal defence lawyers active in Toronto. In the wake of the older, largely male cohort retiring, younger lawyers like Savard, Stephanie DiGiuseppe of Henein Hutchison Robitaille, Naomi Lutes at Greenspan Humphrey Makepeace and Samara Secter from Addario are filling the void. They are all workhorses, ruthless when they have to be and unequivocal about the importance of mounting the best defence possible.

At the event, Savard stood out—and not only because she was the group’s de facto elder stateswoman. Amid the Gucci belts, YSL purses, enough vibrant blazers to stock a Smythe trunk show and a “NO JAIL” licence plate on a Lexus in the parking lot, Savard was dressed all in black save for a patterned scrunchie. (She’d left her usual fraying fanny pack and canvas “Abolish Prisons” tote at home.) She was stopped often by women who wanted to introduce themselves—one lawyer from London thanked her profusely for coming; another sought advice on an upcoming move to Ottawa—and she was eager to meet them too. This community of women is important to her, and so is her position in it (her firm was one of the major sponsors of the weekend). It may be one of the few places where Savard is considered a hero instead of a villain.

Shortly before this piece went to press in early May, the long-awaited trial for another of Savard’s prominent clients, former Philadelphia Flyers goalie Carter Hart, began. He is one of five players accused of sexually assaulting a woman after a gala in London, Ontario, in 2018, on the night the Canadian men’s junior team won. The allegations led to a massive shake-up at Hockey Canada and reverberated throughout the sport. North American media have been closely tracking the trial, which is set to wrap up in June, and its barrage of they-said-she-said details. The central issue—what constitutes consent—is complex, and the public is watching. As Savard navigates a new round of scrutiny, she’ll also be steering her firm through change. Last November, Foy withdrew from their legal partnership. He’s now back at Addario, and Savard has two new partners, Riaz Sayani and Janani Shanmuganathan. The firm that was once Savard Foy now bears her name alone.

What compels Savard to stand up for men like Hoggard, Nygård and Carter? Why these clients? Why choose cases that hinge on convincing a jury that women who say they’ve been raped are lying? Savard admits that her work has at times raised the hackles of not just strangers on the internet but also some friends, family and colleagues. And yet she keeps doing it. “I have a pretty healthy contrarian streak,” she says. “If there are a hundred people in the room and 99 of them are telling me that X is the truth, part of me wants to just test out Y to see whether it’s been given a fair shake.” In other words, it’s not that she doesn’t care what others think. She considers it carefully, then keeps running full-tilt toward the hard thing. 

This story appears in the June 2025 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.