'My stomach dropped': Winnipeg man speaks out after being criminally harassed following single online date

A Winnipeg man said a single date gone wrong led to years of criminal harassment, false arrests, stress and depression.

A Winnipeg man said a single date gone wrong led to years of criminal harassment, false arrests, stress and depression.

Brent Marsch, 38, said he met Jennifer Plantz, 34, on the dating app Tinder in 2016 but when he went to meet her at Polo Park mall, he realized something wasn’t right.

“My stomach dropped,” he said in an exclusive interview with CTV News. He said she gave him the same profile name but her online photo did not match her appearance in person.

He said he quickly ended the date but she sent online messages two years later and in 2019, Plantz showed up at his apartment.

“She was standing there, in a trench coat, huffing aerosol, and I was immediately like ‘Oh, it’s you,’” he said, adding the incident was just the beginning of what he described as a “nightmare”.

Jennifer Plantz was recently handed a conditional sentence of 15 months under house arrest after pleading guilty to criminal harassment and assault last week in relation to 22 false police complaints she made against Marsch over a three-year period. She is also facing three years of unsupervised probation and is ordered to not contact the victim.

Marsch was arrested three times, but when Plantz filed a protection order against him in 2022, police finally looked at the interactions between the pair.