SASKATOON—A man who admitted to taking and hiding the daughter he fathered with his Brazilian mistress has been sentenced to 15 months in jail.
Alexander Fiodor Levin of Saskatoon pleaded guilty earlier this week to child harbouring.
He told court he took the girl from her mother as punishment when he found out the woman had been seeing other men.
Levin and his mistress were visiting Ukraine when he took the one-year-old child to the Philippines. He left her there with a seamstress he had just met and returned to his wife and four children in Canada.
Levin, 47, is getting about 3 1/2 months credit for time already spent in custody.
Judge Daryl Labach said he wasn’t sure that Levin wouldn’t do something similar in the future.
Court heard earlier that Levin met Oziene Barbosa online and started an affair with her in Brazil about three years ago. She got pregnant and gave birth while Levin was back in Canada.
The couple’s daughter, Ieda Alexendra Levin, was already a year old when he went back to Brazil to meet the child last spring.
Levin, Barbosa and the little girl were already in Ukraine when he acquired Barbosa’s Facebook password, went through her profile and discovered that she had been seeing at least three other men while they were apart.
Levin said he felt infidelity is “the most heinous act one person can inflict on another” and had expected his mistress to stay faithful even though he had a wife and family back home.
He said he was so traumatized when he discovered Barbosa’s infidelities that he took Ieda in late June 2013. He told his mistress, who only speaks Portuguese and was pregnant with another of Levin’s children, that he and Ieda were going to buy milk.
He instead left behind a bit of money and a plane ticket for Barbosa to get back to South America and took the girl to Bulgaria, Turkey and Dubai before landing in the Philippines.
Levin told court that he knew he’d have trouble getting a visa for Ieda if he tried to bring her to Canada, so he left her with a seamstress who had repaired a stroller for him.
He gave up Ieda’s location after his arrest last October. She was picked up by Filipino social services and returned to her mother later that month.