'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.

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.

Provincial Judge Raymond Wyant said at the hearing that Marsch was an innocent person “put through hell.”

“That man’s nightmare is never going to end,” he said at the time.

CTV News Winnipeg reached out to Plantz’s defence attorney for comment and Plantz by social media, but did not hear back by deadline.

'All it took was someone to go through the files'

Marsch is speaking out now to question why Winnipeg police did not investigate Plantz until 2022.

“All it took was for someone to go through the files to see what was happening between us and a lot of this could have been prevented,” Marsch said, adding he hopes his ordeal is over.

CTV News Winnipeg reached out to the Winnipeg Police Service to ask why Marsch was arrested so many times even though he was innocent.

However, police said it would be inappropriate to comment on evidence provided in court.

Marsch is warning others about the dangers of online dating but still lives in fear that he will run into his aggressor.

“It's such a small city, she is just going to be everywhere I go now.”  

With files from CTV's Kimberly Rio Wertman