"It was not only a stab in the back but in the heart."
A Canadian man has successfully sued his ex-girlfriend for sabotaging his music career.
A judge has ordered Jennifer Jooyeon Lee to pay Eric Abramovitz $375,000 Canadian dollars (approx. €244,700) for deliberately halting his career in 2014, when they were both music students at McGill University in Montreal.
She deleted an email he had received from a prestigious music school and replaced it with a fake rejection letter.
Out of jealousy? No, because she didn't want him to move away from her!
The Montreal Gazette reports that Eric was an award-winning clarinetist and in his second year of college when he applied for a full two- year scholarship at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles under Yehuda Gilad.
The internationally renowned clarinet professor only accepts two new students a year.
He auditioned in February 2014 and felt confident that he'd be accepted. However, a month later he received an email stating that he had been unsuccessful.
But the rejection letter was fake - composed by his girlfriend of 5 months. She had access to his laptop and found the acceptance email.
Pretending to be Eric, she turned down the scholarship claiming he would be "elsewhere". She then created an email account in the name of the professor, and sent an email to Eric telling him that he had been rejected from the programme.
He only learned of the deception two years later. Determined to study under Gilad, he applied once more for a scholarship.
But he was in for a shock at the audition. The professor asked him, "Why did you reject me?". Eric replied, "Why did you reject me?!"
The two couldn't figure out what happened so Eric sent on the fake email. Gilad said he had never seen it in his life.
Judge David Corbett ruled that Eric had "lost a unique and prestigious educational opportunity":
"I cannot speculate as to how high and how quickly Mr. Abramovitz's career might have soared, but for the interference by Ms. Lee. But the law does recognise that the loss of a chance is a very real and compensable loss."
Eric did finally get to study under Gilad and he's now the associate principal clarinetist of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
