"Julie" – the name is a pseudonym – tells Xtra she dated Luka Magnotta in Toronto for just over a month early in 2006. Magnotta is the man wanted in the video-recorded murder and dismemberment of a so-far unidentified man whose body parts began turning up in Montreal and Ottawa on May 29.
Luka Magnotta posed as a fab boy in a May 2007 issue of Xtra's sister publication, fab magazine.
(Tony Fong)
“It’s a good thing he didn’t kill me,” Julie says. “He was a very cold person.”
She remembers Magnotta as a loner with little love for Toronto’s club scene. When they met, he had just left his job as a dancer at Remington’s, a Toronto gay strip club. He had then moved into work as a gay porn actor and was making most of his income as an escort, she adds. Magnotta’s escort work took him abroad, Julie says, which may explain why
police believe he is in Europe.
One of his escort profiles, in which he was listed under the name “Jimmy,” includes a client review. “I felt as though I was trying to have sex with a dead fish, so I just gave up,” it reads.
Julie says she and Magnotta did not have sex in the time they dated. There was “no intimacy, no nothing,” she says. Magnotta liked holding her hand, she adds, but would not kiss her on the lips.
She says Magnotta told her that when he was a teen, he had sex with his biological mother, who suffered from mental illness. Julie says she became wary of Magnotta because of his seemingly consuming interest in serial killers. “He would talk about them constantly,” she says. He was especially interested in Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, though Julie says she doesn’t believe Homolka and Magnotta ever dated, or even met.
Julie paints an image of a Magnotta with two very distinct personalities: a quiet, passive-aggressive man who would “hold all of his anger in,” and a vain, conceited man who would demand she take pictures of him to post to his multitude of online profiles. She says he spent much of his time checking the internet, especially his YouTube channels, where he would later post grisly images of animal mutilation. “He was very self-obsessed, very narcissistic,” she says. He was prone to sudden mood swings, she adds, but was also “a very good actor.”
Julie says she hasn’t heard from Magnotta since she dumped him in March 2006, except once, when he called her after being stranded by a client. She says she severed ties after that.
"He always wanted to be famous," Julie says. "I guess now he is."