Robert G. Miller is the former owner of Future Electronics, a distributor of electronic components, which he founded in 1968 and built into a global juggernaut. But you won’t find his name on the main pages of the company’s website. In a province where entrepreneurs become minor celebrities simply for having made it, it could be hard to find any trace of the Quebec billionaire.
Miller was a fanatically private person, so reclusive he was rarely photographed. His Westmount home remains obscured on Google Street View, and the CBC reports that the flight logs of his two private jets have been removed from most public databases. His first mention in the pages of Quebec newspapers, as the man who bought Charles Bronfman’s Westmount mansion, can be traced back to the mid-1980s. His name occasionally appeared in classified ads offering sales jobs, or in articles about his business which always made sure to describe him as “publicity-shy,” but that was largely it. Odd for a tech mogul who began cornering the computer components market over a decade before the PC revolution.
Miller’s secrecy was upended for good on May 30, when he was arrested on twenty-one charges, including sexual assault and sexual exploitation of minors. Miller is alleged to have committed his offences against ten women, between 1994 and 2016, eight of whom were minors at the time the crimes were alleged to have occurred. There are likely more victims, as Miller reportedly quickly grew tired of the women and girls he paid for sex. At least one additional possible victim—who alleges she was molested by Miller at the age of twelve, in 1977—came forward as a consequence of the considerable and expansive Radio-Canada/CBC investigation led by Brigitte Noël and Pasquale Turbide.
Identifying all the victims is complicated by a variety of factors, including the victims’ obvious reluctance to come forward and relive trauma from decades past. As reported by the CBC, Miller also went to considerable lengths to insulate himself from potential recrimination. He allegedly had his own pimps, maintained a luxury hotel suite and possibly a second residence for his alleged crimes, told some victims he was a radio executive in the United States named Bob Adams, lavished his victims with expensive gifts to seemingly buy their silence, and employed his security team to run counterintelligence operations against the private investigators hired to look into him.
Before investigations into his perverse alleged sexual proclivities became public (and led to his arrest), Miller had two brushes with the law, both police raids. The first occurred in 1967, when he, his father, and fourteen other people were arrested in a national police effort to shut down a conspiracy to establish a gambling ring. Both Millers were ultimately exonerated. The following year, Miller established the company that would bring him his fortune as it grew to over 5,500 employees and operations in forty-four countries. It was legitimate, though perhaps not respectable. Future Electronics had a reputation for ruthlessness, undercutting, and aggression. Turnover was reportedly extremely high.
For years, much of what was known about Miller and Future Electronics stemmed from reporting after a 1999 joint FBI–RCMP raid on the company’s head office in Pointe-Claire, Quebec. The details have always been murky—it was allegedly a fraud probe that Future’s lawyers successfully fought off for several years before the US Department of Justice dropped the charges in 2002. A full-page article about Miller and his company in the pages of the Montreal Gazette provided perhaps the most detailed profile ever written about either, but it used only ex-employees and former co-workers as quoted sources. Even though Miller told his staff the raid was an “unfounded attack upon our integrity,” according to one 2010 article, he never sat for an interview on the topic himself.
Some details nonetheless filtered out. The public learned Miller was married, with two sons, and that his wife, Margaret Antonier, had worked as an advertising executive with prominent Montreal radio stations. Antonier was also deeply involved in Miller’s other business—namely, a real estate development company called Miromar, which developed factory outlet malls in Quebec and New York.
The couple separated in 2005 and quietly divorced in 2006. As reported by the CBC’s The Fifth Estate and Radio-Canada’s Enquête, in the fall of 2006, Antonier requested a meeting with John Westlake, a Montreal private investigator and former police officer, to discuss an investigation into her ex-husband. The meeting took place in Vermont, because Antonier was reportedly scared of Miller. Antonier claimed she had found pornographic materials that horrified her. Westlake and his associates began their surveillance of Miller, accumulating evidence and testimony, before discovering they were being watched themselves by Miller’s own private security force. When the latter offered Westlake and his partner $300,000 apiece for the evidence and information they had collected—payment to end their investigation—they in turn went to Montreal police and turned their findings over to them.
Perhaps sensing the need to engage in some pre-emptive damage control, Miller granted one of just a handful of interviews of his entire life, when he spoke with Diane Francis, in 2007, for her book Who Owns Canada Now? In it, Miller described the divorce with Antonier as amicable and commented on her strengths as a businesswoman. In November 2009, Montreal police arrived at Future Electronics’ head offices with a search warrant, this time to investigate Miller’s private security team. According to Enquête/The Fifth Estate, the details of the warrant are sealed. It has since been reported by the Canadian Press that Montreal police had opened an investigation into Miller at the time but Quebec’s prosecution service decided not to proceed.
Contrary to Miller’s earlier description of the divorce, details of a very acrimonious separation were made public in a 2010 QMI News Agency investigation by Andrew McIntosh. Though the split was presented as a bitter he-said-she-said, the investigation alludes to Miller’s alleged pedophilia euphemistically. Antonier’s lawyers claimed the divorce stemmed from Antonier discovering her husband had engaged in “horrible wrongdoings” and “wrongful acts.” The lawyers indicated that she initiated divorce proceedings after discovering activities Miller engaged in that were so offensive that he insisted Montreal divorce court proceedings be sealed.
That people were investigating Miller seventeen years before allegations became public should come as no surprise—aberrant sexual behaviour, particularly when committed by powerful men, is rarely an isolated event. But details of Montreal police’s initial investigation into Miller, as told to Enquête and The Fifth Estate by Miller’s victims, demonstrate the extent to which the powerful of our society are protected by services meant to protect the public.
According to Miller’s victims, Montreal police treated them as if they had committed the crime, telling one that, unless she cooperated and told them everything she knew, she would be charged with operating a child prostitution ring. The victim was incredulous—she was only fourteen years old when the crimes are alleged to have started. In another instance, a victim recalls police interrogating her, taking her fingerprints and photographs. As if all this was not bad enough, the victims were reportedly provided legal counsel by Miller—the same lawyer for all the victims, and the lawyer accompanied them to their meetings with police and was present when they were asked to provide evidence against him. One victim says she felt the lawyer’s only job was to keep them quiet.
Another victim told Enquête/The Fifth Estate that she later learned her file sat for a couple years with the prosecution office and went nowhere. She claims that Montreal police never followed up with any of the alleged victims to let them know what was happening. According to the current allegations against Miller, he was still paying to assault girls for years after Montreal police suspended their investigation. When the late actor and filmmaker Claude Jutra was accused, in 2016, of having paid underage boys for sex, Montreal was quick to rename a park, and Jutra’s name was dropped from an annual film award, but seemingly no one in law enforcement thought to dust off the Miller file. Similarly, after numerous women came forward to accuse Just for Laughs founder Gilbert Rozon of rape, sexual assault, and other assorted crimes, Miller’s case file apparently once again escaped additional scrutiny (Rozon has been acquitted of some of those charges).
Whether Miller will even make it into a courtroom, let alone face justice, is far from guaranteed, despite the considerable evidence against him. He is allegedly in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s, and his lawyers are arguing that he would never be able to get a fair trial because he can’t defend himself, and that leaving his home would be a hardship. In June, a Quebec superior court judge refused the request for a stay on charges. Miller has reportedly been suffering from Parkinson’s since 1996 and has been bedridden, unable to feed or bathe himself, since 2022. His victims allege, however, that Miller engaged in his predatory pedophilic behaviour during this time. According to company records, he left the helm of Future Electronics only in February of 2023, after the CBC aired its damning report.
That the allegations against such a secretive person finally became public, nearly twenty years after rumours were first investigated, is a feat in its own right. But it is not justice. If Miller’s Parkinson’s prevents him from being held accountable, perhaps the victims could shift their efforts to Montreal police and Quebec’s prosecution office and all the others who were witnesses and accomplices to Miller’s monstrosity. As disturbing as Miller’s alleged crimes are, it is equally disturbing that the systems of power protected a pedophile.
Taylor C. Noakes is an independent journalist and public historian from Montreal.
