CONCORD – A Superior Court judge has concluded that Marc Bernier, the Nashua man accused of threatening to kill a transgender person for using the women’s locker room at a local fitness club, is guilty of violating the state’s Civil Rights Act, a spokesman for Attorney General Gordon MacDonald announced Monday.

According to MacDonald’s statement on the Superior Court’s ruling, his office pursued a civil rights violation against Bernier shortly after Bernier was arrested in late March on a misdemeanor charge of criminal threatening.

As part of the ruling, the Superior Court judge ordered an injunction against Bernier that orders him to have no contact with, and to stay at least 250 feet away from, the alleged victim for one year.

He must also stay off the property of the fitness center, which is on Northwest Boulevard in Nashua.

The injunction also includes a $3,000 civil penalty, with all but $500 suspended for one year on the condition that Bernier comply with the terms of the injunction.

The ruling, according to MacDonald’s statement, is based on allegations that Bernier, 60, “repeatedly threatened to kill another patron (at the fitness center) after Bernier learned that the other patron was transgender and had used the women’s locker room to change.

“Mr. Bernier threatened to kill her based upon his belief that she should not have used the women’s locker room because her gender and Mr. Bernier’s perception of her gender,” according to the statement.

Nashua Attorney Mark Osborne, who represented Bernier, said in court documents that Bernier’s wife, who accompanied him to the gym that day, was changing in the women’s locker room when a person she later said she believed was a “large, middle-aged adult male” entered the changing room, prompting her to “quickly get dressed and hurry out.”

A short time later, according to the motion, Marc Bernier was using an exercise machine when he noticed a person he also believed to be “a large, middle-aged adult male” using a machine several feet away.

According to Osborne, Bernier described the person as wearing a “short, purple skirt” while exercising, and “wearing several colorful ribbons about the head and hair area.”

When the person “stood up and bent over,” according to the motion, Bernier said the person’s purple skirt “had ridden high enough that Mr. Bernier couldn’t help but see (the alleged victim’s) brightly striped underwear.”

Bernier next noticed “a large bulge in (the person’s) underwear … which he believed to be a pair of testicles belonging to” the person.

After learning from his wife that the person was the same one she earlier saw in the changing room, Bernier asked the person whether the person is “a man or a woman.”

Bernier was told “it was none of his business,” prompting him to respond, according to police reports Osborne quoted in the motion, that “it is my business because my wife changes in that locker room, and if I see you going in there again I will (expletive) kill you.”

The two argued, soon taking it to the front counter where an employee tried to get between them, documents state.

Osborne argues that the security video “clearly shows (the person) not acting afraid, fearful, intimidated or terrorized” by Bernier.

Instead, Osborne wrote, the person can be seen “making a ‘bring it’ gesture with arms spread wide … very much acting like she is in charge and exhibiting no fear.”

Osborne alleges the person “invited” Bernier “to a fist fight,” which Bernier declined, he wrote.

Dean Shalhoup may be reached at 594-1256, or at dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.

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