Face of Nation : Ottawa’s Cortney Rattray-Johnson, serving eight years for selling fentanyl, has launched a gofundme account to finance beauty school once she’s released from prison.
Rattray-Johnson, 29, was arrested in 2017 for drug trafficking alongside her boyfriend, the ringleader in a drug-and-guns operation. She pleaded guilty early on and expressed remorse for the toll the “death and misery” trade took on Ottawa’s most vulnerable.
She promised the judge that she’d come out of prison a reformed woman and is now trying to crowdfund the schooling for a job in esthetics.
In her plea for $8,000, Rattray-Johnson introduces herself by saying she was raised in a good, middle-class family.
She trained as a hair stylist but a car accident derailed her career and she turned to fast money, only to get busted for selling hard drugs, including deadly fentanyl. (Half of the heroin she was selling was cut with fentanyl.)
“I never imagined this is where I would be for the last years of my twenties. Instead of letting it all break me down I have chosen to use my mistakes to my advantage to create a new beginning for myself,” she wrote.
“ I have lost many things because of my poor choices and I am trying to rebuild relationships and respect within the community. Although I can never change what I have done I am trying to move forward in a positive direction.”
Rattray-Johnson realizes most won’t give her plea a second’s thought, but she’s got nothing to lose.
She reports that her time in prison has so far been well spent. She got her high school diploma and she’s been teaching inmates English as a second language. She’s also spoken to at-risk youth and high school classes about her mistakes with the hope they don’t “go down the same path.”
The sentencing judge back in 2017 described Rattray’s apology in court as genuine, and noted she didn’t make any excuses.
Her family had no clue she was selling drugs and remains firmly supportive of her life-after-prison plans.
She is up for day parole in the fall.
