WE ALL HAVE SECRET LIVES — SOMETIMES LONELY ONES, TOO. AND AS YET ANOTHER POLITICIAN FALLS VICTIM TO SEXTING, CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD SAYS OUR LUST OFTEN KNOWS NO BOUNDARIES.
Did Clement think he would not be caught?
How sobering it is now to go through Tony Clement’s various social media accounts and realize that it was just two weeks ago that he was celebrating his accomplished wife Lynne Golding’s new book and posing with her and the novel, or that in September, his band, The Dock Spiders, was playing a few gigs in his home riding of Parry Sound-Muskoka.
How much of those happy pictures was real? How much of an online life is ever real? For all that Clement, in the modern vernacular, appeared to “share,” as much was hidden. With human beings, there is usually a secret self, if not a whole secret life.
After admitting Tuesday evening to sexting someone he said he believed was a “consenting female recipient” who then allegedly tried to shake him down for money, by one report 50,000 euros — this aspect the RCMP is investigating — Clement stepped down first as shadow justice minister and as a member of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians.
By midday Wednesday, “new information” that suggested “this was not an isolated incident” led Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer to ask Clement for his resignation from caucus.
Were his posts just this relatively old guy (Clement is 57) trying to reach his constituents and fellow Conservatives in the modern manner, or was he creeping, as a legion of young women have claimed on their social media feeds (“Every girl in Canada with an Instagram was wondering when this would finally happen,” said one) to meet what she described as “literally any age 20-26 Canadian girl with a medium-length haircut”?
It’s a reminder, if nothing else, that when it comes to lust, brains are the first thing to go out the window.
How did he manage not to learn the lesson of the felicitously named Anthony Weiner, the former Democratic congressman who resigned over one sexting scandal, only to repeat the behaviour while trying to make a political comeback and who, as of last fall, was in jail for sexting a minor?
Closer to home, there was the Mike Kydd story. He taught a marketing course at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, and was suspended after a female student filed a formal complaint against him.
One of the pictures he’d texted her — a picture of his penis, of course, at her repeated request, a fact she originally failed to disclose — was posted on Twitter by a third party.
He told me once (and confirmed it Wednesday) that even as he was doing it, sending the woman the picture she’d demanded, he knew he was absolutely courting disaster, yet somehow couldn’t stop himself.
Later, she claimed he had foisted the picture upon her. The police investigated her complaint but declined to lay charges; the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission dismissed the woman’s complaint there.
He was an adult; she was an adult; as a part-time prof he had virtually no power over her and, in fact, it was he who was vulnerable, newly separated from his wife and living on his own, and already a little afraid of her. Yet he pressed send. Such is the power of sexual desire, or loneliness, or both.
Clement, to use a golf term, did not go to school on the many men who went before him. He must have imagined that he would be the one guy who wouldn’t get caught or trapped or found out. Well, there aren’t many of those guys about any more.
Of course, it is dead wrong to text intimate pictures to minors, period. It is also wrong to send them unsolicited, to anyone. Clement believed his adult recipient wanted them and, retroactively, that he had been set up as a target of extortion. It is also lousy behaviour to creep young women online, if indeed Clement did that too.
And I don’t buy for a minute his efforts to “medicalize” what he did.
In the brief statement he issued, he said he is “committed to seeking the help and treatment” he needs. What treatment would that be, for heaven’s sake? For terminal vanity?
But there’s an unappealing prissy quality to the discussion of his downfall, perhaps unsurprising given the prissiness of the Tory leader and the party.
As my late father always said (this meant as helpful advice for his boy-crazy daughter), “A stiff prick knows no conscience.” Or much of anything else, either. Still took me years, no decades, to learn the truth of it, for men and, yes, women too. It always does.