Joly backs controversial candidate
Report outlines past as escort with multiple identities
Mayoral candidate Mélanie Joly says she knew all about Bibiane Bovet’s past life as an escort, and she stands by her candidate in Plateau-MontRoyal as someone with enormous courage and the will to turn her life around.
Joly, the head of the Vrai Changement pour Montréal party, said she anticipated there might be some discrimination toward Bovet as a transsexual candidate and that some people would cast judgment on her because of her past work in the sex trade.
“I knew that Madame Bovet was a transsexual and that she had a tough past,” Joly told reporters at a news conference Friday afternoon. “But there is no question of her integrity and she is not one of the candidates who filled their pockets at city hall.”
Bovet herself did not attend the news conference.
According to Joly, the article that appeared in La Presse on Friday detailing Bovet’s life as an escort and her multiple identities over the years, hit Bovet hard and she will take a few days to get over the emotional stress, Joly said.
The article was accompanied by a photo of Bovet wearing black lingerie and a red heart pendant.
Bovet is wearing the same pendant, though different clothes, on a website where she presents herself as Justine Lenoir, a “financial engineer” and banker in Hollywood Hills, Calif.
She was Jena Roberts in Miami, however, where she featured in at least one pornographic film before officially changing her name in Quebec to Bibiane Bovet.
Now Bovet is officially a therapeutic masseuse, Joly said Friday, but Joly and her candidate for De Lorimier had a long conversation and Bovet agreed not to give any massages while she is running for city councillor.
As to whether Bovet paid taxes while working as an escort — a job Bovet said she did until June 2012 to pay for her transition from a man to a woman — Joly did not have a clear response.
“That’s her business,” she said at first. Then, “She needs to obey the law.”
Joly was also evasive about Bovet’s controversial ideas about the economy. A self-described “financial engineer,” Bovet has been trying to find investors to create her own currency. Asked what she thought of such ideas, Joly said, “She’s entitled to her opinions.”
Joly believes it is not merely coincidence that this controversy has surfaced just days after her better-thanexpected results in recent polls, which put her in second place after Denis Coderre for mayor. Her opponents are frustrated, she said.
“For me it would have been easier to let her go and say I made a mistake,” Joly said. “But the truth is she has my full support and she has the support of the whole team. ... I am very proud of what we’re doing.”
Marcel Côté, who the latest polls put in fourth place in the mayoral race, said Bovet should never have been accepted as a candidate, mostly because of her economic ideas, which include abolishing provincial taxes. It shows that either she wasn’t properly vetted, Côté said, or Joly lacks judgment.
His own questionnaire for candidates includes potentially embarrassing questions, Côté said, like whether someone has paid for sexual services. His questionnaire does not ask potential candidates whether they have ever been paid for sexual services, however.