PM accused of ‘dancing’ around groping allegation
TRUDEAU ADMITS APOLOGIZING AFTER ALLEGED GROPING, BUT SAYS DIDN’T ACT ‘INAPPROPRIATELY’
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave his most detailed response yet to an 18-yearold allegation he groped a female reporter, confirming Thursday he had apologized to the woman at the time but saying he didn’t feel he had acted “in any way untoward.”
Facing reporters at Queen’s Park in Toronto after his first meeting with new Ontario Premier Doug Ford, Trudeau offered his most elaborate response to the allegation since it resurfaced in recent months.
“I’ve been reflecting very carefully on what I remember from that incident almost 20 years ago,” he said. “I do not feel that I acted inappropriately in any way. But I respect the fact that someone else might have experienced that differently.”
Criticism of Trudeau’s response to the allegation has grown louder since the Post published the first in-depth reporting on the claim — confirming the woman’s authorship of a newspaper editorial and that she made separate contemporaneous complaints about the alleged incident to both her editor and publisher — and in light of his avowal that he has been “deeply engaged” on issues of sexual assault since his early 20s, the zero-tolerance policy for sexual misbehaviour he has imposed on his own political caucus and his previous statements that women should be believed when they raise allegations of impropriety.
Adding her voice to that criticism in the wake of Trudeau’s comments Thursday was Valerie Bourne, publisher of the Creston Valley Advance, a small-town newspaper in Creston, B.C., that featured the short editorial in an August 2000 edition on the groping allegation. She was one of the supervisors to whom the woman reported the incident that summer. She told the Post she thought the prime minister’s explanation was unsatisfactory, and that the prime minister was “tap-dancing” around the substance of the allegation.
In August 2000, Trudeau attended the Kokanee Summit festival, an event held by a local brewery, to accept a donation of $18,500 towards his family’s campaign to build a new public backcountry cabin in a nearby provincial park in memory of his brother Michel, who had died there in 1998 after an avalanche swept him into a lake while skiing.
After the festival, the Advance published an unsigned editorial accusing the then-28-year-old Trudeau, still years away from a career in politics, of the “inappropriate handling” and “groping” of a young female reporter for the paper who had covered the festival. It also quoted an apology it said he gave her the following day.
The National Post previously spoke with two of the reporter’s then-supervisors at the Advance, Bourne and then-editor Brian Bell, who confirmed she complained to them separately shortly after the alleged incident. The woman has declined requests for comment, and the Post has chosen not to name the woman, but the Post has confirmed she wrote the unsigned editorial herself.
On Thursday, Trudeau said, “I’ve been reflecting on the actual interaction and if I apologized later, then it would be because I sensed that she was not entirely comfortable with the interaction we had.
“Like I said, I’ve been working very hard to try and piece it together and even when the original editorial came out at the time, I was fairly confident, I was very confident that I hadn’t acted in a way that I felt was in any way inappropriate.”
Asked for further clarification, Trudeau said, “I apologized in the moment,” adding that neither he nor anyone on his team has reached out to the woman. “We don’t think that would be appropriate at all.”
Trudeau’s office had previously provided a oneparagraph statement on the incident that said he did not recall any “negative interactions.” He repeated a similar message in Regina on Canada Day, telling reporters when asked that he remembered the festival — that it had been a “good day” — but that he didn’t “remember any negative interactions that day at all.”
Trudeau did not specifically respond Thursday to a question as to whether he should be subject to an independent investigation, as other Liberal members of caucus have been. He instead connected the incident to the broader societal conversations struck by the #MeToo movement in the past year.
“Part of this awakening that we’re having as a society, a long-awaited realization, is that it’s not just one side of the story that matters. That the same interactions can be experienced very differently from one person to the next,” he said. “And I am not going to speak for the woman in question, I would never presume to speak for her. But I know that there is an awful lot of reflection to be had as we move forward as a society on how people perceive different interactions.
“This lesson that we are learning, and I’ll be blunt about it, often a man experiences an interaction as being benign or not inappropriate and a woman, particularly in a professional context, can experience it differently and we have to respect that and reflect on that.”
“What a dance that is,” Bourne told the Post Thursday after reading a transcript of the prime minister’s comments.
“To me, he’s deflecting. He’s basically saying that two people can have a different reaction to the same event. He’s got his perception of it and she has hers — and he’s not saying that either is wrong.
“By him acknowledging that he saw that editorial (at the time it was published), by him acknowledging that he remembers the apology and his justification of that apology, it makes me wonder just how detailed his memory is.
“I know what (the woman) told me and I have every reason to believe that what she told me was 1000-per-cent the truth.
“He’s not admitting, he’s not denying, he’s not saying she’s right, he’s not saying she’s wrong. He’s trying to close this off without saying anything concrete that anyone can hold him accountable for further down the road. That’s my perception of it,” said Bourne.
Both Bourne and Bell told the Post that after the editorial was published there had never been a request for an apology, retraction or correction from Trudeau or anyone else.
Bourne declined to specify the precise nature of the alleged unwanted touching out of respect for the reporter’s privacy.
She also said she has had no communication with anyone from the newspaper since leaving as publisher in 2001, including the former editor, Bell, but noted that both she and Bell had independently provided the Post similar impressions of the woman and similar accounts of what she told them.
“For Brian and myself to say the same things shows, to me, it is what it is.
“We both had the same view of her values, her morals, her integrity, her professionalism, her ethics, her work ethics. Neither one of us have questioned that or thought negatively of that. We both hold her in high esteem.”