‘CATEGORICALLY UNTRUE’
Patrick Brown denies sexual misconduct
Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown denied allegations of sexual impropriety dating back years, as his top advisers resigned around him Wednesday night.
He called the news conference just ahead of a report on CTV’s national news, which reported allegations from two unnamed women. One said he’d asked her for oral sex when she was still in high school and he was a Barrie city councillor, by dropping his pants. The other said he’d assaulted her when she worked for him when she was a federal MP, at a time when she was extremely drunk.
None filed a complaint at the time, CTV reported.
“These allegations are false,” a tearful Brown said in a sudden nighttime news conference at Queen’s Park in Toronto. “Every one of them. I will defend myself as hard as I can, with all the means at my disposal. I can’t speculate on the motive of my accusers, I can only say they what they are saying is categorically untrue.”
He spoke for about a minute and walked out without taking questions. Immediately afterward, five of his top aides — chief of staff Alykhan Velshi, campaign manager Andrew Boddington, strategist Dan Robertson, press secretary Nick Bergamini, and policy adviser Ken Boessenkool, many of them veterans of Stephen Harper’s federal government — resigned. They said they’d urged him to quit as party leader but he refused.
“Mr. Brown will have to go,” said Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington Tory MPP Randy Hillier. “The campaign team has resigned and I’m confident they know more about this than I do. We don’t have a campaign team or a leader at the present time.”
Nepean-Carleton MPP Lisa MacLeod didn’t immediately return a request for a response. Nor did Carleton Tory candidate Goldie Ghamari.
New Democratic Party Leader Andrea Horwath said Brown has to resign.
“He deserves his day in court, but no person can lead a political party in this province with allegations like these hanging over his head,” she said.
At deadline, the Liberals had said nothing officially.
Premier Kathleen Wynne and her Liberals aren’t pushovers, but the question of the campaign up to the provincial election due in June was supposed to be whether they could claw their way back somehow.
Brown ran as an outsider candidate for the Progressive Conservative leadership, won it by outworking the establishment candidate Christine Elliott, and then dragged the party to the political centre — embracing carbon pricing, a modern sex-education curriculum and a bigger role for government in numerous social services — while promising to be a better manager of the people’s business.
He brought in political operators who’ve worked on winning campaigns before and worked in multiple conservative governments, adding gravity to a provincial party that’s shrivelled further in every election since 2003.
Now the formidable Tory team is in pieces, with Brown (as of Wednesday night, at least) still standing, but surrounded by the rubble.
Since reporting on the predatory behaviour of Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein broke the dam on sexual-misconduct stories about powerful men, most of the cases have involved men who admitted they’d done wrong. Some have quibbled about the details or said they’d been partly misinterpreted, or misinterpreted signals themselves, but the general tone has been of contrition.
For Brown to pay the price he’s paid, for allegations he directly and completely denies, will raise questions about the differences among legal justice, moral justice, and political justice.
“It’s never OK for anyone to feel they have been a victim of sexual harassment or feel threatened in any way,” Brown said in his news conference. “We need to move forward to eradicate sexual violence and harassment across the province, across the country. Everywhere.”
He suggested he will sue his accusers: “I know that the court of public opinion moves fast. I have instructed my attorneys to ensure that these allegations are addressed where they should be: in a court of law,” he said.