Why Ms. M never went to the police,
She preferred guarantee of confidentiality Senate ethics officer could provide
Ms. M, who proved to be Sen. Don Meredith’s undoing, was worried about the stigma of coming forward publicly with allegations against someone she saw as a powerful man, both politically and in the religious community.
“I am young,” she told the Star back in June 2015. “I still have many accomplishments to attain that I don’t want to be known for having a relationship with a manipulative politician as a teenager.”
That is why the then 18-year-old chose the Senate ethics officer over the Ottawa police when she was asked by authorities to describe a two-year sexual relationship with Meredith, who is also a Pentecostal pastor, beginning when she was just 16, living alone in Ottawa far from her parents and family overseas.
The Ottawa police, quite transparently, told her that despite the normal ban on publication on her identity in court for a case like this, her identity would be known to anyone who attended court or examined the court file. The Senate ethics officer’s proceedings would be under a cloak of confidentiality, she was promised, and so they have remained. Without Ms. M’s co-operation, the police did not investigate. With it, Senate officer Lyse Ricard did and found that Meredith breached the trust of his office, and of Canadians.
For Ms. M, it has remained important to keep her identity confidential. She has gone on to graduate from university in Ottawa, and now works elsewhere in Canada, doing her best to put the matter behind her. For a considerable time, she did not even tell her parents, though she eventually did.
“My parents sacrificed so much to send me to Canada, I will not want to embarrass them,” she previously said.
Meredith resigned from the Senate on Tuesday, days before senators were to vote on his expulsion.
When she first spoke to the Star, Ms. M (she is called by this pseudonym in the Senate report) said her decision to first talk to a reporter came as a result of what she had heard of a previous investigation into Meredith, this one related to workplace harassment and sexual harassment. Ms. M had seen news accounts of this and realized that some of the people she had likely seen on visits to Meredith’s office may have felt they were victims of a toxic workplace culture.
“I am worried that they will not be believed,” Ms. M told the Star at the time. She thought that by adding her voice, and the considerable documentary evidence (text, Skype and Viber chat histories) she might make a difference.
Tuesday, after a protracted investigative process, followed by a Senate committee’s decision to recommend Meredith be expelled, Meredith resigned. He wrote to the Senate saying that he did not want to engage in the “constitutional fight” that he suggested would ensue if senators voted, for the first time in history, to expel a senator.
“I am acutely aware that the Upper Chamber is more important than my moral failings,” Meredith said in his brief letter.
Ironically, the workplace harassment probe ongoing when Ms. M’s allegations surfaced may never see the light of day, along with a third probe into Meredith’s business dealings and an allegation of conflict of interest. The Senate’s Ethics and Conflict of Interest Code states that any probe underway when a senator leaves the Senate will be suspended permanently. It would be up to the Senate ethics committee to make a ruling to continue and publish the probe’s results.
Meredith, in resigning, leaves a $145,000 salary and as a previous Star story detailed, will receive a pension of roughly $25,000 annually for life beginning when he turns 55 in two years.
On Meredith’s first day as a senator, back in February 2011, he was introduced to the chamber by Marjory LeBreton, a Conservative senator at the time.
“The Reverend Donald Meredith joins us from the Toronto region, where he has been actively involved in his community as a Pastor of the Pentecostal Praise Centre. He is also the executive director of the GTA Faith Alliance, which is an organization of over two dozen community and faith organizations dedicated to looking at the problem of youth violence. Reverend Meredith is a committed anti-crime advocate, who is deeply devoted to his community and to ending the tragedies and senseless violence we have seen in Toronto in recent years,” LeBreton said, to much applause. Laughter and jokes followed when she mentioned to an Ottawa audience that Meredith is a “100 per cent Toronto Maple Leafs fan.”
In the years that followed. Meredith, when he spoke in the Senate, often mentioned how he was committed to helping youth, something critics of Meredith have cited as an odd statement for someone now known to be involved with a 16-year-old.
As the Senate detailed, Meredith’s relationship with Ms. M began at his urging in 2013 when Meredith, 48 at the time, met the young woman at a church event. Over a two-year period it progressed from flirtatious chats over Skype and Viber to sexually explicit live videos during which Meredith would masturbate while the woman took off her clothing, to intimate sexual relations that included fondling. They had sexual intercourse before and after Ms. M turned 18.
It was an on-again, off-again relationship. Ms. M tried to break it off soon after it started, writing to Meredith in July 2013 to express concern about the relationship.
“The more I let you into my life, the more you hurt me.”
Ms. M told Meredith that she was upset at how, on a meeting in his Senate office earlier in the year, he suddenly grabbed her and put his hands on her buttocks. She said that she came to talk to him and instead received “sexual harassment.” She explained in the letter that she was young and thoroughly confused by this relationship with a much older, married man. She said she found it odd that he was constantly asking her about sex, whether she watched pornographic movies, and what she was wearing (when they were communicating via text). His frequent response, which she quoted to him in her letter, was simply, “I am a man.”
Tuesday, Ms. M told the Star that she is doing well, though “struggling” with the aftermath of the situation.
In a line that predicted the future, Ms. M, then 16, wrote to Meredith in the summer of 2013 that she watches the news and observes that, “today, someone is retiring because of a sex scandal, tomorrow, its another’s turn.” Kevin Donovan can be reached at 416-312-3503 or kdonovan@thestar.ca
“I don’t want to be known for having a relationship with a manipulative politician as a teenager.” MS. M