TV ONTARIO HOST CLEARED OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT.

A decent, proper wrongly accused public figure

If the conviction of Bill Cosby of sexual assault this week put wind beneath the tired wings of #MeToo, the vindication of veteran Ontario broadcaster Steve Paikin was the force that added drag.

Even putting those two names in the same paragraph is an injustice to Paikin, a man so proper that even the independent investigator who has cleared him of any wrongdoing, lawyer Rachel Turnpenney, took notice of it.

In a single line of her 27-page report released Friday, she wrote, “There was also credible evidence provided to the investigator that Paikin is uncomfortable talking about sexual subjects in a public manner.”

Yet his accuser, the multiple-times unsuccessful Toronto political candidate Sarah Thomson, would have had the world believe that within five minutes of sitting down to lunch in a crowded uptown restaurant named Grano, in the presence of her assistant, a man he had never met, Paikin baldly asked Thomson to sleep with him.

This was from the getgo, for anyone who has ever met this decent, lovely man, transparent horse manure.

The host of The Agenda and I aren’t friends, but I’ve been on his TVOntario show a couple of times, and that was enough to convince me he was incapable of acting badly, let alone that badly.

Fortunately, Paikin enjoyed the same excellent reputation — as a consummate pro who does his homework, excruciatingly decorous always — at TVO and everywhere else.

It was that stellar reputation that allowed TVO CEO Lisa de Wilde to do the right thing, and keep Paikin on air and in the job while the investigation proceeded. It was almost shocking to see a company extend the presumption of innocence to an accused employee.

So the accusation fell flat, or rather it would have totally had it been levelled at almost any other time.

But Thomson made it first in two posts in the dreadful online publication she runs, the Women’s Post (in which she didn’t name Paikin), and she made it as #MeToo had just taken down then Ontario Conservative Leader Patrick Brown.

Indeed, in her first post, dated Jan. 31 and headlined “Guilty men fear the truth,” she wrote in part: “The two women who reported Patrick Brown have inspired other women.” Then she issued an invitation: “If you are a woman and have experienced a talk-show host who used a similar line on you, please reach out to me” and gave her email address.

She wrote another piece on Feb. 2, in which she credited herself with having taken on then Toronto Mayor Rob Ford back in 2013 and “being the first to talk about his drug use and sexual misconduct.”

Well, that wasn’t quite what she did. What she did was accuse Ford of having grabbed her ass at a fundraiser and some of those present said they’d overheard her tell another woman, “We need to get a picture of the mayor’s hand near your butt; it would be good for the campaign.”

Her modus operandi then is now familiar.

As she did with Paikin, she told a number of people who were not witnesses that she’d been assaulted, attempting to bolster her allegation that something had happened with supposed contemporaneous complaint.

In any case, with the second Women’s Post article, Thomson reissued her invitation for other women who had experienced “the same situation” to come forward.

“And I warn him,” she wrote. “We are coming. … Do the right thing and step down from your job.”

The very next day, she wrote Paikin a personal email, saying, “I am sorry but I could not let you carry on — what you did to me wasn’t fair — and with the elections this year, I don’t want you doing it to other women candidates.”

Again, she issued a threat: “So I am gathering letters from other women with similar experiences of you — we’ll add a letter from my EA and my own letter and will be sending to your board and CEO next month.” She urged him to step down “before this blows up” and cautioned that, “I can’t control how the other women will want to handle their issues with you — they may expose you.”

But Paikin in essence exposed her: He immediately handed the email over to TVO and called her accusations “complete fiction.”

There were and are no other women.

The letter from her EA was an email, dated the day of the Grano lunch, that Thomson may have solicited and which the EA all but disavowed. The EA, identified in the report as Witness J, was deemed by the investigator to be as unreliable as Thomson herself.

Despite being asked for an interview early on, Thomson didn’t talk to Turnpenney until April 5; it appears she was not cooperating with the investigation she made necessary.

There never was, as she told Paikin, any of that “using your position to try to get women to have sex with you ...” As the report makes clear, Paikin didn’t and doesn’t have that power, the say-so over who is and isn’t a guest on the show; his executive producer does.

The producer eventually stopped asking her on because she was, shall we say, a handful.

Curiously, as Turnpenney noted, Thomson appears to still genuinely believe Paikin asked her for sex, just as she still insists she was somehow blackballed from the show after 2010, though she was not, as her 2011 appearance proves.

What Sarah Thomson believes is true doesn’t matter.

But the destructive power she wielded so carelessly and with such menace, and to no consequence for her, does matter. Yet here we all are, again.

SAME EXCELLENT REPUTATION AT TVO AND EVERYWHERE ELSE.