Duffy contacts possible daughter
Peruvian woman says embattled senator is father
A Peruvian woman does not know if she will proceed with her paternity lawsuit against Mike Duffy now that the suspended senator has reached out to her, her lawyer said, even as Duffy himself called the matter “private.”
“The truth is we don’t know what is going to happen,” lawyer Jorge Alejandro Razuri Susoni said over the phone from Lima.
“There are a great deal of variables in this situation ... All possibilities are open and it depends on both parties to talk about them.”
Razuri confirmed that Karen Duffy Benites, 32, had a two-hour conversation on Facetime with Duffy but declined to elaborate further, saying only that she is happy.
“For the moment we won’t be making any more comments related to this case. We are indicating that they have been in contact, and that’s a good thing for Ms. Karen Duffy,” Ra- zuri said. Reached through Twitter Wednesday, Karen Duffy declined to provide additional comment.
A request for comment to Mike Duffy’s personal email account elicited a one-line response: “This is a private matter and no one’s business.”
A former TV journalist, Mike Duffy, 68, has been under intense scrutiny of late over a Senate expense scandal. He faces 31 charges, including fraud, breach of trust and bribery.
He previously told Maclean’s magazine, which first reported Karen Duffy’s story last week, that the allegations were “untrue” but that he would respond to any legal process from Peru.
Karen Duffy, married to a zinc mining executive and with three children, says she is the product of a shortlived romance between her mother, Yvette Benites Ruiz, a convicted drug mule who was awaiting deportation in Ottawa, and Mike Duffy.
A December letter from her lawyer to Mike Duffy, and provided to Postmedia News, alleged Benites met Mike Duffy in 1979 in Kingston, where she served less than two years in jail. A court document filed in the Superior Court of Justice in Lima indicates the first meeting was actually in 1981, in Ottawa, where Maclean’s says she was living in a halfway house.
A sudden deportation meant Benites left without telling him personally that she was pregnant, she told Maclean’s, but she left him a note and tried repeatedly to contact him in subsequent years.
Benites told QMI Agency Wednesday that Mike Duffy had acknowledged paternity in conversation with her daughter, but the latter’s lawyer did not confirm the report.
Karen Duffy, who runs an athletic apparel business, claims she made numerous attempts to get the senator’s attention over the years, sending him frequent updates of her growing family, to no avail.
Her birth certificate lists “Mike Duffy Clayton,” a Canadian “TV reporter,” as her father, although her mother could have given any name. Mike Duffy’s middle name is Dennis.
The letter her lawyer sent to Mike Duffy sought a “process of conciliation” to resolve the matter swiftly and the “most peaceful way possible with complete discretion, being that it is an imminent family matter.”
The court documents related to the legal action filed in Superior Court of Justice in Lima are apparently en route to Mike Duffy. Once he receives them, he will have 10 days to respond. If he fails to, a Peruvian court can declare him her father.
“I’m not interested in one cent from that man,” Karen Duffy recently told a Peruvian television program. “I only want him to know, and to turn his head and see that in Peru, in the country that he least imagined, perhaps, there is a piece of him, which is me, who’s waiting for him.”