Aubut’s ‘brutal awakening’ to how society has changed

As he addressed the media Friday for the first time since a sexual-harassment scandal forced him from his job atop the Canadian Olympic Committee, Marcel Aubut offered his “unreserved apologies” to those he hurt. He announced he has quit the Montreal law firm BCF where he was a prized rainmaker to focus on becoming “a better person.”

But the man who has always been convinced he was a pretty great person — last year he boasted to a reporter that he was “born to make a difference” — suggested he had fallen victim to larger forces.

When he returns to resume an “active and fruitful professional life,” it will be with a new understanding, he vowed. The trademark Aubut “determination and energy” will still be there. But he said he will have to remind himself “that society has changed, and that it demands a greater respect between individuals — more specifically between men and women.”

Society has undoubtedly changed during Aubut’s 67-year lifetime, but it is not as if it happened overnight. It had already changed pretty substantially back in the 1980s when a 15-year-old girl signed on to be a hostess at Quebec City’s Colisée, home of the Nordiques hockey team of which Aubut was president.

Now in her 40s, the woman told TVA this week that during her time working at the arena, she had to put up with Aubut’s fondling regularly. “The hand that descends a little too low to the upper buttock or the hand that climbs a little too high, with insistence, and brushes against the breast,” said the woman, who was not identified.

“You try to avoid falling prey, but it’s not possible. You had to endure Marcel Aubut.”

In his comments Friday, Aubut did not address the specific allegations that have surfaced against him over the past 10 days, and he declined to take any questions.

Society had most certainly changed by 2011 when Aubut was warned by the COC to end his offensive behaviour. The warning followed an Olympic event in Moncton where he was accused of unwelcome comments, touching and kissing.

Somehow that was not enough to snap Aubut out of the Stone Age. There was an assistant at his former law firm who told TVA she was harassed, and sport lawyer Amélia Salehabadi Fouques, who said Aubut propositioned her in front of her son last year.

Then came the harassment complaint from a COC colleague that triggered Aubut’s resignation as president last week. “In 45 years of profes- sional life, I have always lived at 200 kilometres an hour, without stopping,” he said. “It took a crisis like the one I am going through and that I am putting those close to me through, to force me to take a timeout and to reflect deeply.”

Aubut had none of his old swagger Friday. A cordon was stretched across the room in front of his lectern, as if to protect him from the media horde.

“I extremely regret having hurt so many people, who certainly did not deserve it. I hope that one day these people will be able to forgive me,” said Aubut, who is married and has three daughters.

“Today, to all these people and to all others who were outraged by what they saw or heard during the past days, it is from the bottom of my heart, the bottom of my heart and with all the sincerity I am capable of, that I offer my unreserved apologies.”

Aubut called the events of the past 10 days “a brutal awakening.” But if he was truly oblivious to the advances in relations between the sexes over the course of his adult life, he wasn’t sleeping. He was comatose.