Tables turn on journalist at B.C. trial
VANCOUVER In July 2012, a senior editor at the Toronto Star sent freelance reporter Laura Robinson an email in response to a number of messages she had delivered to him. “Obsessiveness is a trait as admirable as it is irritating,” read his cryptic note.
The editor “was suggesting that I was obsessive,” said Robinson, testifying at a Vancouver court.
Clearly, she was that. Were she not stuck on a questionable story that other journalists might have left alone, things would never have come to this: Unproven accusations of abuse; stained reputations; and a defamation trial that, in a bizarre twist, Robinson initiated against someone she’d attacked in print.
Robinson returns to B.C. Supreme Court on Monday, for a second week of trial proceedings. She is suing John Furlong, former head of VANOC, the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games organizing committee.
She claims Furlong defamed her in his response to an incendiary story she wrote about him three years ago, in which several B.C. aboriginal people accused him of physical abuse and racist taunts in the late 1960s and early ’70s, at a Catholic-run day school where Furlong had taught.
The Toronto Star edited Robinson’s story in July 2012, removing references to an alleged sexual assault; the physical and verbal abuse accusations were not cut. The Star decided not to publish it, court heard last week.
The Georgia Straight, a weekly Vancouver newspaper, published the Star’s edited version two months later. Furlong called the physical and verbal abuse allegations outrageous and untrue, and characterizing Robinson as an irresponsible journalist pursuing a “personal vendetta.”
He filed a defamation suit against the Georgia Straight and Robinson, but later withdrew it. By then, Robinson had launched defamation proceedings against Furlong.
The trial began last week. Robinson took the witness stand midweek and was soon cross-examined by Furlong ’s lawyer, John Hunter.
It was a fascinating back-andforth. The tables were turned; Robinson, the plaintiff, had to play defence. Hunter suggested she’d had an agenda in writing and promoting her piece, that she was an embittered axe-grinder who resented male authority figures in sport.
Robinson said she’d had no agenda. This was undermined, perhaps, by an incident revealed in her crossexamination. Robinson admitted to having called a female VANOC vice-president a “traitor to women” after female ski jumpers were excluded from the 2010 Games.
Robinson said she regretted the remark.