We won’t have much time to talk about it on the show today (not that there’s really anything left to say), but the infamous video that Rob Ford once famously said that he had “never seen or does not exist” is now available for all to see. With the charges this morning dropped against Ford’s friend and sometimes driver, Alexander “Sandro” Lisi, who allegedly tried to bribe and brass knuckle his way to the tape after the website Gawker revealed its existence, the most famous video of a Canadian mayor is now online and as easy to see as your nearest YouTube embed.
The video unfurls mostly as described by both Gawker and Toronto Star reporters Robyn Doolittle and Kevin Donovan. The notable exception is that Ford isn’t heard uttering a gay slur about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, while the reported racial slur against the teenagers he coached in football seems to have been misquoted. As for the discrepancies in their initial description, Doolittle had the following tweet:
https://twitter.com/robyndoolittle/status/763781133880393728
Back at the Toronto Star, Donovan wrote a piece about his one regret from the situation after months of attacks that he, Doolittle and the Star had a political agenda and had made the whole thing up…
This event, and other disturbing incidents, happened long after the original crack video story was published. Which leads me to my one regret. That, while sitting in the back seat with a man we now know to have had involvement in the gun and drug trade, I did not grab the phone from his hand, and sprint off with my reporting partner. And post the video online.
Others, meanwhile, assert that there’s still a political agenda at play. “I wish they would let Rob rest in peace,” Doug Ford said in a statement earlier today after the video was released. “From Day One Rob felt this was political. Today proved that point.”
Rob Ford, of course, passed away earlier this year after an 18-month battle with cancer.
Open Sources Guelph 