Ex-UCP candidate who says she was branded a racist hopes 'truth can be aired in full' at trial

Caylan john ford is hoping a Calgary courtroom testament redeem her justness heptad years after her private Facebook messages were leaked to media outlets, a move she says branded her a white supremacist and devastated her life.

"I was wrongly defamed and lied about, and suffered very significant harms as a result. And I don't believe that such lies should be allowed to stand."

The judge-alone trial, which began in March before Justice Lorena Harris of the Court of King's Bench of Alberta, is scheduled to last until mid-June. The court has so far heard from more than 30 witnesses, including Ford and former Alberta premier Jason Kenney.

The defence, which is expected to launch next week, will include testimony from journalists, both former and current, of the media outlets.

The lawsuit initially included 14 defendants, but Ford reached settlements with six of them. Progress Alberta, a non-profit group, paid Ford $250,000, while the other five defendants settled for undisclosed amounts. One person who is no longer a defendant didn't reach a settlement.

"They have never retracted or corrected their original stories, nor have they ever presented my perspective on the allegations," she said. "That is why they are still parties to the action."

But according to their statements of defence, there's nothing to be contrite about and nothing that needs retracting or corrected — and all stand by the articles that were published about Ford.

Ford initiated legal action after she stepped down in March 2019 as a candidate for the United Conservative Party. Her resignation followed a story published in PressProgress under the headline: "UCP candidate complained white supremacist terrorists are treated unfairly, leaked messages show."

The story quoted from what it said were leaked messages that had been part of private social media conversations Ford had with another individual, Karim Jivraj, whom she had met at a Progressive Conservative party in 2017. The two later cultivated a friendship, but that relationship eventually deteriorated.

One of the messages from Ford, according to the PressProgress story, included a statement she allegedly made in reference to white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017.

"When the perpetrator is an Islamist, the denunciations are intermingled with breathless assurances that they do not represent Islam, that Islam is a religion of peace, etc.," Ford allegedly wrote.

"When the terrorists are white supremacists, that kind of soul-searching or attempts to understand the sources of their radicalization or their perverse moral reasoning is beyond the pale."

The story quoted an anonymous source as the leaker of the messages, but it was later revealed to be Jivraj.

At the time of her resignation, Kenney, who was UCP leader and a month away from being elected Alberta's premier, condemned the remarks attributed to Ford and "found her comments completely inexplicable."

In her statement of claim, Ford said the articles and subsequent controversy led to her being "irreconcilably injured" and have caused her "catastrophic personal and professional embarrassment and humiliation on an international level."

She has suffered "forced isolation and social ostracism," along with the unavailability of new employment, the statement of claim says.

The Star, in its statement of defence, denied that the articles or words complained about by Ford were "false, malicious, or defamatory."

"To the extent various characterizations of the Ford comments (such as 'racist,' 'offensive,' 'comments about white nationalism' or 'promoting white supremacist talking points') are facts (which is denied), the Ford comments are racist, offensive, relate to 'white nationalism,'" it said.

The Star said allegations that the comments were racist and promoted white supremacy "largely lay in the fact the comments were considered racist and supporting white supremacy by stakeholders and public figures, not in the truth or falsity of those characterizations."

Meanwhile, the Broadbent Institute denied that its article was defamatory or that Ford's statements had been "edited, altered, taken out of context or changed in any way."

For example, she said despite the characterization that she complained about how white supremacist terrorists were treated unfairly following the Charlottesville rally in 2017, "that simply never happened: I actually wrote that I found that rally 'sickening.'"

Ford said the media received "short, decontextualized excerpts" from an unreliable source, never saw the whole conversation and instead "deceptively edited my comments to attribute to me views that I have never held."

"The defendants did not just report on my words. They called me a white supremacist, a racist, hateful, and dangerous."

Senior Reporter

---

---