The scandalous sacking of a high-profile Canadian radio host over a sexual incident has taken a surprising turn, with the broadcaster defending himself online by detailing his preference for consensual "rough sex".
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The rumour mill kicked into gear on Sunday when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, known as CBC, released a statement saying its "relationship with Jian Ghomeshi has come to an end".
Within hours of the announcement, lawyers for the popular broadcaster said their client planned to sue for $50 million in damages over "breach of confidence and bad faith".
A short time later Ghomeshi published a 1500 word confession on his public Facebook page about his sexual preferences and his perspective on why he was fired.
"I've been fired from the CBC because of the risk of my private sex life being made public as a result of a campaign of false allegations pursued by a jilted ex girlfriend and a freelance writer," the host of national daily talk program Q wrote.
The post was liked more than 75,000 times and shared by more than 30,000 people within just five hours.
He said he started seeing a woman in her 20s about two years ago and they engaged in "adventurous forms of sex that included role-play, dominance and submission".
"We talked about using safe words and regularly checked in with each other about our comfort levels," he wrote. "She encouraged our role-play and often was the initiator. We joked about our relations being like a mild form of Fifty Shades of Grey or a story from Lynn Coady's Giller-Prize winning book last year."
He claimed a break-up led to "a campaign of harassment, vengeance and demonisation" and "categorically untrue allegations" that he had been abusive.
He acknowledged that his "tastes in the bedroom may not be palatable to some folks".
"They may be strange, enticing, weird, normal, or outright offensive to others. We all have our secret life. But that is my private life. That is my personal life. And no one, and certainly no employer, should have dominion over what people do consensually in their private life."
Following the post, the Toronto Star published details from interviews with three young women who claimed Ghomeshi had been physically violent to them without their consent.
The Star's editor, Michael Cooke, defended his decision to publish the "explosive" allegations: "In view of Mr. Ghomeshi's extraordinary statement on Facebook on Sunday evening, and his high public profile in Canada, we now believe it is in the public interest."
Many facts of the saga remain unclear. The nature of the evidence Ghomeshi showed CBC is not known. Nor are the identities of his accusers. And it's not certain whether Ghomeshi's public confession - presumably an attempt to get out in front of a story likely to be damning - will affect his prospective litigation.
No matter the resolution, it will surely derail a rise nothing short of meteoric. Born in London in 1967 to Iranian parents, he grew up in time for the Iranian hostage crisis. He endured taunts of "blackie" and questions of where he kept his machine gun, Toronto Life reported. "I didn't take offence to being called Blackie," he later wrote in the Globe and Mail. "It didn't bother me as a little kid, because I didn't recognise any of the broader societal implications or any sort of a power dynamic."
After he relocated to Toronto, his passion for music was supplanted by one for social criticism, for which he had a keen and insightful eye. After a music tour through the United States in 2001 as the Afghanistan war was beginning, he wrote a widely-read dispatch called, "A dove in the land of the eagle." "Never make the mistake of assuming Americans to be a homogeneous group with one opinion," he wrote. "It's a stereotype we tend to perpetuate in Canada, if not the rest of the world."
The piece won him a slot as a CBC broadcaster, which he parlayed into larger and larger roles.
If there's a date, however, that marked the beginning of the end of Ghomeshi's CBC career, it is June 10, 2013. On that day, XOJane published an article entitled, "I accidentally went on a date with a presumed-gay Canadian C-List celebrity who creepily proved he isn't gay." Though the piece never identified Ghomeshi, it was said to describe him, and he admitted as much to Toronto Life.
with Washington Post
