I can't understand why/how. For something like this to happen that way, it must have been a hit job from a rival or somebody else up there.
It seems to me that this is a career-making opportunity for a reporter, just as the Aziz Ansari story was a brand-making moment for "babe.net". That might be a powerful incentive to spruce things up a bit to make for a juicier story.
I think the standards of journalism require the disclosure of a connection like that. When the CTV runs a story about Bell Media, they disclose that Bell is their parent company, for example. Columnists make similar disclosures when they're writing about subjects they have a personal relationship with. If Aiello is friends with the feature witness in her story, failing to disclose that is a glaring omission.
So that leads to the question: does Rachel Aiello actually have a personal relationship with the feature witness in her story?
While trying to find out more on that question, I stumbled onto this article. The Ontario PC party ended its relationship with a law firm after one of the lawyers, Joseph Villeneuve, publicly named the accuser:
He also referred to reports that the woman is a former work colleague and friend of Rachel Aiello, one of the CTV reporters, something the network denies.
“I think the public deserves to know when a reporter is in a close relationship with an anonymous source,” he said. “It doesn’t pass the smell test … Frankly, there seems to be an intentional or negligent attempt to mislead about the fact they were acquainted for years before this disclosure. Fairness dictates that a disclaimer should’ve been made.”
But Matthew Garrow, a spokesman for CTV, said the allegation that Ms. Aiello was close friends with the woman in the story is false.
“Because this woman had worked on Parliament Hill, CTV News took steps before publication and broadcast to ensure that there was no previous contact with any of our journalists that would influence our reporting of this story,” he said. “Our legal counsel participated in this process.”
http://nationalpost.com/news/politics/ontario-pcs-fire-lawyer-allied-with-patrick-brown-after-he-attacks-browns-sexual-misconduct-accuser-onlineSoooo... Brown obviously knows who the anonymous accuser is. Did Joseph Villeneuve also know who she is? Did he drop the correct name in his Facebook rant? Probably. Villeneuve is a personal friend of Brown, and it seems likely that the law-firm working on the file for the Ontario PCs would have that information as well. It seems likely that Villeneuve had the right name.
The next question is whether the accuser is Chelsea Nash, as Frank Magazine and others have been claiming? Did Frank get that information from Villeneuve's Facebook posts or from other sources connected with Brown?
I did a little google-sleuthing myself and found that Chelsea Nash was indeed at the "Hockey Night in Barrie" event that the anonymous accuser said she organized for Brown. In this 2014 photo gallery, Nash is pictured in one of the photographs, holding a clipboard talking to one of the players.
https://www.simcoe.com/news-story/4760779-celebrating-hockey-night-in-barrie/It seems more than likely that Chelsea Nash is indeed the anonymous woman in the article. It's probable that there's other information around to support that as well-- LinkedIn profiles and so on.
Did Aiello and Nash have a personal friendship? Yes. This is easily verifiable with a bit of googling. One can find that they were two of the four members of the "Hill Times Headliners" lawn-bowling team when they worked at the Hill Times, for example.
But CTV says this just isn't so...
But Matthew Garrow, a spokesman for CTV, said the allegation that Ms. Aiello was close friends with the woman in the story is false.
“Because this woman had worked on Parliament Hill, CTV News took steps before publication and broadcast to ensure that there was no previous contact with any of our journalists that would influence our reporting of this story,” he said. “Our legal counsel participated in this process.”
It's hard to reconcile CTV's statement with the anonymous woman being Chelsea Nash. It seems like either everybody has it wrong and Chelsea Nash isn't the anonymous woman, or else CTV is lying about having done due diligence on a connection between the two.
-k