I'm curious why you quoted and acknowledged my whole post except for the part where I said how the two women ended up in his room because it's very pertinent to the point we're debating.
One of them he offered a tour of his house and the other came along with him and a friend of his who conveniently left. The reason they were in his room therefore had nothing to do with false pretenses on the part of the women or any kind of gray area about mutual desirability where he could have taken things the wrong way and whipped out his ****.
His behaviour was not 'overly optimistic', it was outright calculated and predatory. Legal, ok, but definitely not who I'd want leading my party into an important election.
Okay, let's talk about these two incidents in detail, because it seems like some of the details are getting muddled. The first incident, which occurred in 2007, when the girl was 18 and Brown was 28.
The first incident occurred more than 10 years ago. The woman, a high school student in Barrie at the time, said she and a mutual friend met Brown at a bar.
Brown then invited them back to his home and provided them with alcohol, though the woman was under the legal drinking age at the time.
She says she was drunk when Brown invited her for a tour of his home. When the pair entered the bedroom, Brown closed the door and exposed his **** to her.
"He pulled down his pants said, and I don’t know if he said 'suck my dick' or 'put this in your mouth,' but something along those lines,” she said.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/patrick-brown-denies-sexual-misconduct-allegations-from-two-women-resigns-as-ontario-pc-leader-1.3774686So first off, I think it's ridiculous that people keep saying "a tour of the home" as if it's something with a well-understood itinerary and code of conduct. "Come tour Brown Manor", as if it's like a tourist attraction. Last time I invited someone for a tour of my place, we were both naked before the tour was half over, and my apartment is only 700 square feet, so it's a pretty short tour.
Second key point: Brown was 28 at the time. He wasn't an MP. She didn't work at his constituency office. He didn't have a constituency office. He didn't have any sort of leverage over her in the least.
"28 year old man asks for, receives, blow-job from 18 year old he met at a bar" is not news. People who insist that the Brown story is totally different from the Aziz Ansari smear piece need to stop talking about the part where he showed her his
****, because that part of the story is EXACTLY like the Aziz Ansari story.
And if this is what people feel women needed to be protected from, they are full of
****. That is completely retarded.
Let's move on to the second account, which bears closer analysis.
After an interview in his Parliament Hill office, Brown hired her to work in his Barrie constituency office.
Brown tasked her with organizing the Hockey Night in Barrie charity game he hosts annually. Emails from Brown viewed by CTV News confirmed this.
"You know you are my favourite " writes Brown in an email to the woman days before the Aug. 15, 2013 event.
At an after-party in a now-closed local nightclub, The Bank, the woman says Brown and others provided her with a string of free alcoholic beverages. She was by then legal age.
"It was too many to count," the former staffer said.
When the bar closed, the party moved to Brown's home, all captured on social media.
The woman says she was extremely drunk when Brown invited her and a male friend of his to Brown’s bedroom to look at photographs of a trip to Asia stored on his iPad.
Brown's friend then left, leaving her and Brown to sit alone on the bed.
"The next thing I know he's kissing me. Sitting beside me, kissing me and then I was, I kind of just froze up. He continued to kiss me and he laid me down on the bed and got on top of me. I remember consciously trying not to move my mouth and I was just not moving, so I was laying there immobile and he kept kissing me," she said.
"I felt it was sexual. I could feel his **** on my legs when he was on top of me so I felt that it would have gone to sexual intercourse if I had not done anything," she said. "I would characterize that as a sexual assault."
"That scenario, like of a very inebriated young employee in the bedroom of her boss, alone with him, who hasn’t had a drop of alcohol all night, just that’s an intimidating situation and I was not sure what to do about it," the former staffer said.
She told him to stop, saying she had a boyfriend and told Brown to take her home, which he did, driving her back to her parents’ house.
So first off, you claim that Brown's friend leaving was "calculated". That's highly speculative. And there's nothing indicating that the woman couldn't have left as well. Personally I have said words along the lines of "yeahhh, I should go too..." more times than I can remember. If she didn't feel safe sitting alone with Brown on his bed, maybe she could have accompanied the other guy out of the room.
I stand by what I said earlier: I don't think it's unreasonable that Brown thought she was interested in pursuing things further. And when she made clear she wasn't, he respected her wishes.
Is Brown guilty of bad judgment? Clearly. Is this "deeply disturbing" or any of the other hyperbole that is currently being thrown around? Absolutely not.
We agree on one thing at least, that it was his caucus who forced him out, but again, I don't think it's about #MeToo, it's about a winning campaign.
Predatory men rarely act out randomly, you can bet he didn't pull this kind of stunt only twice in life. The party members likely knew about his behaviour and they knew **** could hit the fan with more women coming forward.
Smart move, #MeToo or not. He would have been a huge liability who could've cost important votes in urban areas.
I have no doubt that this news item would have been damaging to the Ontario PC's chances of winning the election, and I completely understand the decision to dump Brown.
Would Brown's conduct still be "deeply disturbing", and so on, if he were an accountant rather than a politician.
-k