All I cared about was that the kids would think I was at work and what my daughter Sadie would say to me that week. “Daddy’s in the newspaper!!” she bubbled, just as she always did. Every newspaper box lined outside the kids’ public school had me in that blessed suit, photographed from various angles, all week.
When I was given the suit, Andrew also handed me his BlackBerry.
“Okay, Mike, Susan is asking you to read this.”
On his BlackBerry was a message, a “statement,” that Andy suggested I read. Andrew has his own firm, a civil litigation operation on the top floor of the austere Toronto Dominion Bank Tower. Besides being a terrific lawyer, Andrew was one of my earliest supporters, politically very smart, and cautious as the wise counsel he was. His advice is important to me.
“I’m recommending that you read it to the media. Then nothing. Don’t answer any questions. Just read it and walk away.”
Andy told me how it had been produced. Susan and Marie Henein and Jaime Watt, from the consulting firm Navigator, had worked on the statement. When I heard Watt’s name I was pleasantly surprised. Watt had worked as a senior strategist and communications guru for Conservative Premier Mike Harris and was Jim Flaherty’s consigliere. After his time in provincial government, he had transitioned into a successful private-sector career. I’d first met Jaime at a dinner party held by Neil and Marie Finkelstein. Neil is one of Canada’s leading barristers and Marie was also a lawyer and a renowned artist. They’d been political supporters of mine and hosted many a dinner party, often mixing and matching people who might not otherwise get to mingle together. Conservative Jaime Watt and Liberal Michael Bryant, for example.
Susan and I met Watt and his partner Paul Ferguson at a dinner party and an instant friendship was born. We had them over for dinner and we’d been hosted by them at various functions.
After I was arrested, Susan called Jaime for advice. He cleared his day and gave Susan all of his time. Jaime and his colleagues at Navigator would give me countless hours of help, at a time when I was literally incapable of thinking or reading, let alone deciding about communications matters. Watt refused to charge me a cent for the work they did for me, on and off, for months.
Navigator’s efforts on my behalf were both pilloried and celebrated in the media. Some thought I was yet again obsessed with my reputation; they found it deeply cynical. The reality was otherwise, but that’s no matter: people will think what they will think. A few days after the accident, there was still a huge appetite for more media on the Bryant–Sheppard story, but no new facts. So media editors and producers turned to shaky journalism and much commentary on process, rather than substance. In other words, they reported not on what was happening (nothing), but on how it might have happened. In other words, they set their sights on Navigator.
On September 1, Watt got Navigator’s media-scan machine kicked into gear for crisis management. He suggested a statement be made and drafted one. At first, Marie Henein said forget it, no statement. Susan went back and forth between the two and they came up with wording they could both live with.
This was the statement that Andy brought to show me on his BlackBerry. He asked if I was up to it. I noticed that there was no reference to the man who had died or to his family. I said I wanted that added, and scribbled down something about the “deceased.” I wasn’t confident that the police had accurately identified the man who’d died the night before.
Andy assured me that the police were positive that the deceased’s name was Darcy Allan Sheppard. I’d never heard or seen that name before. Marie reviewed the amended statement and she okayed the wording.
“The media are outside the station,” Andy said. “There are a lot, Mike. But I think you can handle this. You can do this, buddy. Make this statement and then you’re done. You can go home. If you don’t say anything, they’re gonna stalk you all over town. They’re on your front lawn now—”
I gasped a little at that thought. Not in surprise, but to hear it made me realize my worst fears for my family.
“Okay, I’ll read it,” I said.
I asked Andy to help me scribble it down from the BlackBerry onto a piece of paper—literally, the back of an envelope. I stood just inside two sets of glass doors, looking out at the media throng. It was huge. Granovsky and Evangelista took me by my elbows and guided me toward a microphone on a podium. I stood facing the wrong way, with my back to the cameras.
Then I felt some hands on my shoulders. I was gently turned around, to face the cameras, by Global TV’s Catherine McDonald, a friend and a veteran crime reporting specialist. Neither of us could have ever imagined this scene. Too unbelievable.
“Okay, Mr. Bryant. Whenever you’re ready.”
When I began to speak, it just happened. My voice was cracking and I was having trouble getting the words out.
“May I ask for your understanding in not making a statement today on last night’s tragic events. At an appropriate moment I will, of course, speak to you. I would, however, like to extend my deepest condolences to the family of Mr. Sheppard. To all those who have offered support to my family in the past 12 hours, thank you.” I barely got out those two words.
“May I ask that the media continue to respect my family’s need for distance and privacy … for the next few days. Thank you.”
I started walking away, and was steered back toward the front door of the station by Granovsky. Andrew walked up to the podium as if he were to make a statement. The photographers followed me but the rest homed in on Andy, who waited until I was safely inside the station, at which point he said not a word and walked back into the station.
Next I was in the passenger seat of Granovsky’s giant SUV, driving along unfamiliar streets. I don’t recall saying anything for a long time.
“Can you slow down a bit?” I said. “I’m having a little trouble with this.”
“Sorry. Sorry, buddy. Of course.”
I stared through the car window. The day was gorgeous, apparently. The weather reports said it would be sunny and warm without exception in Toronto. We drove past the Sobeys in Liberty Village, a new café kitty-corner from it, the familiar gentrified stores on Queen Street West, people sitting on patios, then the hockey card store on Bathurst.
Everything looked different, like I was wearing pain glasses hooked up to my stomach. It was all in monochrome to my eyes. The colour had been bled out of everything and I felt like throwing up.
I looked curiously at lovers strolling, workers on a smoke break, parents walking with babies, people shopping. It was as if everybody’s lives were continuing on like they had been 24 hours ago. But I was no longer part of that world—the sunny, normal, pedestrian world of ordinary life. I was no longer of that world. Will it always be like this? Was I going to spend the rest of my life being this way?
Granovsky was now driving up to Avenue Road. We were a few minutes away from my house. I was in the passenger seat, my jaw clenched, sweating a little. I should call Susan, I thought, and began dialling in a guilty panic. I should have called her minutes ago!
I couldn’t dial the number. Stephen did so for me. Susan answered. We wept and spoke some words to each other that would temporarily mark a blessed spike, an apex maybe, in the arc of our marriage.
Then she snapped into her role as four-star general. “Okay, we’re ready for you. Pull up to the side door. There’s media camped out front—”
Stephen had overheard my conversation with Susan. When excited, she tended to amplify her already loud voice for telephone conversations. It was as if Stephen had been conferenced into the call.
“How is she?” he asked.
“Strong. Heroic.”
“She’s been amazing,” Stephen said. “Unbelievably strong.
Orchestrating everything: your lawyer, media help, getting her own lawyer, getting us to the station with the suit. Getting people in and out of the house with media everywhere. A rock.”
Fifteen hours earlier, as I was cuffed
in the back of a squad car, heading south to the Traffic Division on Hanna Road, Susan was following—Nikki at the wheel, Susan on the phone. She was calling lawyers—one asleep in Greece; another, Cynthia Fromstein, asleep in Toronto—her mom, her Uncle Harvey, who’d spotted me on television, and Sarah, with the kids, now for the night.
At the station, she was assured that I would be released soon enough. Eventually, the police figured out that taking a statement from Susan would be good police work. Like any lawyer, she knew the risks. Like any spouse, she wanted to help me. But how?
Female police officers started showing up in the waiting room, trying to offer Susan comfort. Later, they would call her, pretending to be a shoulder to cry on, offering to meet. To “just hang out,” one said.
I pity the fool who underestimates Susan Abramovitch. But this was complicated for her. This was not just about police manipulation, it was about her husband’s liberty. She was doubting her own instincts, and she was in shock—also enduring post-traumatic stress disorder, of course.
Nevertheless, she made the right choice, and the only real choice in that situation: she provided no statement to the police. In those situations, any statement would be used only to incriminate, and not at all to exculpate. I’ve no doubt that the police would say otherwise. Regardless, the experience of being hunted by the police, to be used as a pawn in their investigation, only compounded her rage about the rush to judgment that led to my arrest. That rage has left her, to this day, contemptuous and fearful about policing in Canada.
At some point around 3 a.m., she was told by Cynthia, my lawyer, that the man on the bike was dead. Susan heaved a bit to herself, and had to sit down. She later told me that she knew right then that our lives had changed forever.
When it was clear that there was no releasing me anytime soon, she went home to sleep, then awoke Nikki at 5 a.m. Soon enough she was on the phone with Marie Henein, retaining her on my behalf, then retaining Doug Hunt as her own counsel. This was all before most people had gotten out of bed that morning.
As Granovsky and I approached my house in his SUV, I spotted the media gauntlet. Incredibly, they didn’t spot us, despite driving slowly and carefully through them, all chatting away, standing aside for this SUV driving up Michael Bryant’s laneway. Once in the door, I ducked into the basement, away from any windows. Susan ran downstairs where I was waiting with my arms open wide.
I squeezed her and spun her around.
“Daddy’s home! Yay!”
“Daddy!!!!”
Sadie and Louie said it like I’d just got home from work.
Another day at the office.
“Daddy! Daddy! Are you going stay? Are you going to stay?” That was always their question. Was I home to see them during dinner then heading out somewhere, or was I staying home to play with them, help them brush their teeth, tuck them in, perhaps read them a story.
“Too hard,” said Louie as I squeezed him. Sadie slipped under my other arm. We kissed cheeks staccato-style. Louie wiped the kiss off his cheek, something he did in his sleep if we kissed him at night before turning in ourselves.
I turned back to embrace Susan again. She was crying, happy. We had been married 12 years and a day.
* Cynthia Fromstein’s recollection of the conversation was repeated to me soon thereafter. She referred to her notes; however, there is no transcript of the conversation.
N I N E
Stretcher Bearers
To be suddenly on the wrong side of the law—especially if you were once a well-known politician, especially if you’d been
Chief Law Officer in the jurisdiction, especially if you were still widely thought to be politically ambitious—is to discover how abruptly and totally the world can turn on its axis. In important ways, in trivial ways, and in every way in between.
From the moment I stepped out of that police station on Hanna Avenue into the disorienting sunshine of September 1, 2009, nothing in my life was as it had been just 15 hours before. It was as if I’d stumbled through Lewis Carroll’s looking-glass, or entered the Wachowskis’ Matrix. Everything that was familiar, everything I’d once taken for granted, had changed.
The most immediate was my relationship with the news media. For better or worse, I had always been one of those politicians regarded as never having met a microphone or TV camera he didn’t adore. I courted and cultivated relationships with reporters. I tried to figure out their needs and fill them. When it suited me, I leaked to reporters, unless it involved my Chief Legal Officer duties, wherein I was uncharacteristically circumspect. Otherwise, I spoke freely and at length with reporters. I loved leading newscasts, loved making headlines, loved the whole gratifying rush of being at the centre of any scrum—the cockpit of politics, where reputations and careers can nosedive fast.
Now here I was, the just-released accused, no longer a mediahound but the hunted, saying nothing, taking no questions, pleading to be left in peace and privacy. My arrival home shortly afterwards, with the news media all over our driveway, would illustrate again my new world order. A day earlier, that sort of reception might have been my idea of paradise. Not anymore.
It would be a little while before I’d realize how little those reporters really needed any more to chew on, and how much they’d already gorged on the story.
The best chronicle of the media performance in the early hours of this story would be published in the spring of 2010 by the Ryerson Review of Journalism (RRJ). Within hours of the accident, wrote RRJ reporter Matthew Halliday, The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star had run brief online stories describing a hit-and-run on Bloor Street. Neither story named me as the driver, but rumours were apparently already making the rounds.
Just after 5 a.m., the RRJ said, 680News reported that I was the driver in police custody, after having been involved in a confrontation with a cyclist while returning from a night on the town.
“As night turned to day in Toronto’s newsrooms, phones rang, in-boxes pinged, a journalistic reveille rallying the incoming army of editors and writers,” Halliday wrote.
He quoted National Post reporter Matthew Coutts saying: “It got pretty exciting pretty fast…. Right off the bat it was all hands on deck. A lot of people get into journalism for that rush.”
The feeling was apparently widespread in a profession whose best days are usually other people’s worst.
“I shouldn’t call it a great day,” Kelly Grant, then Toronto editor of The Globe and Mail, told Halliday. “But when a story breaks that everyone wants to read and I have this stable of incredibly talented reporters I can throw at it, that’s not a bad day. That’s a great day.”
If this story involved the worst moment of my life, the Ryerson Review of Journalism suggested that it hardly became journalism’s finest hour, even if it provided a peek into the sort of thing that most energizes newsrooms.
As Halliday wrote, unsubstantiated rumours went viral through Toronto newsrooms. “Bryant had been cavorting with a mistress.” “Bryant had been drunk.” Almost instantly, this was Toronto’s own Bonfire of the Vanities. This was Michael Bryant’s personal Chappaquiddick.
“The dream was,” Toronto Star city editor Graham Parley told Halliday, “Let’s find the ritzy restaurant in Yorkville where Bryant ate and count how many bottles of expensive wine were on the table…. It would have been sensational to find him drinking with some mystery woman before jetting off in his luxury convertible. You know, ‘What a story! Mmm, yeah!’ In a crude way, you could say we went looking for dirt and didn’t find anything.”
In short order, the Bonfire of the Vanities narrative, the drunken-Lothario-on-a-spree that had the potential to be such a circulation and ratings booster, began to unravel. No luxury convertible. No ritzy restaurant. No expensive wine. No mystery woman.
“It would’ve been a better story for us if he had been drinking,” Parley told the respected Ryerson magazine. “No question we were going out there with a bit of ‘Gotcha’ in mind, and the facts were
the opposite of ‘Gotcha.’”
On many levels, though, they still got me. Eyewitnesses were quoted, with accounts of events that were practically hallucinatory. They had my Saab travelling at 100 kilometres an hour or more, when it would eventually be proven that it never left first gear or got above 34 km/h; they had the driver trying to bounce the assailant on mailboxes, when it would be proven the car never so much as touched a curb. (Yet more evidence to prove the fallibility of human memory and eyewitness accounts.) The goat I’d once sought to feed was feasting—with gusto—on me. The gods can never be accused of lacking a sense of humour.
Even worse, some media had my home address in a database and others read it on the Toronto Star website. The Star had published my address, even provided a map showing where the house was—which was, in fact, about 100 yards from my children’s public school. There were photographs of my kids, ages 5 and 7, on the website, with their names under each photo. Susan would ask someone to get the photos taken down, but it didn’t happen until the new year, about five months later (though I am grateful to the Star reporter who fixed it).
The mainstream media had nothing, however, on the world of blogs. There, I would find out only later, I was routinely called a murderer and denounced as the “Butcher of Bloor Street.”
Still, if I found myself the target of anger, hate, and vitriol by some, the events that followed my return home on that first day of September 2009 also opened my eyes to qualities of unconditional love and friendship, of consolation and support from people and places I’d never anticipated.
When I first went upstairs to our bedroom that first day home, and lay down on the bed to rest, I saw a pile of books beside Susan’s night table. On top was a memoir by Abigail Carter, a woman who had lost her husband in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Her book was called The Alchemy of Loss: A Young Widow’s Transformation. I opened the book to the first page. It began with an epigraph from the Persian poet Rumi’s “Zero Circle”:
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