ABOVE: Trustee under fire for accidental emails. Peter Kim reports.
TORONTO – A Toronto school board trustee said he was merely expressing his “complete and utter disgust” with some of the “processes” he’s been subjected to in an email he mistakenly sent to dozens of his colleagues.
“I don’t think anybody could hold against me the expression of that disgust,” Sam Sotiropoulos said in an interview with Global News. “Politicians vent all the time, often off-the-record, sometimes on-the-record. I was simply venting.”
Initially, he refused to expand on what it was he was “venting” about. But in a subsequent interview, Sotiropoulos said he regrets his comments, but won’t apologize for finding some of his colleagues’ positions “repugnant.”
“Do I regret my comments made in the heat of the moment? Yes. Do I think I need to apologize? No.”
He went on to question why none of his colleagues complained to him, or to the school board’s code of conduct committee, and suggested they could be trying to get their own exposure by using the media as a “kangaroo court.”
“There’s a process here, if they don’t want to follow it and want to take it to the media thinking it would get them some exposure, that’s foul play in and of itself,” he said. “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
Global News was forwarded the correspondence by a source inside the TDSB who received the email, sent by Ward 20 Trustee Sam Sotiropoulos.
The first email, sent at 12:28 a.m on December 6, reads: “Thanks for the update, Mari, I will try to make the 27th of January a priority. As for the informal invitation, I appreciate the gesture, I really do, but as it is not a meeting, I will not be attending. Some of our colleagues positively make my skin crawl; I don’t need to subject myself to their malicious misery, ill-breeding and sourpusses. It would be bad for my digestion. I would probably end up puking in someone’s face as I wouldn’t want to mess up your legendary kitchen.”
It’s not known what event Sotiropoulos was turning down but he followed up his email several hours later.
The second email, sent at 8:01 a.m. the same day, reads: “Whoops! I hit Reply All by accident. Oh well, it’s not like I said anything untrue. That’s exactly how I feel. If you felt offended, perhaps you might want to ask yourself why it is that I feel as I do and how your behaviour may or may not have contributed.”
The school board would not comment on the emails.
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