Parti Québécois (PQ) Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon said he fully supports a PQ candidate who was outed by a local newspaper on Friday for having appeared in porn last year.
St-Pierre Plamondon described the 22-year-old Laval-des-Rapides candidate Andreanne Fiola as “engaged and brilliant” in a statement published on Twitter, adding that she has raised awareness on issues related to the environment and Quebec independence. “Continue your excellent work Andreanne,” he wrote.
“We chose her for the entirety of who she is,” the PQ leader told reporters after the story surfaced — first published by a local Laval newspaper, Le Courrier Laval, which received a tip that she had been identified in the footage because of a tattoo on her arm. Fiola wore a mask in the video to preserve her anonymity and removed all the content from the adult platforms where it had been published — OnlyFans, Pornhub — some time after.
The party leader called the fact that she was outed “disgusting.” “Who hasn’t watched porn? Let them cast the first stone,” he said.
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Melanie Lemay, a women’s rights advocate and co-founder of Québec contre les violences sexuelles, told Global News that Fiola having her identity exposed was akin to revenge porn — the distribution of intimate or sexually explicit images or videos of individuals without their consent.
After the story broke on Friday, the 22-year-old candidate, who does much of her campaigning on TikTok where she has amassed a following of 86K, issued a statement on social media saying several months ago she participated in the production of “explicit digital content” distributed on several adult platforms.
Fiola, who studied environmental studies at the University of Sherbrooke and has several governmental jobs listed on her resume, said she had the content taken offline because she no longer wanted to expose herself in that way and that she would never make a similar choice again. She apologized for the impact it had on those around her and said she will continue her campaign.
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“I think it sends a strong message of empowerment and leadership,” Lemay told Global News, speaking of the fact that the young candidate was not only not ousted by the PQ, but supported. She said this is a progressive step forward, as similar incidents of women getting outed to their employer for doing sex work often costs them their career.
Global News reached out to the PQ and to Fiola early Friday to speak with the candidate before the story aired or was published.
–with files from the Canadian Press and Dan Spector, Global News