‘A great day for all journalists,’ John Cruickshank says

TORONTO – The release of hundreds of pages of documents and Chief Blair’s admission he has seen a video of the mayor seized by police in June marks the end of the mayor’s “vindictive campaign” against the Toronto Star, the newspaper’s publisher said in an interview Thursday.

“I think it’s a great day for all journalists, really,” John Cruickshank said. “The fact is that the mayor and his brother have waged a vindictive campaign, a highly manipulative campaign of lies and defamation against us and I think this puts an end to that. So above all it’s a relief.”

The Toronto Star and Gawker were the first media outlets to report on the alleged video in May, and the only ones whose reporters say they’ve seen the video. Mayor Rob Ford denied the allegations when they first arose, calling them “ridiculous” and saying on his radio show “there is no video.” He has also said he does not smoke crack cocaine and is not addicted to crack cocaine.

The statements in the documents have not been proven in court.

Read more: Complete coverage of the Rob Ford story

The mayor and his brother, Councillor Doug Ford, have long accused the Toronto Star of targeting them; ford once accused some Star reporters of being “pathological liars” after a report on his alleged behaviour at the Garrison Ball.

“There’s been an investigation into the mayor of Toronto. A very intense investigation for many months,” Cruickshank said. “What we do see is the mayor in very frequent contact with an accused drug dealer and a man who has on many other occasions been accused of assaulting women and up to 8 or 9 times a day they’re on the phone back and forth. I don’t know how to interpret that. but it doesn’t seem good.”