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A one-time Pan Am Games employee has apologized to David Peterson after her multi-million-dollar sexual harassment lawsuit against the former premier was dismissed by the Ontario Superior Court.
A Pan Am Games employee has apologized to David Peterson after her multi-million-dollar sexual harassment lawsuit against the former premier was dismissed by the Ontario Superior Court.
Ximena Morris issued an apology to both Peterson and his wife, Shelley, for launching the suit in 2015. But her lawyer says she doesn’t apologize for the substance of the allegations, and had agreed to drop the case because of the mounting costs of the legal system.
News of the settlement came in a media release Tuesday from Torys LLP, the law firm that represented Peterson.
But lawyers for Peterson and Morris, each speaking to the Star Tuesday morning, painted very different pictures of the two-year case.
“We maintained from the outset that this action was brought solely to embarrass Mr. Peterson, as a well-known public figure, for the purpose of extracting funds from him and the co-defendants and attempting to bring notoriety to Ms. Morris,” said Lisa Talbot of Torys LLP.
Talbot said Morris had used a threat of litigation and the threat of going to the media in an attempt to extract money from Peterson, who served as chair of the TO2015 Pan American and Para Pan American Games.
“On Aug.13, 2015, Ms. Morris’s counsel called counsel for TO2015 threatening to issue a statement of claim and to immediately disclose the allegations to the press if the defendants did not pay Ms. Morris $500,000 within half an hour,” Talbot told the Star.
“When the defendants did not accept Ms. Morris’s demand, Ms. Morris and her counsel had the statement of claim issued immediately and went to the press.”
Morris’s lawyer said he had no comment on that particular allegation. But in a phone interview Tuesday, Rocco Achampong said that “Ms. Morris did not apologize for the allegations.”
“She apologized for instituting the lawsuit. That’s the wording … Litigation is a very costly exercise, and cannot be afforded by the average Canadian, and this is the result,” Achampong said.
Talbot said Morris had failed to prosecute the case over the course of two years, and that “the whole matter was absolutely unfortunate and should never have happened.”
In May, Peterson put forward a motion in court to impose a timetable and enforce a discovery plan to move the case forward. The motion compelled Morris to provide “proper and complete” answers to questions that needed answering to continue.
In throwing out Morris’s lawsuit against Peterson and other executives with the Pan Am organizing committee, the Ontario Superior Court also dismissed Peterson’s counterclaim for abuse of process and defamation, on the consent of both parties, without costs.
Morris was the Games’ manager for external partnerships, manager for official languages, and manager for talent services and scheduling for the opening and closing ceremonies.
She had alleged that Peterson inappropriately embraced her and made publicly humiliating comments about her appearance at work events.
She claimed her complaints to human resources and senior officials were met with a shrug and that she was told to “let it roll off your back.”
Peterson always maintained nothing untoward happened. But Achampong said Morris had been facing “very powerful firms, and it’s one person.”
“To be perfectly candid, the odds are stacked against her,” he said.
Achampong also said Torys was “re-victimizing” his client by rushing a news release to the media in the wake of the decision to dismiss the lawsuit.
