WARNING: Some readers may find some details offensive or upsetting.
The City of Ottawa’s Integrity Commissioner is officially investigating complaints filed by a sixth woman about Coun’s behavior. Rick Chiarelli, CBC News has learned.
And while some of the allegations may sound familiar – visits to nightclubs to recruit volunteers, pressure to leave without a bra and wearing revealing tops – they include new shocking details.
The woman, who was in her early 20s when she worked part-time for Chiarelli from 2013 to 2015, said the college counselor launched a long campaign in 2014 to pressure her to perform oral sex with a stranger in exchange for money.
She said he manipulated her during a particularly traumatic period of her life after she told him she had been sexually assaulted this summer at an event unrelated to her work.
When she turned to Chiarelli for advice, he told her not to report the attack to police, not to tell her boyfriend and not to seek advice, the woman said.
The CBC agreed not to give her name, as she did not tell her family many details from the time she worked for Chiarelli.
During the same period, the woman said she succumbed to constant pressure from Chiarelli to go to work nightclubs without a bra.
“In the beginning, it was like a transparent top with a bra underneath and a skirt and heels,” the woman told the CBC. “But by the end of the work for him, I went out with a skirt and heels and a transparent top with nothing underneath.
“That’s exactly what he wanted.”
She said she would drink a few glasses of wine or a few shots before Chiarelli took her on these nightclub outings, “just to handle it, just to get through it.”
“It was almost like a violent relationship where I was afraid of him, but at the same time I trusted him and wanted to impress him and make him happy,” she said.
Ridiculous and Unbelievable: A Statement by Chiarelli
In a statement emailed to CBC by councilor Bruce Sevini’s lawyer, Chiarelli denied the allegations, calling “many” “absolutely absurd and unbelievable.”
The lawyer also wrote that Chiarelli “has good reason” to believe that the allegations and the timing of the story “were incorrectly influenced by political considerations”.
When asked to clarify, neither Sevini nor Chiarelli gave any answer.
Sevini also opposed the anonymity of an “unnamed prosecutor.”
“In addition to deliberately withholding the prosecutor’s name, you have failed to provide the kind of basic and / or meaningful details that any reasonable person would expect to receive from a journalist who engages in objective / responsible reporting,” Sevini wrote.
On April 13, the CBC sent Chiarelli a detailed list of allegations that included when the woman worked for him and the approximate timing of the alleged events.
In addition, earlier this week the CBC had received permission from the applicant to identify her verbally to Sevini and Chiarelli. None of them accepted the offer.
Chiarelli’s lawyer also argued that the Integrity Commissioner’s trial did not allow the councilor to respond to the allegations in a “substantial way”.
The adviser has not been involved in the previous two investigations by the Integrity Commissioner into his conduct.
The initial stories of 2019 about Chiarelli’s behavior shocked some residents
After the CBC began spreading stories in September 2019 about Chiarelli’s inappropriate behavior toward job applicants and former employees, the woman emerged as a witness in a follow-up investigation by the Ottawa City Commissioner of Integrity.
The CBC reviewed the official synopsis of the woman’s three-hour oath testimony to one of former Investigation Commissioner Robert Marlowe’s investigators in November 2019. This testimony is consistent with both the woman’s ongoing complaint to the new Integrity Commissioner, Karen Shepard, and the version of events she recently told CBC.
The CBC also reviewed recent emails sent by Shepherd to the woman, confirming that she had launched a formal investigation into the complaints.
Chiarelli has a “trimming process,” says a former employee
Like other women who spoke, the last applicant said it was difficult to explain why she simply did not leave.
She said Chiarelli would threaten to ruin her reputation if she quit her job, adding that he had given examples of the careers of other former employees he had harmed. Other former employees told the CBC and the Integrity Commissioner the same thing – that they feared the consequences of leaving in a bad relationship.
But the woman said she was left with almost as much persuasion as fear. She said Chiarelli’s tactics were both ruthless and gradual.
“He’s in the process of getting a haircut,” she said. “You have to remember, this has been going on for several years… So it’s starting slowly. Everyone has a limit through which he does not want to cross with his morals, his values, what he feels comfortable with is not comfortable with.
“And he, for some reason, is only able to make you cross that line for a while. So then your threshold of what is comfortable for you moves a little higher. And then he pushes you a little further.” “
She said it was exhausting to constantly fight and try to avoid questions, to compromise with the toilet.
“It becomes easier to give in and do what he wants me to do… and keep your job and not get fired.”
The woman was hired part-time at the district councilor’s office in Ben Franklin Place and at public events. She said Chiarelli took her to a nightclub virtually every weekend to recruit men as volunteers. (Gene Delil / CBC)
The woman said she was a naive student who knew nothing about politics when she started working in the ward office and at public events.
Chiarelli was in control, she said, insisting he drive her to and from the bar. He will drive her for hours before leaving her home at 4 a.m., she said.
In the fall of 2013, Chiarelli made her go on a “romantic date” with someone she met at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, who said she worked for Pixar, the woman said. She recalled that Chiarelli was very excited about this potential contact and pressured her to meet him at the former Black Tomato restaurant in ByWard Market.
As usual, Chiarelli insisted on taking her to and from the meeting, she said. But when Chiarelli found out that he was not a Pixar employee but a volunteer, the woman said that Chiarelli was “very unhappy with me.”
Trash Mental Health
But it was another traumatic experience in the summer of 2014, she said, pushing her mental and physical health, self-esteem and relationships to the brink.
The woman said she was sexually abused at an event unrelated to her work at the town hall, and that the witness was a well-known person in the entertainment industry. About a week later, she turned to Chiarelli for help.
She said she sees him as a father, especially since she has daughters her age.
“He was the only one I told because we had a lot of, I don’t know, weird working relationships that made me believe he was the only person I could trust,” she said.
She said he told her not to report the attack to police and not to tell her boyfriend because he would probably leave her. So she didn’t.
Chiarelli also allegedly told her not to seek advice because she feared the story would spread or that a therapist would encourage her to report the attack. Instead, he suggested that if she really had to seek help, he would personally find someone for her, the woman said.
The woman said her physical and mental health had deteriorated in the coming weeks. At one point, she was taken to the emergency department of Montfort Hospital on her own because she had suicidal thoughts, lost weight and developed an eating disorder.
“I was so weak, I was so unhealthy, my mental health was in the trash,” she said.
I felt useless as a person. I had no integrity and no longer self-esteem. – The applicant
Her friend at the time told the CBC that he found out about the attack in October 2014. He was absent in the summer and said he had returned to Ottawa to find his girlfriend to behave chaotically, not to respond to his affection. , lose weight and keep your cell phone.
He said that one day he checked her phone and saw an exchange between her and the entertainment person. He thought “something was wrong” because the names were in code and the messages included strange references.
When he confronted her, “she revealed sexual violence to me,” he said. At the time, he said she had also told him about her travels to recruit people for Chiarelli’s bars.
He told the CBC that he wanted her to leave the adviser job “immediately” and “is considering ending the relationship for a while.”
But what he said he didn’t know about a year ago was that in late 2014, the woman succumbed to pressure from Chiarelli not to wear a bra when she went to nightclubs to recruit volunteers.
“I started wearing more revealing clothes when I went out to clubs with Rick,” she said of the months after the attack. “I was not interested. I felt useless as a person. I had no integrity and no more self-esteem.
“I really didn’t care what happened to me.”
The CBC reviewed recent emails sent to the complainant by Ottawa’s Commissioner for Integrity, Karen Shepard, confirming that a formal investigation was under way. (Sean Kilpatrick / Canadian Press)
It was also at this time, she said, that Chiarelli began a “joke” with her over the text that she was not good at having oral sex – and that he was planning a trip to Montreal to prove he was.
She said he offered to pay her several hundred dollars in cash if she had oral sex with a stranger she had taken to a nightclub in Montreal.
At first she tried to laugh. “How do you respond to your boss telling you that?” She …
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