Toronto Star reporter serves Mayor Rob Ford with libel notice for calling him a pedophile

Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale has served Mayor Rob Ford with a libel notice in order to begin the process of suing him for defamation.

Dale also served Vision TV, the station that broadcast the interview with Conrad Black in which Ford implied that the Star reporter is a pedophile.

“Daniel Dale is in my backyard taking pictures,” Ford said during the interview. “I have little kids. He’s taking pictures of little kids. I don’t want to say that word but you start thinking what this guy is all about.”

The interview was then picked up on American radio.

Dale says he was standing on adjacent public land researching a public interest story on the mayor, and never took any pictures, which he says was confirmed by police Det. Tricia Johnston who looked at his phone.

After Ford’s claims were questioned, the mayor said he stands by “every word.” Dale is willing to drop the suit if Ford retracts the “false insinuation that I am a pedophile and all of his false statements about my conduct on May 2, 2012.”

Dale writes that he was willing to let the incident go were it not for later remarks that Ford made to a radio station on the same subject.

“He got caught. I got his phone. I got his camera. I had everything," Ford said, though Dale points out this claim had already been refuted.

But Ford went on to say, “When you’ve got young kids, that freaked me right out.”

According to Dale, that’s what did it.

“This isn’t quite as egregious as the comment he made to Black, but it brought renewed attention to his malicious and defamatory insinuation to Black that I have some sort of predatory interest in young children -- that I am a pedophile. I can’t tolerate it. I won’t tolerate it.”

[Toronto Star]