VANCOUVER — Former Vancouver Olympics CEO John Furlong's temper boiled over while he was under cross-examination at the civil court trial where a journalist accuses him of defamation
Furlong accused Bryan Baynham — the lawyer for journalist Laura Robinson — of sullying his deceased wife's reputation.
Robinson is suing Furlong for public comments he made after she wrote a 2012 article that included allegations he physically abused First Nations students at a Roman Catholic School in northern B.C. some 45 years ago.
Baynham grilled Furlong on apparent discrepancies between statements he made at trial and in pre-trial interviews, including a story about Deborah Furlong filling up their truck with Georgia Straight newspapers on the morning an article was published.
Furlong insists his distraught wife did drive around grabbing all the papers she could find — in order to mitigate the article's damage — and says it's outrageous and hurtful to her memory to suggest otherwise.
Furlong's lawyer accused Robinson earlier in the trial of being behind allegations of sexual abuse stemming from an article in a First Nations publication, but Baynham suggested to Furlong that he'd never heard of the news paper and must have heard it from elsewhere.