Caylan Ford is documentary filmmaker, writer, researcher, charter school founder, and a former political candidate.Some uncharacteristically dry inside baseball for those who care about media malpractice, defamation, and Alberta politics.I recently concluded a 3.5 month media defamation trial, with closing oral arguments scheduled to be heard in October and a decision following thereafter.By every measure I can conceive of, it has been the longest and most involved media defamation trial in Canadian history, though you wouldn’t know it from reading the news. Canada’s subsidized press has scarcely covered the proceedings at all; Juno News and the Western Standard are the only outlets that reported on any developments beyond opening statements.Recently, however, a handful of podcasters have reported on the trial through sympathetic and wholly uncritical interviews with one of the defendants, Luke Lebrun. Lebrun is the editor of Press Progress, run by the NDP-adjacent Broadbent Institute, and both he and his employer are named defendants in my action. They have been fundraising to help cover their legal fees by claiming (or strongly insinuating) that mine is a SLAPP lawsuit — a definitionally unmeritorious action intended to silence the free press and intimidate critics — and that I belong to a class of powerful and wealthy people who can afford to launch frivolous and costly litigation to bleed newsrooms dry.It is no, and I am not. I am a self-financed individual, supported by my own savings, as well as from small donations and loans from friends and family. I have far more to lose than the fully indemnified individuals or the insured and taxpayer-supported organizations I have sued. If my claim were unmeritorious, I would not be risking bankruptcy to see it through.Press Progress’ donors and supporters should know exactly what they’ve been funding. I will venture to offer some highlights and key exhibits from trial, presented here through a chronological narrative. If there is sufficient interest, I may do something similar for the other major defendants, CBC and Toronto Star. This may be of some use if and when this case is studied in j-school ethics and libel law courses.~~~In 2018, I was running to become a Member of the Legislative Assembly in Alberta. As a first step, I sought the nomination to become the United Conservative Party (UCP) candidate in the constituency of Calgary-Mountain View.I was born and raised in Calgary, having lived there for 20+ years. I had lived in the constituency of Calgary-Mountainview for three years during my undergraduate degree (these details matter, for reasons that will become clear). Mine was an open and competitive three-way nomination race in which over 900 UCP members ultimately participated. I won the nomination soundly in December 2018.But in addition to running against two other persons in the nomination, I was also the target of a shadow campaign by a man called Karim Jivraj.Jivraj had run for the federal conservatives in 2015 in Toronto. I met him in early 2017 and we were briefly friends. He moved to Calgary after being driven out of Ontario conservative politics for engaging in various untoward behaviours, including using pseudonymous email addresses and twitter accounts to defame conservatives (especially women). He intended to seek political office in Calgary, but quickly alienated himself from influential figures in conservative politics.Beginning in March 2018, Jivraj became fixated on trying to destroy my political career. In 2023, a judge wrote the following about his motivations:Mr. Jivraj’s motives were based on jealousy and spite. His wish to harm Ms. Ford had nothing to do with the politics other than to destroy the political aspirations of a former friend who was finding success in contrast to Mr. Jivraj’s own failures. His motive was actual maliceIn the first half of 2018, Jivraj started a false rumour that I had made unsubstantiated allegations of sexual harassment against another person. He then purchased my internet domain name, threatened to sue me when I attempted to recover said domain name, and took over the board of the UCP constituency association where I was seeking the nomination.In October 2018, Jivraj manufactured a story that I was a “fly-in” parachute candidate from Ontario. (‘Every accusation is a confession’, as they say: Jivraj moved to Calgary from Toronto to for purely mercenary purposes to seek political office. I was actually born and raised in Calgary, though I had also lived in Toronto, Ottawa, Washington DC, and Oxford before moving back home to raise my young children). Jivraj claimed that I had lied about my residential history in Calgary, committing fraud in the process; that I was in breach of the UCP’s nomination contestant eligibility rules; that I was being given a pass because I was the recipient of corrupt “insider deals”; and that this had prompted unrest from grassroots UCP members. None of this was true and no supporting evidence for these claims has ever been proffered.Jivraj wrote these allegations in a letter addressed to the UCP’s executive director, persuaded some members of the constituency association board to sign the letter (some without actually reading it), and then leaked it to the media.At trial, it emerged that Jivraj sent his letter to Press Progress using the pseudonym “Jacklyn Popov.” Press Progress editor Luke Lebrun suspected this was an assumed identity, but never inquired about who the sender was or what motivated him. He never investigated any of the specific claims about me. He did not know if any of it was true. He didn’t contact me for comment or for a response. He didn’t contact the UCP for comment. He didn’t contact any of the signatories of the letter. He did not investigate at all.At trial, Press Progress put forward no evidence to support the truth of the claims against me.Despite doing nothing at all to determine the truth of Jivraj’s allegations, Lebrun and his Alberta-based correspondent Stephen Magusiak adopted them as true. From their text messages, disclosed at trial:When Magusiak tried to look into my connections to Toronto, he came up dry. Lebrun told him to stop investigating the truth of the allegations, because that wasn’t what the story was about:Press Progress then published the first of three articles repeating and adopting the allegations that I was a parachute candidate from Ontario who had committed fraud, lied about my residency history, and was being propped up by corruption and impropriety.The UCP immediately responded to and dismissed the claim that I was in breach of party rules. Press Progress received that communication, but dismissed it with a glib, onomatopoeic response: “Ha”. They never corrected or updated their story.With each subsequent article they published from October 2018 to January 2019, Lebrun and Magusiak embellished the allegations against me further. They hallucinated a story wherein I met UCP leader Jason Kenney at a cocktail party in Ontario and was recruited as his “handpicked parachute candidate.” They claimed, without a shred of evidence, that my constituency association staged a revolt when I won the UCP nomination. None of this happened.In their private conversations, Lebrun and Magusiak appeared to convince themselves that I had broken the law. They mused I had never set foot in Alberta (despite my living here for 20+ years), and that grassroots UCP members were in mutiny against me (I won a competitive democratic nomination, and then had one of the most successful grassroots fundraising campaigns of any candidate, in any party, anywhere in Alberta). From Magusiak and Lebrun’s text messages:[…][…]As they discussed a compilation article summarizing their previous reporting, this is how Lebrun (right) and Magusiak (left) discussed the UCP and conservatives in Alberta: “all fucking crazy”. To communicate this idea to their readers, they published an article describing me as a belonging to a class of “bozos, bigots, and sketchy characters” who “created chaos.”Following the publication of their first set of defamatory articles about me, I contacted Press Progress several times to tell them that their stories about me were not true and to request corrections:They ignored my attempts to correct the record, and continued to embellish the story. In January 2019, Lebrun claimed that I was flown to Alberta by Jason Kenney to run as a parachute candidate, leading to a revolt from my constituency association:It’s worth noting that my constituency association was extremely supportive of my candidacy. People who had been persuaded to sign Jivraj’s letter against me had repudiated their involvement. The association then forced Jivraj off their board when they realized what he was doing. Press Progress was told about this (or at least some intimations of it) but ignored the facts and persisted with their chosen narrative. Jivraj continued to feed them bad information using pseudonymous email accounts, which they appeared to accept unquestioningly.Press Progress correspondent Stephen Magusiak published several tweets elaborating various conspiratorial theories about me, the UCP, an imaginary backroom deals with Calgary Herald columnist Licia Corbella. (Jivraj had purchased Corbella’s domain name after she wrote a favourable newspaper column about me. He then pitched Press Progress a story that she was part of the conspiracy). I again tried to correct him:In discovery, Stephen Magusiak explained that he was trying to bait me into writing “what’s updog,” whereupon he would respond “nothing much, dog, what’s up with you?”. From his discovery transcript read-ins:These people claim to be serious journalists.In January 2019, Luke Lebrun learned Jivraj’s real identity. On January 12, he was told by a third party that Jivraj had been suspended by UCP for misconduct against me. Among other things, Jivraj had: purchased my internet domain name; fabricated fake quotations and attributed them to me; bought google attack ads on searches of my name where he published one of those fake quotations; and abused confidential UCP membership data to send a pseudonymous email defaming me to ~1400 electors in Calgary-Mountain View.Lebrun was provided with an authentic copy of this email from the UCP announcing Jivraj’s suspension from the Calgary-Mountain View constituency association:Lebrun was undeterred. He obtained Jivraj’s phone number from Thomas Lucaszuk, and his collaborations with Jivraj intensified.In a January 2019 phone call, Jivraj told Lebrun that he had copies of my private conversations, which could be used to derail my candidacy. (Note: I did not have these records, having deleted them at Jivraj’s request a year earlier. I eventually obtained the records in late 2022 through a court order. Jivraj fought against the application and did not want the full records disclosed).Jivraj encouraged Lebrun and Press Progress to publish selected out-of-context excerpts of those private conversations in order harm me and the UCP’s electoral prospects. Specifically, he wanted Press Progress to publish stories about how I (allegedly) supported the carbon tax; disliked pride parades; believed there are different discursive responses to terrorism depending on the motives of the perpetrator; and thought Catholic schools and Madrassas are different. He had many ideas about how these fairly unremarkable positions could be spun as a scandal.Here is a portion of the transcript from that January 2019 phone call between Luke Lebrun and Karim Jivraj:[…]Jivraj sent Luke Lebrun several screenshots from our 2017 Facebook Messenger conversations, but then he decided the timing was not yet right. He asked Press Progress to hold off on the publication of any stories based on my private correspondences. Luke Lebrun obliged and put the story on the back-burner. They would wait until publication would cause more damage.By early March, with the 2019 Alberta election less than a 40 days away, Jivraj told Lebrun that the time had come to publish the “hit” against me. Jivraj had just learned that he was barred from seeking a nomination for the federal conservative party, and declared his intention to seek revenge.Lebrun and Jivraj had another phone call, longer and more bizarre than the last, around March 5, 2019:[…]They explicitly discuss how to time the release of a publication to cause maximum damage to me. Jivraj had asked them to hold off on publication in January, and now (in early March) says the time is ripe because the election writs would soon be dropped, but the UCP still had time to remove me as a candidate. This does not seem to me like public interest journalism, but like pure, calculated malice.Jivraj believed the most “devastating” story would be about how I had once described pride parades as a “celebration of vice and transgression” — a description that came from a private conversation that I had explicitly framed as a devil’s advocate-style exercise. If that story didn’t have the intended effect of getting my candidacy terminated, they should do a second “hit” by revealing that I had once written (again in a private conversation) that “Catholic schools are not the same as Madrassas,” and framing this as a hateful attack on Islam.[…]During the same phone call with Jivraj, Luke Lebrun twice brought up a problem with the plan: to avoid legal liability, he would have to obtain comment from me, and I would surely deny the allegations. They then discussed finding a “trick” to solve this problem, and Jivraj represented himself as a lawyer:(Lebrun did not seem to know what ‘qualified privilege’ means in the context of defamation law).And again:Jivraj also warned Luke Lebrun that he could be discredited as a rogue “stalker” and “harasser” who was “on all sorts of meds.” He told Lebrun that I had filed a police report against him (true; the police advised that I apply for a restraining order), and that he had been driven out of the UCP for his conduct. On that basis, Jivraj asked for a shield of anonymity, and Lebrun agreed.Lebrun testified that he never looked into whether Jivraj was a lawyer. He was not.He never asked for more information about the police report, nor did he try to track it down. This was part of his testimony at trial (transcribed to the best of my ability):Q: You failed to inquire into this police report, even when Mr. Jivraj himself made you aware of it?A: I mean, he wasn’t in jail or anything like that, so I saw no reason to believe there was anything to it.[…]Q: You said that filing a police report “just seems like a pretty standard attempt to discredit someone”?A: YesAs suggested by the police, I did eventually file for a restraining order. Jivraj fought it for years, culminating in a 6-day trial where I was granted a permanent restraining order and awarded full solicitor-client costs (which were never paid). Jivraj’s harassment against me was of such a nature that the judge recognized a new tort of civil harassment. But even at the height of the #MeToo era, Luke Lebrun thought I was just trying to discredit Jivraj and my concerns about his stalking and harassment should be ignored.Lebrun testified that he agreed to give Jivraj anonymity because he had expressed concerns about being discredited. This was part of the exchange in cross-examination at trial1:Q: You understood that the reason Mr. Jivraj wanted anonymity was because he could be discredited as a stalker, a rogue crazy person who was on all sorts of meds, who is trying to go after Caylan Ford?A: Yes. These were a number of reasons for how he could be targeted in some form of retributionQ: That’s what he told you?A: YesQ: That’s why you gave him anonymity?A: YesOn March 15, 2019, a terrorist in Christchurch, New Zealand, shot and killed 50 people in a mosque attack. Jivraj emailed Lebrun suggesting that they change their story angle to focus on a narrative that I sympathized with white supremacist terrorists. (In that private conversation, I was actually discussing an apparent asymmetry in elite discourse concerning terror attacks and approaches to de-radicalization. I had studied counter-terrorism in grad school and worked on international security files for Canada’s foreign ministry, so this was at least peripherally related to my scholarly and professional interests. Read in context, there was no hint of sympathy with white supremacist political violence, which I had called “sickening”).In one of the dozens of emails exchanged between Jivraj and Lebrun as they planned this “hit” against me, Jivraj wrote that the timing of the terror attack in Christchurch was “strangely perfect”.Lebrun then came up with an idea to refer to Jivraj as a Muslim to further shield him from public scrutiny about his credibility, status, or motives. He wrote the following to his colleague Stephen Magusiak in a text message: Under cross-examination at trial, Jivraj testified that he had selected excerpts that could harm me, and omitted those that offered clarifying or exculpatory context. Despite knowing that Jivraj meant to cause me harm, Luke Lebrun allowed Jivraj to select cherry-picked, out-of-context excerpts for him. He undertook no direct verification of their authenticity, and was indifferent to the question of whether they were a fair representation of the conversation as a whole. He never even asked to see the whole conversation, and it was never made available to readers so they could form their own judgements.Magusiak and Lebrun had a story outline completed on March 15, 2019. The story was almost completely finished on March 17. By mid-day on March 18, Lebrun had finished writing his article. He uploaded it to Press Progress’ Wordpress content management system, and got approval for publication from Broadbent Institute program director Katrina Miller. The article had a line stating that I did not reply to a request for comment. I had not been contacted for comment.Afterwards, Lebrun contacted me for comment for the first time, asking pointed and accusatory questions (as Jivraj suggested), and giving me three hours to respond while I was in the middle of a publicly advertised campaign event. He stated that he gave me only three hours to make sure I did not have a chance to “respond to it or, you know, do PR kind of damage control.”I responded to Lebrun’s email by asking what the source of the leaked messages was. I knew that Jivraj was behind it, but wanted to know whether Lebrun was aware of who he was collaborating with, and whether he would be honest. Lebrun said his source was a “prominent conservative.” Meanwhile, I was trying to recover the record of the Facebook messenger conversation so I could respond to accusations about it, but was unsuccessful.After the three hours were up, Lebrun published the article with the headline “UCP Candidate Complained ‘White Supremacist Terrorists’ Are Treated Unfairly, Leaked Messages Show.” It communicated that I was aligned ideological with the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque massacre and sympathized with white supremacist terrorism. Through guilt-by-association, it cast a penumbra of suspicion that I was white nationalist, white supremacist, and Islamophobic:This is an inversion of the actual content of the conversation. I had not complained that white supremacist terrorists were treated unfairly. I did allude to the the importance of understanding why some people are drawn to the “perverse moral reasoning” of white supremacy—in order to rehabilitate and de-radicalize them. I had called the the Charlottesville rally and associated violence “sickening.” I did not say that western culture would collapse if another race took over, or anything resembling that. I did say that I was saddened by what I saw as the likely second-order effects of demographic replacement in Europe (“demographic replacement” being a social science term; I was using it to refer to the dual phenomena of sub-replacement fertility and high levels of international migration). Specifically, I was concerned about the destabilizing effects of these trends and the loss or diminution of particular, local cultures. But Press Progress saw “demographic replacement” and assumed this was related to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, writing:Lebrun included graphics claiming to reproduce my private messages. The article led readers to believe that these reproductions were completely unaltered and unedited. That was a lie. In addition to being so sundered from their original context as to completely obscure their meaning, two of the four excerpts were also materially edited.For example, this is one of the messages as printed by Press Progress:The actual conversation had nothing to do with Western culture ‘collapsing,’ as stated by Press Progress. It was instead part of a discussion about the challenges of civic nationalism, and specifically the feasibility of Jivraj’s proposal for the complete cultural assimilation of immigrants at scale. The graphic above is actually an edited excerpt taken from this comment:Readers can form the own opinion about the significance of Press Progress’ edits, but there is no question that this and other statements were both edited and re-framed. The effect was to take a milquetoast observation (that many, but not all, immigrants are attached to their own culture and heritage and will be reluctant to part with it) and turn it into an apocalyptic and racist portent about civilizational collapse.The article also claimed that my social media had “remained silent” after the Christchurch mosque massacre (as if that was evidence that I supported terrorism). That was false – I had promoted several tweets denouncing the attacks and celebrating the heroism of one of the Muslim men who stopped the shooter.The article also claimed Jivraj was a Muslim conservative with “deep ties” to the conservative party, who requested anonymity due to unspecific threats of retribution. That was a lie. Jivraj had been removed from his volunteer role in the UCP months earlier and sanctioned by the party. He was barred from running for the federal conservatives. He’d been ostracized by the Ontario PCs. There were no threats of retribution against him. He was an extremely strident and often public critic of Islam—a fact that was confirmed by numerous witnesses at trial. Despite being raised in an Ismaili household, he had told me that he he did not identify as Ismaili and had no attachment to the teachings of Islam:Elsewhere, Jivraj described Muslims as “scum” who were “infecting” Paris suburbs (he had lived in Paris during university and the experience seemed to be quite radicalizing):At trial, Luke Lebrun was presented with several of Jivraj’s public statements about Islam from this time period. He appeared surprised, stating he was not aware of how “problematic” Jivraj’s actual views on Islam were. Again, he had failed to do any research on his source’s background or actual motives, and ended up publishing falsehoods.Right after this article was published, Luke Lebrun and Stephen Magusiak had a group chat with Duncan Kinney and his Progress Alberta colleague Jim Storrie. In the DM exchange, Kinney and Storrie discuss setting up a lead-gen petition tool to “help” UCP leader Jason Kenney make the decision to remove me as a candidate. Duncan Kinney wrote that he had “ampac and muslim folks who want to fuck with Kenney”, and alludes to plans to mobilize them. Shortly after, AMPAC began issuing tweets calling for Jason Kenney to denounce and remove me as a candidate. Jason Kenney testified at trial that this was a factor that led him to ask for my resignation: it caused him to believe this was a coordinated de-stabilization event that would take the UCP’s campaign off-message, which they couldn’t risk during the 28-day writ period.[…]A few hours after the March 18 article was published, I was forced to resign my candidacy.Jim Storrie wrote that it was a good thing I was ‘knocked off’ early in my political career, because I would have been “politically very competent” (Why does Mr. Storrie not want competent people governing Alberta? Sadly I’ll never know: Progress Alberta settled out of this action for $250K. Press Progress failed to call Progress Alberta employees as witnesses at trial.)Kinney and Storrie’s outfit Progress Alberta was a registered third-party advertiser in the 2019 Alberta election, meaning it was spending money to promote or oppose a particular political party with a view to influence the election outcome. Registration is required to keep compliant with Alberta elections law. Press Progress was not registered, but there are several instances where the records show this type of planning and collusion between the two entities.For example, ten days following publication of the Press Progress article, I appeared on the radio show of now-Premier Danielle Smith to share my side of the story. Duncan Kinney and Luke Lebrun again discussed how the former was launching a petition campaign — this time to target Danielle Smith for having the temerity to give me a public platform to speak:“she needs to disappear,” wrote Kinney following my first media interview. Lebrun expressed some trepidation about how coordinated the attacks on me seemed, and suggests that the [Toronto] Star should write the next article about how foolish and crazy I am. The Toronto Star published something like 16 articles and 4 front pages defaming me.A week or so later, Press Progress published a fifth article about me. This time they dropped the innuendo, and published statements baldly asserting that I am a white supremacist. They also targeted two of my associates, implying that they were extremists and white supremacist sympathizers because they had once liked a tweet that I published. (Ironically, the tweet they liked was a call to stop campaigning through ad hominem and actually discuss substantive policy. It was part of a thread where I expressed support for a young Vietnamese political candidate who was being wrongly smeared as a misogynist).Press Progress has spent much of the last year insinuating that my lawsuit is a SLAPP action and fundraising on that basis. They have persistently pleaded that they acted responsibly and reported truthfully.Caylan Ford is documentary filmmaker, writer, researcher, charter school founder, and a former political candidate.
