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In October 2019, we received multiple inquiries from readers about the veracity of reports that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was about to be embroiled in a major sex scandal involving his tenure as a teacher at the West Point Grey Academy in Vancouver between 1998 and 2001. On Oct. 7, for example, the Buffalo Chronicle website published an article under the headline Trudeau is Rumored to Be in Talks With an Accusor to Suppress an Explosive Sex Scandal, which reported that: On Oct. 6, a Facebook page called The Global Informer posted a meme featuring a photograph of Trudeau along with the claim he Ended teaching job due to having inappropriate relations with student: On Sep. 30, the Canadian magazine Frank, which publishes a mixture of political satire, news and gossip, posted an article reporting a slightly different version of the rumor: As the website Canadaland reported, the evidence-free rumors of Trudeau's alleged sexual relations with either a student or a student's mother were accompanied by additional evidence-free rumors that the Liberal Party prime minister had attempted to cover up the story. On Oct. 4, the Canadian columnist and political consultant Warren Kinsella tweeted out a photograph of Trudeau posing alongside several young women, an image that reportedly came from the 2000 edition of the West Point Grey Academy yearbook. Kinsella hinted that the next day's Globe and Mail newspaper might feature a related story about the Canadian prime minister, writing I always encourage people to read the Toronto Sun. Naturally, but they might also want to read the Globe and Mail tomorrow. My Spidey sense is tingling: When no such story emerged on Oct. 5, some observers claimed this was evidence that Trudeau or his representatives had sought to suppress its publication, or that a non-disclosure agreement was hastily being arranged in order to silence the person with whom Trudeau was purported to have had a sexual relationship. Hence the Buffalo Chronicle's claim, quoted above, about the non-appearance of an expected Globe and Mail piece on the putative scandal. Canadian political reporters were certainly looking into the West Point Grey Academy rumors in early October 2019, but as of Oct. 9 nothing had emerged publicly to substantiate those rumors. In a press conference on Oct. 4, the Globe and Mail's Marieka Walsh invited Trudeau to address the allegations (without repeating them), and asked him why he had left his teaching post at the school. Trudeau responded: I moved on, and I have great memories of an excellent time teaching in Vancouver in public and private schools. Walsh later followed up by asking the prime minister whether he had signed a non-disclosure agreement about his departure from the school. Trudeau answered with an unequivocal No. Walsh asked again why he had left the school, and Trudeau answered Because I was moving on in my career: Similarly, the headmaster of West Point Grey Academy at the time Trudeau worked there, Clive Austin, responded to multiple inquiries from reporters, writing in a statement that: Previously, Trudeau had said that he left the West Point Grey Academy in part due to a disagreement with administrators over school policies, and in particular after an episode involving the student newspaper, of which he was the staff moderator. In his 2014 memoir Common Ground, Trudeau wrote of the subject that: No publicly available evidence supports any claim that Trudeau had a sexual relationship with either a student or a student's mother while he was a teacher at West Point Grey Academy between 1998 and 2001, nor that such an episode contributed to his departure from the school's teaching staff. The reports and social media posts which made that claim either did not cite any sources or cited only anonymous and unspecified sources. Furthermore, Trudeau has given plausible explanations for his departure which do not involve any sex scandal, namely that he was disillusioned with school administrators' conservative approach to certain policies and that he simply wanted to move on in his career -- two different but not contradictory reasons. That Trudeau's departure from the school had nothing to do with any sex scandal was corroborated by a statement issued in October 2019 by the school's principal during the period in question. Furthermore, no publicly available evidence supports the claim that Trudeau or his representatives have endeavored to suppress or cover up the supposed sex scandal. The fact that in October 2019, Canadian reporters made public their investigations and inquiries into the rumors actually undermines the credibility of the claims, since no reporting has yet emerged which would corroborate the allegations against Trudeau. The sex scandal claims appear to be no more than gossip and unsubstantiated rumor, published only two weeks before Canada's 2019 federal election, but we cannot definitively dismiss this particular set of allegations against Trudeau. Because the claims have been so vague and lacking in factual specifics (no names, dates, places, or firsthand accounts have been published) it has not yet been possible to test their credibility and therefore not possible to either corroborate or refute them. If that changes, we will update this fact check accordingly. We submitted questions to both the Canadian Liberal Party and the Office of Prime Minister Trudeau. The Office of the Prime Minister directed us to put our questions to the Liberal Party, from whom we did not receive a response.
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