Well, that didn’t take long.
Barely four months after her role in the Raveena Aulakh tragedy was revealed, Jane Davenport has exited the Toronto Star.
Readers will recall how last June l’affaire Raveena went from unspeakable private tragedy to institutional scandale as Star management tried to drop the cone of silence on their epic blunders.
As first reported in Trash Magazine, Aulakh, the paper’s environment reporter, heartbroken over an office affair gone bad, committed suicide.
Star management fuelled speculation about the circumstances by not publishing her obituary. Public editor Kathy English was deployed to pen a master class in self-serving suck-and-blow, in which she clumsily relied upon Raveena’s plea for privacy (“’Please don’t talk about me. Please don’t let anyone write about me,’ she wrote.”) not only as an explanation for not running an obit, but as tacit justification for the Star’s subsequent attempts to sweep the entire HR headache under the rug.
But any hope management had of keeping the wretched matter quiet came unravelled when it was revealed that it was Jon Filson, the paper’s tablet supremo, with whom Raveena had been having an affair for several years.
Months prior, Raveena had discovered that the married Filson was also schtupping her boss, Davenport, then the Star’s managing editor. Raveena had found a collection of sexually graphic emails between Davenport and Filson on his cell phone.
Turns out this wasn’t the first time Davenport had landed in the ethical rough.
National editor Stephanie Cesca went to her in May 2015 to protest Filson’s abusive behaviour and mistreatment of staff. Many Star hacks were amazed how Filson had shinnied up the corporate ladder, while driving good reporters from the paper, including much-liked sports typist Dan Girard.
As Cesca excoriated Davenport’s bedmate, Jane just sat and nodded, making little comment.
Two months later, Cesca found herself sacked, without cause. She later sicced her lawyer onto the Star, scored a fat settlement and now works with the provincial government.
Amazingly, Jane’s transgressions didn’t amount to a firing offence. She was merely buried in an airless pit of a TorStar office until she got her severance package settled (shurely not $400,000!?—ed.)
Now she’s gone.
Next stop: The National Post? After all, that’s where long-suffering hubby Jack Romanelli is sports editor.
…and the Wheel of Life and ( ) rolls on…
In the words of The Walrus’ head pitchfork-polisher Jonathan “Show Us The Note!” Kay, “Even in death, the departed can offer up value to the living…. and in Aulakh’s case, her life, her death, and her last cri de coeur may have much to say about the frustrations, indignities and heartbreak endured by staff at the country’s biggest newspaper.” $400K. Value to the living and indignities indeed!
I have spent a fair amount of time in newsrooms. They manage to be cluttered and antiseptic at the same time. There is no music, no art on the walls. Sometimes there are no walls at all. They are hives of overworked, preoccupied people writing stories in a hurry, plotting their career arcs, exchanging speculation and gossip over bad coffee, getting drunk, boinking their fellow prisoners & giving each other colds. They have no lives of their own. Their awareness of the world around them is through the media they produce. And they’re worried sick – the news affects them too.
The newsroom is a the most toxic environment I have ever entered. Mock them as you might, this is how most people would behave in the same situation.
Yeah, if by ‘most people’ you mean Jack from Lord of the Flies.