CANADA
Macleans
John Furlong, the former Vancouver Olympic CEO, has come out swinging in his legal response to journalist Laura Robinson’s allegations in court filings that he physically abused a former spouse and sexually assaulted another as well as abused former students at Burns Lake and Prince George, B.C., when he was a volunteer missionary instructor in the late 1960s.
Furlong accused Robinson of waging a “personal vendetta” against him in a volcanic rebuttal filed in the B.C. Supreme Court Friday, July 26, as part of a civil lawsuit by Furlong over a story Robinson wrote for Vancouver’s weekly Georgia Straight newspaper.
“The events alleged are said to have occurred in 1969 and the 1970s but have not been reported in the intervening decades to the Plaintiff (Furlong) or to the authorities by any person involved,” the reply document says. “This is because they never occurred.”
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Robinson’s original story, published in September, 2012, accused Furlong of hiding his past as a Catholic missionary teacher at Immaculata Elementary school in Burns Lake, and later at Prince George College, and that he physically abused several of the aboriginal students who attended. When Furlong filed suit, Robinson used her court-filed defence to level even more serious charges, including the allegations of sexual and spousal abuse.
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