http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=853635
(((Crushed by the salacious press; well, one might as well take one's tale of woe to the salacious press.)))
(((Makes you wonder what Monica's up to these days.
Is she in Canada?)))
Link: Relationship with Bernier ruined me: Couillard.
MONTREAL – Julie Couillard's relationship with the media began during the past decade with two doomed affairs. One was with her late husband, Gilles Giguère, who was shot in grisly, gangland fashion; the other was with her second husband, Stéphane Sirois, an unstable man with biker-gang affiliations who became a police informer.
Despite that troubled history, she says it was her relationship with former Cabinet minister Maxime Bernier, pictured, that ruined her.
"Unfortunately, though he was a minister, though he was, according to our society, a respectable man and so forth, Maxime ended up damaging more than the colossal mistake that was Stéphane Sirois," Ms. Couillard said on Wednesday in one of the many interviews she is about to give about the relationship. "He totally destroyed my life."
Promoting her memoir, My Story, in a smoky Montreal hotel suite with a draped-off bed, Ms. Couillard is breaking the silence surrounding the controversial affair she had with Mr. Bernier, who resigned as a result of leaving classified information at her Montreal home during their six-month relationship. The memoir, published by McClelland and Stewart, appears in bookstores on Thursday.
Wearing a buttoned, cream-coloured shirt and a pale scarf with a Gallic twist, Ms. Couillard is an absolute charmer. Articulate in either language, she bats her big, pale blue eyes. She is a leaner – and a toucher. (Fifteen times, by my stick-figure accounting method.) Though her voice is husky,worldly and a bit wounded, she can also at times sound utterly guileless. (((Okay, cut the chop-licking and back to the chase.)))
When I asked her how the media should have portrayed her during her long period of silence after the scandal involving Mr. Bernier broke, she replied that her past should have been left in the past, their affair was hardly sordid. "I was just a girl who happened to meet a guy who happened to be cute and he thought the same of me," is how Ms. Couillard recalled the relationship.
It was only the opposition and the media, she maintains, that turned her into a shady temptress dispatched by the underworld to tease out government secrets.
The book goes a long way to dispel the idea that she is a nefarious temptress. If anything, men usually seem to get the best of her, including her high school sweetheart. Often her affairs were fraught with obstacles, either illegal activity, a wife, or crossing the line between professional and personal. Her only true love was Mr. Giguère.
A teenager who suffered from epilepsy, she tried to claw her way out of the hardscrabble Montreal suburbs by bit jobs in retail, modelling and acting (Highlander III), She found her true calling in real-estate, but even then she had some hits and misses.
A veteran of a few profound scares in her 39 years, Julie Couillard was watching television five months ago when she noticed an item on her local news network that the girlfriend of Foreign Affairs, Maxime Bernier had ties with the criminal underworld.
"The life I had for myself was destroyed on the 7th of May," said Ms. Couillard, with a curling lip and eyes that look glassy enough to emit tears. "Why did that happen? Because I'm a woman? That was my crime?"...
