Article content continued

One of the pictures he’d texted her — a picture of his penis, of course, at her repeated request, a fact she originally failed to disclose — was posted on Twitter by a third party.

I don’t buy for a minute his efforts to 'medicalize' what he did

He told me once (and confirmed it Wednesday) that even as he was doing it, sending the woman the picture she’d demanded, he knew he was absolutely courting disaster, yet somehow couldn’t stop himself.

Later, she claimed he had foisted the picture upon her. The police investigated her complaint but declined to lay charges; the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission dismissed the woman’s complaint there.

He was an adult; she was an adult; as a part-time prof he had virtually no power over her and, in fact, it was he who was vulnerable, newly separated from his wife and living on his own, and already a little afraid of her. Yet he pressed send. Such is the power of sexual desire, or loneliness, or both.

Clement, to use a golf term, did not go to school on the many men who went before him. He must have imagined that he would be the one guy who wouldn’t get caught or trapped or found out. Well, there aren’t many of those guys about any more.

Photo by Tony Clement/Instagram

Of course, it is dead wrong to text intimate pictures to minors, period. It is also wrong to send them unsolicited, to anyone. Clement believed his adult recipient wanted them and, retroactively, that he had been set up as a target of extortion. It is also lousy behaviour to creep young women online, if indeed Clement did that too.

And I don’t buy for a minute his efforts to “medicalize” what he did.