Talk about shooting the messenger — and a pretty supportive one at that.

After years of boosting Rob Ford as our man at City Hall, the mayor suddenly turned on the little paper that grew him into a big deal and blamed the Toronto Sun for “misquoting” him in an August 2010 article that has him now fighting a $6-million lawsuit.

Say it ain’t so, big guy. Is this how you treat your friends — by throwing them under the bus when the going gets tough?

Ford is being sued by Boardwalk Cafe owner George Foulidis over comments he made in a Sun article following an on-the-record editorial board meeting during the election campaign in which he questioned the untendered 20-year lease just inked by Foulidis’s company, Tuggs Inc

“You can’t be responsible for a message delivered and prepared by someone else,” said Ford’s lawyer, Gavin Tighe, in his closing argument before Superior Court Justice John Macdonald.

“The article is a distortion. I say more than a distortion, it’s a completely different message than what Mr. Ford was saying.”

Really?

That’s funny, since he never asked for a retraction or issued a clarification the day after his mug was splashed on our front page and inside the paper under the headline “Ford smells ‘corruption.’ Contract for Beaches eatery ‘stinks to high heaven’”.

In fact, as our former editor Rob Granatstein mentions in his column, Ford even repeated the same “corruption” allegations the next day in a press release — though without mentioning the Tuggs deal by name — when responding to outgoing mayor David Miller’s criticism that his comments in the Sun were “irresponsible.”

“I think it was corruption, Mayor Miller doesn’t, so let’s make all the information public and let the taxpayers decide for themselves,” Ford said in his release on Aug. 12.

Ford had come to the Sun the day before, a friendly chat with a roundtable of editors and reporters where the mayoral candidate espoused on issues in the upcoming municipal election. City Hall columnist Sue Ann Levy brought up the controversial sole-source deal that gave Tuggs Inc. exclusive rights to sell food and even suntan lotion on the eastern beach for another two decades.

“I wish that you guys knew what happened in camera, which a lot of you do obviously. But these in camera meetings, there’s more corruption and skullduggery going in there than I’ve ever seen in my life. I don’t know what it is,” Ford told the Sun.

“And I can’t accuse anyone or I can’t pinpoint it, but why do we have to go in camera on the Tuggs deal?”

Later, he added, “A lot of these issues don’t have to go in camera. And if that Tuggs deal doesn’t stink to high heaven, I, I ...”

Jonathan Jenkins, an excellent reporter I may add, wrote the story for the next day’s paper. He zeroed in on Ford’s contention that City Hall was rife with corruption in back room deals, and referenced the controversial Boardwalk Cafe lease.

Where’s the torquing? Where’s the spinning?

Those are Ford’s quotes. He repeated as much on the stand this week and then went even further while testifying at his libel trial. When asked whether he thought there were bribes going on behind closed doors at City Hall in the Boardwalk Cafe deal, Ford said he could never prove anything but that he’d heard rumours and received a lot of “anonymous” calls.

So more than two years later, Ford appears to still be standing by his allegations. And yet his lawyer claims that it was the Sun who had an agenda and it was the reporter’s “pen” who twisted his words?

Now that he’s got his feet to the fire, the mayor has mused that he didn’t know the Sun editorial board was on the record — when everyone present confirms that it was — and that his comments were sensationalized.

Bad form, sir.

If your allegations have landed you in legal trouble because you never had any evidence to back them up, that’s on you — not the Toronto Sun.

The judge has reserved his decision.

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