Shannon Everett takes a sip of her Peach Blossom Cold Tea — the same drink she tossed towards Mayor Rob Ford back in June.

To be clear, because both the mayor and his guardian brother Doug certainly weren’t in their embellished version of events afterwards: Everett says she did not throw her drink at Ford that afternoon on College St. She launched it in the direction of Ford and his entourage, as the mayor was posing for pictures with members of the public during a walkabout at Taste of Little Italy.

What follows is entirely her account of events.

The “weapon” — a plastic glass — she says, landed several metres away from Ford. Its lid didn’t even come off. There was no splashing of its contents, though Ford dabbed at his face with a large tissue.

“He was sweating,” says Everett. “If his face was wet, it was from that. There was no way the drink actually touched him.”

On his radio show the next day, the mayor at first chuckled over his “little shower” but then added: “It’s not funny. That hurt, man. When it hits you in the face, you don’t expect it, right?”

To which Doug Ford chimed in: “It could have been hot chocolate. It could have been something more dangerous. It could have been a weapon.” Later, he threw in a further made-up detail, saying the liquid had burned the mayor’s eyes.

Well, we know from the record that the mayor has publicly lied on several occasions. His bro’ seems afflicted with the same disdain for truthyness. And Everett, with her impetuous guerrilla attack, handed the siblings just the ammunition they could exploit as a diversionary episode during the height of the Crack-gate scandal.

Ford had picked up the dangerous projectile, sniffed its contents, insisting he’d detected something booze-smelling, possibly rye or vodka. And seemingly, the mayor knows his booze. On this occasion, however, he was wrong.

But the claim advanced a fictional narrative that Ford’s assailant was a juiced-up whack-job. “He made it sound like I was intoxicated and not in my right mind,” says Everett.

Everett is no nutbar. She’s a 27-year-old educational multimedia designer at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa, a yoga instructor, a cyclist, an environmentalist, who lives in the Beach and had never before had any interaction with police.

On June 15, she was with a girlfriend on their way to a dinner party in the Little Italy neighborhood, stopping at the outdoor kiosk of The Green Grind, where Everett purchased the drink. Both girls took turns sipping from it through a straw as they strolled along College. By the time they reached Crawford St., she says, there was no more than two ounces of peach blossom tea — with maple syrup — left in the cup.

And there was the mayor, posing with passersby. Fleetingly, Everett thought about the strange nature of celebrity, how people like sidling up close to it, even if they don’t particularly like the person. She thought about the cheap notoriety sought by individuals who are famous just for being famous — the Kim Kardashians and Paris Hiltons of the world, whose primary claim to fame is appearing in sex tapes.

“Not that I’m comparing the mayor to Paris Hilton.” And not, to our knowledge, that Ford has ever appeared in a sex video. Why, that’s just as ridiculous as ... um, a video that appears to show Ford smoking a crack pipe.

But mostly she was shaking her head at civilians clamoring to be photographed with a mayor when probably some of those pix would end up posted on social media with a wisecrack or ridiculing comment attached.

It got up her nose, the scene.

Without thinking about the consequences, Everett flung her drink, she says — not directly at the mayor, she insists.

“I just threw it like ... a boo, in disapproval. I wasn’t out to hit him. I just thought, you are so not cool, Mayor Ford.”

All hell broke loose. One of Ford’s aides was immediately in her face. As she turned to leave, quickly, both Fords ran after her.

“I was like, oh-oh.

“Rob Ford is yelling, ‘IT HIT ME IT HIT ME.’ This other guy — I didn’t even know it was Doug Ford, I thought it was the mayor’s bodyguard — was saying to police, ‘WE WANT HER CHARGED WITH ASSAULT!’ He was really bullying the cops, demanding their badge numbers. He was, ‘HOW DARE SHE!’ And, ‘YOU CAN’T LET HER GET AWAY WITH THIS!’

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“I thought I was going to have to apologize, like a little kid. And I did apologize, over and over again. I apologized to everybody.”

But she was charged with assault, handed a citation. “I couldn’t understand it. Assault? I hadn’t touched him. The drink hadn’t touched him.”

Everett and her friend went on to the dinner party, stopping first to buy some cupcakes. “We got cupcakes because we were sad. Salted caramel, actually.”

At the party, the “slushie-bomber” had already hit the Twittersphere. “It wasn’t a slushie,” Everett sniffs. “It was organic.”

For weeks afterwards, she was bombarded with tweets and emails, some applauding her small rebellious act, others crucifying her. She cancelled her Twitter account — which was her first name and surname — and someone promptly picked up the domain, pretending to be her.

The hardest part was telling her parents. “My mother was, like, you did what?”

We are sitting in The Green Grind, Everett — reluctantly — giving her first interview since the incident, since the brief statement she made on the steps outside the courthouse last month after the Crown had withdrawn the assault charge, explaining the mayor did not wish to proceed with the case. Everett was immensely relieved. Most everybody else was immensely disappointed.

Everett’s lawyer, Marie Henein — a killer on stiletto heels — had been looking forward to cross-examining Ford in the witness stand. Maybe the mayor has had enough of courtroom testifying. And he’d already milked the “assault” for all it was worth.

For Everett, however, the mini-drama will never go away; she will always be a Google footnote in the Ford saga.

“I did feel regretful, at first. But I also feel I had to pay far more consequences for what I did than the mayor. He and his brother said all these things about me that weren’t true.

“And if the mayor will lie about me, just this ordinary person who never did anything to him, why should people believe him about anything else, like why all those workers left his staff, and those stupid slogans he uses about wanting to help the people of Toronto?”

She pauses, drains her drink.

“All this whole situation did was confirm to me that he’s a terrible person, that he’s dishonest and a bully.”

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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