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This story arises from an anonymous Twitter message I got and followed up on last week. Ghamari answered questions I asked, starting last Thursday. The two politicians tell versions of events that disagree in important ways and the Progressive Conservative party wants to get to the bottom of it.

Photo by Ashley Fraser / Postmedia

“While Ms. Ghamari declined to pursue her complaint at the time, the party has now hired a third-party investigator to provide clarity on what occurred that evening. We will provide further details upon its completion,” a high-ranking PC party official said, asking not to be named because, amid the chaos of leader Patrick Brown’s departure, there’s actually nobody in the Tory party whose job it is to speak for it at the moment.

In Ghamari’s telling, Hillier noticed her outside the convention centre in the evening of March 5, 2016. She was getting fresh air and checking her messages; he was having a cigarette. He walked up, slung an arm around her shoulders and pulled her in close. Hillier is tall, stocky and solid. Ghamari is slight — five-foot-two and 110 pounds, she says.

Photo by Wayne Cuddington / Ottawa Citizen

“He was smoking, his cigarette was in his left hand, and it was clear that he was drunk. It was just very obvious from the way he was walking and I could smell the alcohol on his breath,” she said. “His fingers were digging into my shoulder and his cigarette was still in his hand as well, so when he’s doing that … it was almost right in my face.”

At the time, Ghamari was on the fringes of the Progressive Conservative party, considering running for office but not declared yet. Nepean-Carleton MPP Lisa MacLeod and Carleton-Mississippi Mills MPP Jack MacLaren were close to open war for control of the Tory operation in Eastern Ontario. (MacLaren was an early Brown supporter and ally who’d been elevated in the caucus after Brown’s win; stories about a dirty comedy act he put on at a charity fundraiser were still a month away.) MacLeod’s riding was being cut up in a redistribution and she hadn’t yet said whether she intended to run in Nepean or Carleton.