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In the CTV London interview, Phillips says he did not express concern to Blackridge about the content on the anti-Ridley website – which included a bizarre claim of child abuse because she once brought her young son to a weekend budget meeting.

Ridley lost her re-election bid in west-end Ward 10 to Van Meerbergen. Cassidy won re-election, beating several challengers including another Blackridge client, Randy Warden.

It was well-known that Van Meerbergen had hired Blackridge to aid his campaign last fall, but an indirect link to the Ridley attack website was only established a few weeks ago when Blackridge co-owner Amir Farahi was tied in court documents to it.

Van Meerbergen has declined multiple Free Press calls for comment in the weeks since court documents linked the Ridley-attacking website to Farahi. When The Free Press wrote that he was facing pressure to answer questions about the link, Van Meerbergen told a local radio station the newspaper’s coverage was “bogus”

In the Thursday interview, he admitted his campaign’s tie to the scandal but said he had “no participation whatsoever” in the website’s creation.

Blackridge is co-owned by Farahi and Skinner, a second-term TVDSB trustee. Skinner is facing a formal probe from the school board under a code-of-conduct complaint filed by a colleague, Corrine Rahman.

In a statement last week, Blackridge said the websites that attacked Cassidy and Ridley were factual, if “harsh.”

Friday, Coun. Stephen Turner said the Blackridge scandal “seems to evolve daily” and that city hall needs “a mechanism to investigate that, as warranted.”

Calls to Blackridge were not returned.

Ridley, who has returned to private life, declined comment Friday.