It was late at night, nearly a year ago, that Renata Ford pulled up in a taxi outside her parents’ home.

According to a police report, the contents of which have not been proven in court, the mayor’s wife was slurring her words and belligerent with the driver, police sources have told the Star. She either refused to pay the fare or did not have the money.

Their argument became so heated that the cabbie called for police assistance.

When cops arrived, they observed that Mrs. Ford had bruises and cuts to her limbs and face that appeared to be a few days old. But, when asked about it, she refused to say how the injuries had been suffered. She was, in fact, too incoherent to say much of anything — either inebriated or on drugs.

The upshot of this event is that nobody was charged. When police tried following up the matter in subsequent days — as they always do when domestic abuse is suspected — Mrs. Ford was not cooperative.

This occurrence was just one of among more than two dozen incidents in the past eight years or so when a member of the Ford family has intersected with police, sources have told the Star.

The Star obtained the incident report from this episode many months ago. The details were also confirmed with senior police sources.

Management at this paper decided not to publish a story about the matter. Editors agreed that Mrs. Ford, though the mayor’s spouse, was not someone who is in the public eye and was therefore entitled to privacy. Nobody here had any stomach for expanding the scandal engulfing Toronto’s mayor to encompass his family, thereby causing harm, particularly to the couple’s two young children.

But there is a strong argument to be made that those kids are at risk:

From a father who, as he’s acknowledged, sometimes drives after drinking. According to allegations of past and present Ford staffers in a police document, on the evening last March when he was asked to leave the Garrison Ball because of alleged impairment, Ford had defied his staff’s advice against attending and charged ahead to the marquee affair with his children in tow, his friend and occasional driver Alexander “Sandro” Lisi — since indicted on drug and extortion charges — at the wheel, and another crack addict pal also in the vehicle. A staffer took the youngsters to McDonald’s. From a mother who, the Star has been told by several sources, has her own worrisome issues.

In March 2008, police investigated a disturbance at the Ford home following a 9-1-1 call believed to have been placed by Renata, though other family members later insisted it was Rob Ford who made the call, complaining of “verbal abuse” from his spouse. In any event, Rob Ford was charged with assault and threatening death — charges that were later withdrawn, prosecutors citing “inconsistencies” in Renata’s statements.

Leo Tolstoy wrote: “All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

It is the mayor who has now dragged his wife into the sordidness of his squalor-without-end.

Thursday morning, Ford pushed-pulled Renata — a woman rarely seen in public — through a throng of reporters outside his city hall office. Even amidst this week’s every-which-way madness, where it felt like the needle on the Shock-O-Meter could not possibly spin any further around, Renata’s stunning appearance was a game-changer, a media rule-changer. (As a news editor for PBS in Washington told me in an email: “I’m sure your jaw is in a permanent state of ‘drop.’”)

Ford has deliberately dumped his wife in his slop, the final deflective gambit of a scoundrel.

Presumably, to the mayor’s cockamamie way of thinking, Mrs. Ford by his side for a damage-containing press conference — or at least shuffling desultorily in his wake — took the edge off crude remarks he’d made to journalists a couple of hours earlier.

Wearing a Toronto Argonauts jersey, Ford announced he was taking legal action against former staff and a waiter from the Bier Markt — who alleged, in the formerly blacked-out portion of police documents used to support a search warrant against Lisi, that he believed he’d seen the mayor, in Ford’s words, “doing lines” (as in lines of cocaine) at the popular Esplanade restaurant during a well-oiled spree on St. Patrick’s Day 2012.

The lawsuit threat is absurd because statements given to police are no more grounds for libel than testimony given in court.

Buried inside the warrant information is a reference to Ford allegedly telling a young female security guard at city hall that he “was going to eat her box”; that — as some of the mayor’s staff told police — he’d brought a woman (Alana) they believed to be a prostitute or “escort” to his office during that St. Patrick’s Day; and that Ford claimed that same evening to have had sex with former policy adviser Olivia Gondek. (Gondek had emphatically denied Ford ever made such comments to her.)

“I don’t appreciate people calling Alana a prostitute,” Ford harrumphed. “Never had a prostitute here. I’m very happily married at home. This is very disturbing against my wife... Alana is not a prostitute. She’s a friend and it makes me sick how people are saying this ...”

After a weird segue to the upcoming playoff game between Argos and Hamilton — “we’re going to have to spank the little Tiger Cats” — Ford appeared to have suddenly reminded himself of another point he wished to make.

“Oh, and the last thing was Olivia Gondek. It says I wanted to eat her pussy and I have never in my life said that to her. I would never do that. I’m happily married. I’ve got more than enough to eat at home, thank you very much.”

Heads exploded all around city hall.

Not long after, Renata was standing by her husband’s side — with that grim, faraway look we’ve seen in so many humiliated political spouses over the years — as Ford offered Apology No. 148 in a series.

“I want to apologize for my graphic remarks this morning.”

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He added: “When you attack my integrity as a father and as a husband, I see red. Today, I acted on complete impulse in my remarks.”

With wife as a prop, Ford pleaded with everybody to respect his family’s privacy. Yet it’s Ford who has lassoed his family into the glare of publicity. (Neither Rob Ford nor Renata Ford responded to requests yesterday for comment on this story, including a letter left on the doorstep of their Etobicoke home.)

In a brief exchange with trailing reporters as she walked briskly through the underground parking lot later, Renata said, no, she didn’t want her husband to leave office, as many have urged. “That’s what elections are for.”

True. Yet Ford got halfway-yanked out of the chair on Friday as city council passed two humiliating motions that will curtail his power.

They can’t make him go away. But they can, and have, reduced him to a pale shadow of his former self, divesting Ford of the ability to appoint chairs to standing committees. The bigger push will come Monday, on a separate motion to strip Ford of just about every authority vested in a chief magistrate, delegating to Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly “all powers and duties which are not by statute assigned to the mayor, until Nov. 30, 2014.

Operating budget transferred to Kelly; chair of the executive committee transferred to Kelly; even Ford’s staff transferred to Kelly, if they choose.

He would get to keep only the formal title: Mayor.

Mayor of Nothing.

Ford, unusually restrained, nevertheless declared he would counter the coup judicially.

“I have no other option but to challenge this in court.”

The Great Vulgarian has spoken.

Then he went home to his wife, a long-suffering woman married to a booze-binging, crack-using, drug-buying liar.