It all began with one little word – wife.

Toronto university student Kristen Lucas read that Adam Giambrone was married in a Toronto Star story that ran Feb. 1, the day he launched his bid for mayor. It was the last straw.

She decided to come forward to talk about a relationship with Giambrone she said was intimate and began over a year ago, when she was 19.

In an email to the Star, Lucas, 20, wrote she couldn't keep silent any longer. "I've given this a lot of thought. ... I know a lot of things that should probably be made public seeing as he's a public figure."

Except nothing is quite that straightforward.

First, Giambrone, 32, and Sarah McQuarrie aren't married. There had been a misunderstanding and the Star ran a clarification to say McQuarrie was "his longtime live-in partner."

Moreover, Lucas, who believed she was Giambrone's girlfriend, was deeply hurt when Giambrone, then on the verge of announcing his bid for mayor, messaged her last Dec. 27 he would be announcing McQuarrie was his partner. He needed her for the campaign, he said.

"I felt very silenced and forgotten, somebody living in the shadows," says Lucas. "He had humiliated me in front of my friends."

Even then, however, she needed one more reason to speak to a journalist. It came at his campaign launch when her stepmother allegedly overheard McQuarrie refer to Lucas as "crazy." Lucas had sent McQuarrie uncomplimentary messages on Facebook.

Asked about Lucas on Monday, Giambrone apologized for having "an inappropriate relationship with a young woman" in a statement to the Star. But he denied a sexual relationship and Lucas had claimed the pair had sex several times in his City Hall office.

Once the story broke Tuesday, journalists descended upon Lucas and her family, even chasing her 80-year-old grandmother to a bus stop. With Giambrone denying an intimate relationship, she appeared to be lying – a perception that evaporated only when Giambrone admitted Tuesday night he'd had intimate relations with multiple women last year.

"My heart is breaking," Lucas told the Star Wednesday. "Hopefully the humiliation, along with the criticism all over the Internet, will now fade."

She said "in an ideal world" she, too, would have received a personal apology from Giambrone.

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"I'm not too fond of the guy," says Lucas's mother, Lori. "First, he's older. That bothered me. He was always late, always travelling and I saw what it did to my daughter ... Kristen wanted to do it but that doesn't mean I approved of it.

"I raised my daughter to be a strong, independent woman – a free thinker. She's a good person ... I know my daughter really well and she cared about him. When she's upset, I'm upset."