Rob Ford, the former mayor of Toronto, was controversial well before being caught on video smoking crack. The bombastic politician, who reportedly spewed racist and homophobic comments and was once convicted of drunk driving, was elected mayor in 2010 for a scandalous term that led to international notoriety.
Ford’s rise and fall is the subject of a new documentary in Netflix’s Trainwreck series. Mayor of Mayhem traces the right-wing populist mayor’s career and fall from grace, featuring the investigative journalists who reported on the scandal, city councillors, and people who worked for Ford.
Ford’s rise to power
In Mayor of Mayhem, Ford’s close associates say he idolized father Doug Ford Sr., who was also a politician, and was always trying to impress him. The junior Ford was a popular city councillor for a ward in Toronto before he was mayor, serving from 2000 to 2010.
As a politician, he was known for handing out his business card to constituents and urging them to call him if something was amiss. He even still found time to coach high school football in his down time.
Elected mayor in 2010, Ford managed to get several reforms passed in his first year. He got the City Council to repeal a vehicle registration tax. Local transit workers were declared an essential service so they couldn’t strike.
But his brash attitude put off some city councillors. “He was so aggressive that a lot of people didn’t want to sit near him,” John Filion, a city councillor, says in the doc. Ford would tell his opponents to work with him or he’d destroy them.
The smoke out
In May 2013, Gawker published a video that appeared to show Ford smoking crack. At first Ford denied he had smoked crack cocaine and denied that a video of him smoking crack cocaine existed.
The more news outlets reported on the scandal, the more Ford tried to turn people against the media. An arch conservative, Ford started attacking the Toronto Star, which had a reputation for its progressive leanings, calling the paper and its reporters “pathological liars.”
“Rob Ford demonizing the media years before Donald Trump did the same thing was extremely effective,”Star reporter David Rider says in the doc. Some journalists say they received death threats for reporting on Ford’s scandal.
Ford still maintained a dedicated following. The doc shows supporters campaigning for him for re-election.
At a November 2013 news conference outside of his Toronto city hall office, Ford admitted that he smoked crack before, but maintained that he was not an addict. About five months later, Globe and Mail journalist Robyn Doolittle was tipped off to a video of Ford with a crack pipe in his hand. After the Globe and Mail published several still images from the video in April 2014, Ford, who was running for re-election, went to rehab.
In September 2014, he abandoned his bid for re-election when a tumor was discovered in his abdomen. Ford died from cancer in 2016 at the age of 46.
Mayor of Mayhem gives the last word to Ford’s still loyal advisors. One calls him “selfless,” and another even tears up as he reflects on helping Ford navigate the scandal. His former Chief of Staff Mark Towhey closes the 49-minute doc arguing, “All of us have a Rob, somewhere in our life. And I think in the long run, history will think of him as a man who had an illness, who, despite that, accomplished stuff that had never been accomplished before. And…the bad stuff, yep, it speaks for itself.”
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