[LINK] "Patrick Brazeau: It all started with a boxing match"

[rfmcdonald]

I last wrote about disgraced senator Patrick Brazeau in February, when I mentioned that he was now working management at a strip club in the Ottawa area to pay the bills. Since then, worse has happened--arrests, rehab.

What went wrong with the former Conservative star senator? Postmedia News' Stephen Maher wrote an essay on the 28th of March tracing the moment when Brazeau began to fall apart to his famous 2012 boxing match with then-aspiring Liberal leader Justin Trudeau.

As Trudeau celebrated his victory, Levant asked him: “Is Bob Rae next?”

A year later, Trudeau had replaced Rae as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. The fight had changed his image, launching him to a new level of national popularity. Two years later, he has been ahead of the prime minister in the polls for a year.

Brazeau, in contrast, has been in a downward spiral.

The fight raised $230,000 for cancer research — something Brazeau wanted to do to honour his late mother — but the loss in the ring came as a bitter disappointment to his caucus colleagues, and since that day, his political, personal and legal troubles have piled up.

Soon after the fight, he had to apologize for insulting reporter Jennifer Ditchburn on Twitter after she did a story on his spotty attendance in the Senate.

CTV’s Bob Fife started digging into questions about Brazeau’s questionable use of his father’s Maniwaki home as official residence, which allowed him to claim extra expense money. That led to an official audit and ultimately an RCMP investigation.

In February 2013, after an early morning incident at his Gatineau home, he was charged with assault and sex assault. The next day, he was suspended from caucus.

In June, he was ordered to repay $49,000 in housing expenses. When he failed to pay, the Senate started to garnish his wages. In November he was suspended from the Senate without pay. In January, the bank moved to repossess his house.

His girlfriend, who works at a Gatineau bar, faces cocaine charges. He himself faces two trials: one for fraud and breach of trust, the other for assault and sex-assault charges. If he is convicted of any of the charges, he may be permanently expelled from the Senate.