A woman has filed a $1.25 million lawsuit against the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, alleging that, while she was a scholarship student, she was sexually harassed by her mentor and the foundation then pressured her to sign a non-disclosure agreement to keep it quiet.
Cherry Smiley, 38, is a member of the Nlaka’pamux Nation in British Columbia and the Dine’ Nation. She received a scholarship to the foundation in 2016, when she was in the second year of her PhD program at Concordia University in Montreal. She alleges she was sexually harassed by her mentor, Stephen Kakfwi, the former premier of the Northwest Territories, and the foundation tried to get her to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
“They told her that it would be ‘bad for her’ if ‘this got out’ and that ‘Kakfwi could sue her’ and that the Foundation ‘could be accused of racism by Mr. Kakfwi,'” the lawsuit says. “They attempted to minimize the sexual harassment, telling her that it was just a ‘cultural misunderstanding.'”
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