Bernier never loved her, claims biker chick
MONTREAL -- Julie Couillard took fresh swipes at ex-lover Maxime Bernier on Thursday, saying the former minister of Foreign Affairs lacked backbone and could not measure up to her biker fiancé, who was murdered in 1996.
In an interview published on Thursday in the glossy Quebec gossip magazine 7 Jours, Ms. Couillard spoke bitterly of the one-time rising political star now relegated to the backbenches after forgetting secret briefing papers at Ms. Couillard's home.
"I was in love with a dream, but the dream never materialized," she said. "I had misperceived Maxime. I saw him as a much different man than he was in reality. What disappointed me was that he didn't have the backbone that I believed he had."
The interview was conducted late on Monday, just as news broke that Mr. Bernier had resigned, and Ms. Couillard managed a brief note of sympathy. "In spite of the disappointment I feel toward Maxime, in spite of his lack of conscience, his lack of respect and his lack of support for me, I am not fundamentally malicious," she said. "It touches me that he will no longer be minister and that his political career is finished. I know he had great dreams in that regard."
She went on to say that the scandal of the forgotten documents was entirely Mr. Bernier's fault. Never during the roughly five weeks that they were at her suburban Montreal home did he try to recover them, she said. "I will tell all the details of this story if ever there is a public inquiry, as my lawyer recommended to me."
She said she feels Mr. Bernier capitalized on her looks to enhance his image during their relationship, which began when they met at a supper in April, 2007. "Maxime never loved me. Never," she said. "The day after his swearing-in at Rideau Hall, I understood that he had used me to cause a blast in the media."
She rejected the suggestion that it had been Mr. Bernier who was used, and that all she was after was money. "Everyone knows a Minister earns $250,000 a year. What's left after taxes: $125,000, $130,000? I am constantly with businessmen who make a lot of money. A Minister doesn't have any money."
She claimed that her business-development consulting firm suffered because she was dating a politician.
Mr. Bernier is just the latest of Ms. Couillard's ex-boyfriends to suffer an unhappy fate, and he should perhaps be thankful that all he lost was a Cabinet post. Ms. Couillard's first love, Gilles Giguère, was killed in a gangland execution in 2006, three months before the couple was to marry. Mr. Giguère was the right-hand man of loan-shark Robert Savard, a close friend of Hells Angels boss Maurice Boucher.
She later married and divorced Stéphane Sirois, a member of the Rockers, a Hells Angels puppet gang. He would became a Crown witness against his former associates. A third partner of Ms. Couillard, Robert Pépin, hung himself last May after becoming heavily indebted to loan sharks linked to the underworld.
Ms. Couillard told 7 Jours that she was 22 and naïve when she met Mr. Giguère. "I knew that he knew people who knew bikers, but I didn't take the bikers seriously. To me they were just tough guys who rode motorcycles. The real criminals were the mafia," she said.
When she met Mr. Sirois a year after Mr. Giguère's death, she told him he would have to leave the Rockers if he wanted to go out with her, which she says he did. But he was short of cash and became depressive, and she divorced him a year later. "I understood that I had been had: he knew that I was a businesswoman, that I had hard-won money," she said.
She said her relationship with Mr. Pépin was never serious. They met in 2004, when he was facing charges related to a truck high-jacking. He later pleaded guilty to possession of stolen goods. They split in 2005.
She said Mr. Bernier learned about her romantic past soon after they began dating. "I am a woman of integrity, so I told Maxime everything," she said. "He responded that I hadn't had an easy life . . . nothing more."
Ms. Couillard said she does not know whether she will be able to fall in love again.
"I have madly loved one person in my life, and it was Gilles [Giguère]," she said. "He was my greatest teacher. I did not have an easy childhood. Gilles was my father, my mother, my brother, my best friend, my lover, my business partner. Afterwards, the bar was so high, men have not made the grade."
The Toronto Star reported this week that Ms. Couillard had approached it seeking $50,000 in exchange for an exclusive interview, an offer the newspaper declined. A spokesman for 7 Jours said the magazine paid nothing for its interview. The magazine is published by Quebecor, which also owns the TVA network that landed Monday's exclusive television interview with Ms. Couillard.