Rachel Marsden: Fox's Ann Coulter 2.0 | Salon News

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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/29/marsden/


Fox's Ann Coulter 2.0

Conserva-babe and star-in-the-making Rachel Marsden has a, um, colorful past. What was Fox thinking?

By Rebecca Traister

March 29, 2007

Marsden grew up in a suburb of Vancouver. Her father, Claude, was a high school teacher who in 2000 had his teaching license suspended after admitting to an inappropriate relationship with a 16-year-old student. Marsden, in the bio on her Web site, describes growing up listening to Canadian talk-radio bulldog Jack Webster. "Listening to these radio shows during visits to grandma's house ignited a lifelong passion," writes Marsden, adding, "Rachel finds it cute when liberals think they have an original argument. Chances are she heard it for the first time at the age of 7." Marsden also writes that as a "former national level competitive swimmer who still holds records in BC, [she] lives for challenges and thrives on competition."

It was swimming that led Marsden to meet Liam Donnelly at the Westminster Club where they both swam in 1990, when she was 15 and he 22. Three years later she enrolled to study biology at the famously progressive, Utopian Simon Fraser University, where Donnelly was swim coach. In 1995, she accused Donnelly, who was not her coach, of sexual harassment and date rape, claiming that he repeatedly molested her over the course of a 16-month friendship/relationship. Donnelly claimed he was innocent, and on the advice of a lawyer, boycotted the university's investigation into Marsden's claims.

In 1997, SFU fired Donnelly. The university agreed to pay Marsden $12,000 to compensate her for injury to her feelings and the academic scholarship she lost during the case. It was reported that they denied her request to be part of the hiring process for a new swim coach.

Donnelly fired back, alleging that it was Marsden who had done the harassing. He handed over photos of the scantily clad student that he claimed she had slipped under his door, and released an e-mail she had sent him after the date of the alleged molestation that read in part, "I suggest that you just relax and let me undress you, touch you ... If you want, you can undo the garter and take off my stockings, take off my lace bra and underwear, and let your hands explore my body wherever they want to."