Canadian broadcaster sacks star Jian Ghomeshi over claims of abusive sex

In Canada, Jian Ghomeshi was a broadcasting hero. In an age when the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) has been beset by troubles, Ghomeshi's cultural interview show was one of few success stories. He was, perhaps, Canadian radio's brightest star.

Until now, because on Sunday, the CBC said Ghomeshi would no longer be working for the corporation, He had been fired because of "information" it received.

The nature of that information soon became clear. On Sunday evening, Ghomeshi published a long, emotional post to his Facebook page. In it, he said he was fired because of a campaign of false allegations, that he said were pursued by a jilted ex-girlfriend, intended to paint his enthusiasm for consensual sadomasochistic sex as a pattern of abuse.

The Facebook post went viral. It has so far been "liked" by more than 100,000 people, and has thousands of messages of support. But it warned of "salacious" revelations in the days to follow, claiming they would be nothing but "lies", and said that one newspaper had already investigated the story and not deemed it worthy of printing.

That paper was the Toronto Star. On Sunday night it posted the results of its previously unpublished investigation, portraying the story in a different light. It revealed testimony of three women, all of whom claimed that instead of engaging in consensual, Fifty Shades of Grey-style imaginative sex, Ghomeshi was in fact a violent abuser.

By the time of publication on Monday, Ghomeshi had not yet filed the lawsuit that he threatened in his Facebook post, in which he claimed to be the victim of a campaign of harassment from a former lover.

"About two years ago I started seeing a woman in her late 20s," he wrote. "We discussed our interests at length before engaging in rough sex. We talked about using safe words and regularly checked in with each other about our comfort levels."