It seems that the day of reckoning is coming for Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, the fifth-biggest municipality in North America and Canada’s biggest and most influential city. The type of conservative populist who could wring electoral reward out of gaffes and controversies, Ford has been both beloved and despised for his loud, aggressive style. Ford’s run as a politician on the international stage has always had an absurd, I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-seeing quality.

Whether it was his penchant for getting publicly wasted, his insistence that women who contract HIV must be sleeping with bisexual men, or his inability to perform a five step drop without falling over like a character in a slapstick comedy, Ford always seemed a little too good (or bad) to be true.

But nothing could have prepared even Ford’s many critics and skeptics for the story first discussed by Gawker this past May: a video showing Ford smoking crack in a Toronto housing development. Gawker’s editor-in-chief, John Cook, traveled to Toronto and personally witnessed the video, for which his contact wanted to charge an exorbitant sum. The story provoked a conflicted response in the mainstream media, particularly the Toronto Star — after all these years, newspapers still struggle over whether and how to respond to stories broken under the looser ethical and legal standards employed by gossip- and rumor-oriented online publications.