Ex-candidate receives ‘overwhelming’ support

When Brittany Goodwin sets up her lights and camera in her Halifax condo for a boudoir photoshoot, she says she wants to make her clients feel comfortable in their own skin.

She’ll often bring in a makeup artist as well as a hair stylist to get her clients “all dolled up” for the occasion.

“The whole experience is just a matter of feeling good. You come in, you get glammed up, you’re in front of a camera and you feel like a model for a day,” Goodwin said. “I’ve had women cry and just be so taken by emotion and how amazing they feel about themselves and seeing themselves in that light. It’s really, really something.”

It’s a style of photography that Goodwin calls “empowering,” so to hear that a young Liberal hopeful’s candidacy allegedly ended this week over the discovery that she showed off her skin in boudoir photos and online platforms such as Instagram, Tumblr and Onlyfans, she said she was taken aback.

“It’s kind of ironic to me that we live in a province where boudoir photos are less accepted than DUIS,” Goodwin said, referring to current Premier Iain Rankin’s impaired driving charges from the 2000s. “It’s 2021 and we’re very stuck in an old mindset, where women can’t be comfortable with their bodies or women shouldn’t sexualize their bodies.”

Goodwin is just one of a growing chorus of people who have shown their support for Robyn Ingraham, the former Dartmouth South candidate for Nova Scotia’s Liberal Party, in recent days.

On Sunday, just two days after announcing she was running for the Liberals, Ingraham said on social media that she was dropping out of the race because she realized the “time, commitment and intensity of a campaign and the impact it will have on my mental health.”

In a letter to Rankin, which she posted online Wednesday, Ingraham alleged that it was actually the party that told her to step down and blame her mental health as the reason after her boudoir photos and Onlyfans presence became known to the public.

“The misogynistic behaviour from those berating me online for showing off my body, something I have every right to be proud of is not tolerable,” she wrote, in part. “I was told you had my back.”

The letter has racked up hundreds of likes and comments on social media and Ingraham said she’s “wildly overwhelmed” by the support she’s received from her fellow Nova Scotians.

“I’ve had a lot of people message me telling me, ‘Go you,’ and I am getting a lot of trolls as well, so that kind of sucks, but honestly everyone’s entitled to their opinion, so I can’t say much about that,” she said.

Speaking to reporters Thursday, Rankin said he would like to speak to Ingraham so that he can understand what changed from her first statement to her second, adding, “it’s unfortunate she feels the way she does and nobody should feel that way.”

“All I can say is that the Liberal party embraces people from all backgrounds ... I think you see that with almost 40 per cent women on our slate of candidates. I am going to continue to advocate for equity and diversity, and I will continue to try to find candidates of different backgrounds and life experiences,” he added.

As someone who struggles with her body image and mental health, has body dysmorphia and an eating disorder, Ingraham said showing off her skin is a way for her to feel empowered.

“I grew up not liking my body, I have never liked my body, I’ve had people tell me that I should,” she said. “And once I started to get tattoos and I started to actually like my body again, I felt like it was a whole new world and being able to post my photos and having people say, ‘Oh, I like your artwork,’ or, ‘Good for you,’ that makes me feel better about myself and my body image and it helps me a lot with my mental illness.”

She said she hopes the lesson that will come from her experience is that people shouldn’t be so quick to judge others.

“This isn’t something that I wanted to blow up really big, but it wasn’t fair and I needed the people of the province, the women and the sex workers to know that someone is out here trying to fight for them, if they can’t fight for themselves,” Ingraham said. “I may have taken photos of my body and some people might not agree with stuff like that, but I feel I’m a pretty valuable individual who can share experiences and I think that it was pretty unfair that people just attacked me for one part of my life that has nothing to do with what I was just trying to do with the party.”