Senator’s wife plans ‘to be big’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/10/2012 (4956 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — As her face flashed across television screens throughout the Saskatoon airport’s boarding area, Maygan Sensenberger slunk a little lower into her seat.

An aspiring actress and model, she’d always dreamed of being famous — but not like this. Strangers were snapping cellphone photos. Airports, once her favourite places, were suddenly less fun.

Sensenberger, 23, just wanted to get home to Ottawa after pleading guilty to causing a disturbance on an Air Canada flight she took in August with her husband, Liberal Sen. Rod Zimmer, 69.

But her sensational case — she was accused at one point of threatening to kill her husband — attracted intense media scrutiny and public interest.

“Are people sitting around me thinking I’m the crazy Air Canada lady?” Sensenberger said recently.

As a child, Sensenberger dreamed not of infamy, but of stardom. Nor did she imagine falling in love with a man four decades her senior.

The age difference drew stares from the day they met in Toronto four years ago. She was 19, working as a nanny in Barrie, Ont., out with her employers and their son for the day.

The Manitoba senator tried to strike up a conversation. Sensenberger said she was initially unimpressed and didn’t really know what a senator did.

But they exchanged cards, started dating and soon were confronting the reality they were more than friends.

“I was raised right by my parents; I don’t have daddy issues, my parents love me,’ ” she said. “He was raised right by his parents; he’s not a cradle robber or whatever the mean names they have… But after a while, we had to be, ‘It is what it is.’ “

Zimmer said more people should have a relationship as meaningful as theirs, he said.

“It’s just — I can’t explain it, except it’s magical,” he said.

They were on their way to Saskatoon for his mother’s interment the night of the fateful flight. Neither will discuss the details of what happened.

Witnesses said Zimmer was in medical distress and Sensenberger felt no one was giving him enough help.

Zimmer suggested the whole thing was his fault after he tried to convince her his health was fine.

“I said, ‘If you keep asking me, you’re going to give me a heart attack and kill me’ in a joke,” he said.

Sensenberger was charged with endangering the safety of an aircraft, uttering threats and causing a disturbance. The first two charges were eventually dropped and she was given a 12-month suspended sentence with probation after pleading guilty to the last.

Both say the Crown, the police and Air Canada overreacted out of fear they’d be accused of giving preferential treatment to a senator.

Sensenberger had been working on a plan to launch an acting and modelling career, but she said she doesn’t want to capitalize on her notoriety.

“They were telling me this is the time to get an agent, this is the time to ride the wave, and I was like, ‘This is not a wave. This is not something good. This is terrible,’ ” she said.

Sensenberger planned to lie low for a while, but she quickly got bored.

She started sending out head shots, and landed an acting role in a short independent film, then another.

The Air Canada incident might be what she is known for now, but it won’t be how she’s remembered, she said.

“I plan to be big,” she said. “It might take me 40 years, but I’m never going to stop.”

— The Canadian Press