Palino confirms carpark meeting with Brown's lover

Palino claims he fought a clean campaign based on issues and integrity. Photo / Michael Craig

John Palino has admitted meeting Bevan Chuang in a Mission Bay car park but denied any knowledge of her affair until it appeared in media two days later.

Palino issued a statement this afternoon saying he was the target of those seeking to divert attention away from Mayor Len Brown's sex scandal.

"Len and I fought a clean campaign, a campaign based on issues and a campaign based on integrity. To see things subsequently degenerate the way they have is extraordinarily disappointing."

He met Chuang "at her request" in relation to threatening texts we had both received from the same phone number.

Palino said: "Bevan has never disclosed to me the full nature of her relationship with the Mayor and only ever indicated she received persistent and unwanted propositions from the Mayor.

"On the basis of this understanding, I advised her not to go public and, as reported in the Herald, told her it would not be published anyway.

"Suggestions now that I, an entrepreneur, TV personality and political novice, am somehow orchestrating some grand right wing conspiracy to unseat Len after the election are so wrong and so absurd they do not stand up to even the remotest test of common sense.

"It makes no sense that I would lose an election, subsequently generate a scandal and make no attempt to benefit politically from it.

"It makes no sense that I would have associated with someone on my campaign that I knew was sleeping with the Mayor."