In 2019, Leslie Bradford-Scott’s mother handed her a binder containing a secret manuscript penned by her late father while he was in prison.
The only heirloom she still has of him, the 545-page and 175,000-word manuscript — dubbed the Liar’s Playbook — kickstarted her journey of sifting through fact and fiction to discover who her father really was.
Now, everything she’s learned has been packed into her debut memoir, The Liar’s Playbook: A Memoir of Family and Crime, to be published by Simon & Schuster on May 5, 2026.
“It’s a story about intergenerational trauma, the unreliability of memory, and what happens when the past refuses to stay buried,” says Bradford-Scott. “It wasn’t just a reconciliation with my dad. It was with everyone who failed to protect me, and with myself.”
Now living in Roseneath on the south shore of Rice Lake, Bradford-Scott is an award-winning entrepreneur who founded Walton Wood Farm in Bailieboro, a cheeky bath and body product brand she began in her laundry room in 2014 and sold off in 2023.
With her list of accomplishments — which includes a 2016 appearance on the CBC hit television show Dragons’ Den, earning her pilot’s license, and joining the U.S. Coast Guard — you wouldn’t know that Bradford-Scott had to overcome a lot to build herself up to where she is today.
Losing her brother to a drunk driver when she was 16 years old, leaving a toxic marriage, and raising her daughters on her own while selling cars on 100 per cent commission all followed Bradford-Scott’s atypical childhood.
When Bradford-Scott was 12 years old and living in Grimsby, she walked home from school one day to find police officers swarming the family home. Later that day, with no explanation and no questions allowed, her mother and her grandmother whisked her across the border to Florida.
Years later, she learned her father had been sentenced to 15 years in a maximum security prison for trafficking cocaine.
“I always thought my dad was a drug dealer,” she says. “I had heard mafia, I had heard organized crime, but all I knew was he went to prison.”
When Bradford-Scott’s mother handed her the manuscript six years after her father’s death, she knew it was “full of lies” and shoved the book in a drawer. She had been immersed in her business and didn’t have time to “put an excavator to my childhood trauma.”
“I blamed every problem in my life on him. I told myself that, because of the chaos and neglect of my childhood, I chose the wrong partner, stayed in toxic relationships, and never built the education or stability I needed,” she says. “My father wouldn’t let me go to university. He said I wasn’t smart enough, that only my sister was worth the investment. For years, I carried that verdict as if it were fact and built my life around it.”
“I told myself that if I’d had a loving dad, a loving mother, or if anyone had really shown up for me, my life would have been different,” she adds. “I wouldn’t be struggling. My children wouldn’t be struggling.”
But, when winter came around and she needed the hats and gloves that were tucked away in the drawer, she once again came face-to-face with the prison manuscript.
“I sat down, I opened the very first page and there was a dedication to my brother, and it said ‘Brad, I hope you find peace. There is none here. Love Dad,’ and I just lost it. I was a mess,” Bradford-Scott recalls. “I read it all in two days and, when I was done reading it, I thought, ‘Oh my God, was my dad a hero and not the villain?'”
Her father’s manuscript claimed that, when he was a politician in Hamilton running on a platform that he would clean up corruption, he was framed by a cop and that’s why the family was forced to flee Canada. When the family arrived in Florida, her father claimed, he had to become an informant for the CIA, FBI, and other government agencies or else his entire family would be sent to prison.
“I began this investigation and started a podcast with Meg Murphy (called Rewriting Dad) to try and find out what were lies and what was true because some of his memories overlapped (with mine), but others were not what happened. It completely contradicted my memories and then I thought, can I even trust myself? I didn’t think I could trust my own memories.”
Bradford-Scott started tracking down people named in the book and people from her own past and found out that “everyone had a different piece of the truth.”
“What was becoming clear to me was that, no, my father wasn’t the hero. My dad was worse than I thought. He was a worse criminal than I had ever imagined. The truth was more complicated than I expected.”
She recalls hearing different perspectives from close friends of her father and struggled to reconcile them with her own experiences.
“They painted a picture of a man who was inspiring, who made a difference in their life, and they said that their lives were fuller and richer and more adventurous and more meaningful because of their relationship with my dad,” she says. “I was trying to reconcile all the good they were telling me with this man who completely ignored me and was very cruel to me as a kid.”
Bradford-Scott credits Murphy (who she calls an “incredible human on every level”) for pushing her to write the memoir.
“She said ‘Leslie, this is not a story about your dad. This is a story about a daughter. This is a story about you.’ In the end, she was right.”
Bradford-Scott explains that, in thinking about the story as being about intergenerational trauma, she could be the “guardian” of future generations. She says she is already working on a follow-up memoir, in addition to writing her first novel.
“I’m there to say this is who we are, who we came from. This is the blood that runs through our veins and this is our inheritance and we have some traits that aren’t ideal,” she says. “I’ve inherited both positive and challenging traits from my father and learning to recognize them has been important.”
Woven between Bradford-Scott’s own insights and memories, including conversations with people she spoke to during her investigation, the memoir includes unedited excerpts from her father’s own manuscript.
“It’s very cliché to say that the truth sets you free — it doesn’t,” she says. “It actually creates a lot of downstream problems, but you get better at working those issues out, finding the upside, and building on that.”
A book launch for The Liar’s Playbook will be held on Sunday, May 3, with the location and details to be announced.
To preorder a copy of the book, or to get an invitation to the launch by subscribing to her newsletter, visit www.lesliebscott.com.
