S.L.’s Tale

On May 6th, 2021, McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario was hit with bombshell news. For more than a year, a 46-year-old psychology professor named Scott Watter had stood accused of sexually assaulting one of his department’s graduate students. But the full details were known only to police, senior university administrators, and the school’s external investigator. Now, the alleged victim was sharing her story with the public.

The 5,400-word exclusive report in Hamilton’s Spectator newspaper, written by reporter Katrina Clarke, was packed with details. According to “S.L.,” as the accuser would be referred to in court proceedings, Watter was a sexual predator who derived pleasure from watching his victims writhe in pain. S.L. told Clarke that the professor had brainwashed her, and plied her with alcohol, en route to imposing a months-long regime of sexual terror.

At times, S.L. claimed, Watter choked her till she blacked out, “put a pillow over my face and smothered me,” and twisted her nipples to the point of drawing blood.

This McMaster student alleges her former professor subjected her to physical, sexual and psychological abuse. Now, she’s speaking out

The complainant in a criminal case involving McMaster University professor Scott Watter is sharing her story publicly for the first time. Watter’s lawyer has said he ‘will be defending this matter fully and vigorously.’

TheSpec.comKatrina Clarke

In an especially macabre tale related by Clarke, Watter arrived at the home of S.L. and her girlfriend with a bottle of wine after being summoned on news that S.L. (who identifies as bisexual) had been cutting herself in the bathroom—whereupon, “he shut the [bathroom] door and allegedly assaulted [S.L.], touching her vagina and kissing her, [S.L.] says. Then he bandaged her cuts, she says. ‘I don’t know how much more f---ed up you can get, assaulting someone when they’re in a pool of their own blood,’ she said.”

And if the evolving narrative was to be believed, Watter wasn’t acting alone. Months after S.L. first approached McMaster’s Sexual Violence Prevention and Response Office in February 2020 with her initial accusations against Watter, she began channeling recovered memories indicating a wider sex ring within the school’s psychology department (known formally as Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, or PNB).

So did a second woman—whose name, like S.L.’s, hasn’t been made public, and whom I will refer to as “Becca.”

The newly accused cast of sex-ring conspirators included none other than S.L.’s long-term live-in girlfriend, “Alice,” who, like S.L., was also a PNB graduate student; and Watter’s own wife, McMaster psychology professor Karin Humphreys.

According to the converging narratives of S.L. and Becca, both Alice and Humphreys sought to lure victims into Watter’s clutches so as to satisfy their own voyeuristic desires. During the above-described episode featuring Watter sexually assaulting a bloodied S.L. in her bathroom, for instance, Alice supposedly dialed up Humphreys as it was happening, so that the two women could jointly revel in S.L.’s agonies.

There was also alleged to be at least one more male professor in the sex ring, a man who stood accused of taking turns with Watter in raping Becca while they all attended an academic conference.

However far-fetched these claims later seemed, influential members of the McMaster administration treated them as credible. At the height of the university’s sex-ring social panic, in the summer of 2020, no fewer than seven members of the PNB department had been made subject to investigations, some lasting almost a year. During such time, all but two of these “respondents” (as they were known under McMaster protocols) were banned from setting foot on campus or interacting electronically with students, colleagues, and even alumni.

Notwithstanding the confidentiality provisions contained in applicable university policies, administrators publicized details about the respondents that allowed their identities to be quickly deduced by members of the McMaster community. Administrators also circulated warning posters, complete with photos, advising selected recipients about what steps to take if these (apparently dangerous) men and women were spotted “on or around campus.”

The damage done to the reputations of the respondents, and to the PNB department as a whole, was enormous. As well, day-to-day departmental operations were severely disrupted, as the suspended professors comprised almost 10 percent of core PNB faculty.

Ten in-session undergraduate and graduate courses suddenly had no professor. Eleven PNB graduate students and 50 undergraduates—“stranded” scholars, as they came to be described—immediately lost access to their supervisors, casting their thesis work, study projects, and, in some cases, funding, into limbo. A recently retired professor, Daphne Maurer, was brought out of retirement just to manage the resulting chaos.

Meanwhile, suspicions multiplied. One of the formally investigated individuals was an older woman who’d loyally served the PNB department as a rank-and-file front-line staff member for more than three decades. According to sources within the department, she’s reported to have been accused of playfully patting (or possibly pinching) a male graduate student on his behind at a 2019 social event.

The administration deployed campus security in search of alcohol, marijuana, and other suspected instruments of seduction that might be hidden in the offices of suspended academics. One of the suspected sex-ring members spent days trying to figure out how to reclaim an office plant. Another returned to campus to find that everything in his desk had been thrown into a grocery bag.

And then, the whole sex-ring narrative fell apart.