Payback Time for Steven Galloway

On 21 June 2018, I published an article at Quillette titled A Literary Inquisition—How Steven Galloway Was Smeared as a Rapist. It told the story of how Galloway—the bestselling Canadian author of The Cellist of Sarajevo, who then ran the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia (UBC)—had been condemned as a sex criminal by his UBC colleagues and a small group of former students in late 2015. I also described how his accusers continued to repeat these accusations publicly in 2016 and thereafter, even as the case against the former star professor fell apart. At the high point of the campus social panic, it was claimed that as many as nineteen other women had complaints against Galloway.

How Steven Galloway Was Smeared as a Rapist

However spurious these claims proved to be as a matter of a law, they were successful in tarring Galloway and his defenders on social media.

QuilletteBrad Cran

In fact, an investigation conducted by a former B.C. Supreme Court justice found that the only serious allegations against him originated with one woman: a middle-aged student in the Creative Writing program identified in court documents as “A.B.,” with whom Galloway once had a consensual affair. The investigator described these allegations as unsubstantiated.

Notwithstanding these findings, UBC found a pretext to fire Galloway anyway (more on this below). But even before any investigation was commissioned, the university disgraced itself by inviting the public to view Galloway as a menace to women.

A (since deleted) 18 November 2015 UBC memo announcing his suspension, written by Dean of Arts Gage Averill, indicated that Galloway was the subject of “serious allegations,” while giving no hint of what they were. But the very fact that the school was putting out a public alert suggested it was something dangerous.

Averill added that UBC’s priority was “attending to the safety, health, and well-being of all members of our community,” an ominous reference that wasn’t lost on the local media.

Since 2018, Galloway has been fighting to win back his reputation through legal channels. Several defendants have chosen to settle, and nine have published apologies, which are catalogued at gallowayapologies.com. This week, Galloway’s defamation case against four others—including A.B. herself—began in B.C. Supreme Court. It’s a remarkable denouement for the legion of literary figures who not only imagined that Galloway was a rapist, but also proved willing to tear the Canadian writing community apart in a bid to punish anyone who dared suggest otherwise.

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QuilletteJonathan Kay

Two weeks before my 2018 article ran, an arbitrator had ordered UBC to pay Galloway C$167,000 in damages for violating his privacy and harming his reputation. The writer A.H. Reaume, who by then had emerged as a mid-level ideological enforcer in the collective CanLit campaign against A.B.’s doubters, responded to this development by tweeting, “Some people will take today’s news as proof of something. I won’t. I hope you won’t either. I believe women.”

Then she added, “If anyone in Vancouver needs a safe place to digest this news, DM me. I will organise something at my place this weekend if there is a need.”

I quote Reaume here not because there was anything exceptional about her comment, but rather because it was typical of the sentiment being expressed by a certain kind of ideologically orthodox late-2010s CanLit Twitter activist: Every step Galloway took to restore his rights and reputation was greeted as a collective trauma inflicted on womankind. When none other than Margaret Atwood added her voice to those seeking due process for Galloway, she was reviled as a “bad feminist.”

This is the overheated milieu into which my 2018 Quillette article landed. While it was greeted with sullen hostility within the tiny fishbowl of CanLit, it went viral among ordinary readers—not only in Canada, but in other parts of the English-speaking world. The backlash against this kind of “cancel-culture” mob was just picking up steam at the time, and readers were both fascinated and horrified by this Salem-witch-trials-like story of a celebrated world-class Canadian writer suddenly being denounced as a dangerous rapist by an entire national literary community.

Crucially, I reported in detail on the otherwise confidential investigation conducted by the aforementioned former B.C. Supreme Court judge, Mary Ellen Boyd. Her evaluation of Galloway’s accusers, which hadn’t yet been made public, was scathing—especially in regard to the confidante of A.B. who was officially deputised by the university administration to dig up dirt on Galloway, a first-time novelist named Chelsea Rooney.

Rooney’s name is now in the news again after all these years, as she’s just published a detailed apology to Galloway. This was done as part of the legal settlement of his claims against her, along with what Galloway calls a “very substantial cash settlement.”

Boyd did make one negative finding against Galloway in her 2016 report: that he had breached UBC’s policies on discrimination and harassment. She concluded that over several months in late 2010 and early 2011, before he and A.B. commenced their affair, Galloway had made “increasingly inappropriate sexual comments and advances” toward A.B., who was then an undergraduate he taught and advised.

A.B. hadn’t objected at the time. And UBC had no blanket policy forbidding professors from dating students. But Boyd classified the conduct as unwelcome nonetheless, attributing A.B.’s silence to the power differential between professor and student. That, she ruled, was sexual harassment under the school’s policy.

However, the applicable UBC policy requires complaints to be made within a year; whereas A.B.’s came more than four years after the conduct ended. UBC simply waived the deadline for A.B.—and, while they were at it, for every one of the ancillary complainants whom Rooney was trying to recruit.

Rooney’s original claim that she’d found nineteen people to step forward with damning allegations proved to be nonsense. Only eight individuals came forward with complaints. And Boyd determined that none of these had anything to do with alleged sexual harassment or assault. These people had just taken the opportunity to vent about Galloway allegedly being rude or dismissive.

If you’re thinking that Boyd’s findings didn’t give UBC the grounds they needed to fire Galloway, you’d be right. But by the time UBC officials terminated him, they’d conducted a second process. Having evidently been unsatisfied with Boyd’s largely exculpatory conclusions, they decided that the follow-up would weigh allegations beyond those Boyd had considered.

A month after my article ran, Galloway published his own account of the campaign he’d endured in the National Post, a Toronto-based newspaper. Shortly thereafter, in October 2018, he commenced the defamation suit that, following eight years of stalling tactics from the defendants, began being heard in court on Monday. (The proceedings are open. And yes, I’ll be in attendance.)

UBC responded to these 2018 developments with a statement claiming that “the faculty and staff charged with management of this matter were professional and principled in all of their dealings and were guided throughout by the relevant policies and prescribed processes.”

As readers will learn from the material below, this description was farcically inaccurate. And as public relations go, it backfired: The university was later ordered by an arbitrator to pay a further $75,000 over that statement.

Back in 2018, I’d hoped that my Quillette coverage would help educate readers about what happened to Steven Galloway. And it did. But what I did not expect was how much the piece would change my own life.

Until this time, I’d been a member of the CanLit community in good standing. This included a stint as Poet Laureate of Vancouver, and twenty years of service as editor at a literary magazine called Geist. By airing CanLit’s dirty laundry to an international audience, I instantly became an apostate.

This was not completely unexpected. As my Toronto-based Quillette editor warned me before the article went live, “the mob might forgive you for being wrong—but never for being right.”

First out of the gate to attack me was Toronto-based media critic Jesse Brown, who is not a member of the CanLit community, but who then regularly used his podcast and Canadaland website to attack anyone in the chattering classes suspected of violating #MeToo shibboleths. At the time, this was a big part of his brand.

As Quillette podcast listeners will know, Brown has since become something of a progressive apostate in his own right, thanks to the antisemitism he’s observed—and had the courage to denounce—among hardcore leftists. He’s a changed man. But at the time, Brown was as dogmatic as they come. And he had a prominent and powerful place in the world of Canadian online social-justice rabble-rousing.

A Candid Conversation with Canadaland’s Jesse Brown

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QuilletteQuillette

After my article appeared, Brown took to Twitter, as it then was called, to attack not only me but that aforementioned Toronto-based editor, as well as Quillette publisher Claire Lehmann. He accused us of “malice.”

“What malice?” Lehmann asked in a reply. Brown answered that “the malice is demonstrable” on the basis that Quillette had hired “a reporter”—that’s me—“who had a preconceived notion of the story before he began investigating.” Brown claimed that I’d falsely presented Galloway’s accusers as “a group of vindictive, destructive women” abetted by “a weak, indifferent UBC.”

“To be very clear,” Brown tweeted at Lehmann, “your reporter demonstrated malice. Your editor, total incompetence. You? Depends what you knew. You may have been oblivious or misled. I do wonder what you’ll do now, now that you know all about it.”

Quillette, Brown claimed, was duty-bound to retract my article and apologise to the people it purportedly harmed, with Galloway’s former student Chelsea Rooney getting pride of place at the top of the list—on the basis that I’d falsely presented her as a “mastermind” of Galloway’s demise.

The day before, Brown had said that Canadaland would retract its own journalism if it ever “botched” a story “this badly.”

“Please hold me to this,” he added, to demonstrate his sincerity.

Which brings us to one of the purposes of this essay: Those last five quoted words help explain why I’m here.

On 27 June 2018, the same day Brown offered his audience that dramatic take on journalistic ethics, he took his case to Canadaland’s Short Cuts podcast. The episode, titled The Aesthetics of Rigour, was billed this way: “We read the Steven Galloway ‘article’ in Quillette so you don’t have to; turns out there may have been a slight conflict of interest.”

But a few minutes in, Brown’s co-host, Justin Ling, admitted he hadn’t actually read my piece. “I sure tried to read some of it,” he said. When Brown complained that I hadn’t disclosed my affiliation with the story until “8,300 words into it,” Ling replied, “I didn’t get there.” (This was a reference to my work with a group called UBC Accountable, described in more detail below.)

Brown then complained that while he would have liked to ignore my article, it had picked up too many prominent endorsements. David Brooks of The New York Times, he noted sourly, had been one of those who’d retweeted it.

Unlike Rooney and the other CanLit personalities who’ve been forced to face the music through the legal process, Brown wasn’t dumb enough to call Galloway a rapist. In fact, he explicitly admitted that he didn’t know whether Galloway had raped anyone.

But then he added that he still didn’t “really have a problem with this guy getting fired.”

“I am not of the opinion that some collateral damage or some casualties are acceptable,” he added. “I don’t think it’s okay if one innocent person gets called out who did nothing. But Steven Galloway is the wrong poster boy.”

Galloway, who’s become a friend since this ordeal began, later told me that this podcast episode was what tipped the balance in his decision to commence litigation. In October 2018, several months after Brown and Ling aired their peevish gabfest about how Galloway seemed “fireable,” due process be damned, Galloway sued 24 defendants for defamation. Some were later dropped from the case, others have settled, and nine have had their apologies to him memorialised for the next decade at gallowayapologies.com. As noted above, four others, including A.B. herself, go to trial this week.

When the lawsuit was first announced, CanLit pronounced itself (once again) collectively traumatised. Someone started a GoFundMe for the defendants, which raised nearly C$100,000, while others went grassroots, held a fundraiser dance party, and sold anti-Galloway T-shirts and rape-themed tote bags. There was even a dinner party where supporters got together to make gift baskets for the defendants, containing scented candles, chocolates, and potpourri.

Alas, I didn’t receive any swag. Instead, the supporters wrote letters to demand that I be removed from whatever positions I held within the Canadian literary firmament.

My publisher, Arsenal Pulp Press, told me my books were out of print. When I inquired about why they weren’t listed on the website, I was told it was due to a technical glitch—one that wouldn’t be fixed.

I was also removed from the editorial board of Geist. When I asked why, I was told there was no reason; and that no, they hadn’t received any complaints about me. I didn’t believe them, so I pursued the matter through British Columbia’s Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, and eventually litigated the matter.

That is how I discovered the magazine had received a complaint from a former student of Galloway’s, who said that being associated with me “in any way, shape or form” was uncomfortable.

Geist’s editor-in-chief, one AnnMarie MacKinnon, replied to say that the matter had been “nagging at me for a while, too,” and that she’d had “quite of a visceral reaction” [sic] to my name on the masthead.

She told the correspondent that she’d be removing me from the next issue. And she did. In 2021, Geist went further and removed all of my past writing from its website. Last year, after I sued for breach of contract, we settled. My work has been restored.

Resolution In Geist Dispute

My dispute with Geist Magazine comes to an end

Truth & ConsequencesBrad Cran

Then one day I was walking my dog, trying to think of an excuse that would get me out of appearing at a local literary festival I’d been invited to a year before, when my phone rang. It was a festival organiser, informing me that they’d received multiple complaints about me and so my invitation was rescinded.

I told them two things. The first was that I was (suddenly!) looking forward to the event and would be there come hell or high water. The second was that I wanted to see the complaints. After my friend Hal Wake, the late former artistic director of the Vancouver Writers Fest, threatened to pull out if I was disinvited, they backtracked on barring me, but refused to give me copies of the complaints. So I went back to court and got those, too.

There were three. A writer and CanLit #MeToo stalwart named Dina Del Bucchia, who now teaches in UBC’s School of Creative Writing, wrote that my appearance made her feel unsafe, and that misogynists and serial online harassers don’t deserve a platform. Sierra Skye Gemma, one of the various ancillary complainants whose allegations against Galloway were dismissed by the investigator, wrote that my “lies and attacks on women writers” were “a widely known fact.” Lastly, Andrea MacPherson, a professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, pulled out of her own event because she could not appear at a festival with someone “who has silenced and bullied the voices of women who have made complaints of sexual assault.”

In 2023, Gemma unequivocally retracted what she called her “false and defamatory allegations” about me, and apologised. “My conduct was reckless,” she (accurately) wrote, acknowledging that I “had a right to call for due process.”

I wasn’t the only CanLit figure who wanted to exercise that right: In 2016, more than 90 Canadian writers signed an open letter that I helped organise under the header UBC Accountable, asking for due process for Galloway.

In 2018, the late novelist Steven Heighton spoke at his alma mater, Queen’s University. When the Creative Writing program posted about the talk on Facebook, Erin Flegg, one of the ancillary complainants against Galloway (also dismissed), objected to Queen’s hosting “a writer whose name is still on the UBC Accountable letter,” and asked in McCarthyite fashion that the program host no one who’d signed it. A program organiser named Carolyn Smart replied that she would “act upon it.”

The playwright Carmen Aguirre, a survivor of sexual assault at the hands of one of Canada’s most notorious serial rapists, defended due process for Galloway in an op-ed. This aroused the ire of Keith Maillard—Galloway’s former mentor at UBC, who had by this time turned himself into an especially febrile leader of the anti-Galloway faction. Maillard called the article “a nasty bit of self-righteous agit-prop that would fit easily into an MRA [Men’s Rights Activist] site.” (Galloway sued him, too, and Maillard settled.)

When I surveyed the UBC Accountable signatories in 2022, nearly two-thirds reported receiving hateful or threatening messages, and more than half believed they had been blacklisted, cancelled, or deplatformed.

All of this to say that a lot of people did not appreciate my article on Steven Galloway. Nor did this crowd appreciate anyone, anywhere arguing that he should enjoy the same presumption of innocence owed to any ordinary person accused of a terrible crime in a liberal democracy. The fact that their position was not only fundamentally illiberal, but also factually untenable in light of the Boyd investigation only made them more bitter, and more desperate to shut up anyone suspected of dissent.

Over time, the whole issue had become an ideological loyalty test for a certain kind of aspiring writer who trades in the precarious CanLit economy of blurbs, panel appearances, sessional teaching gigs, masthead name-checks, and government writing grants. For young writers in particular, being seen as offside on the Galloway issue was a potential career-ender (or so it was believed).

Galloway’s biggest early win came against a legal application, funded by that GoFundMe money, to have his suit thrown out under British Columbia’s anti-SLAPP law, a statute designed to protect legitimate public debate from censorious lawsuits.

It was 2021, three years into the ordeal. Twelve defendants, A.B. and Rooney among them, argued that Galloway’s lawsuit was really about silencing people who come forward with allegations of sexual violence. (An article that appeared on Brown’s Canadaland website quoted an academic who claimed that if Galloway won on this issue—which he did—“it’s going to send a clear message to sexual assault complainants about whether or not they should talk to anyone, ever.”)

Galloway became an ideological loyalty test for a certain kind of aspiring writer who trades in the precarious CanLit economy of blurbs, panel appearances, teaching gigs, masthead name-checks, and grants. Being offside on the issue was seen as a potential career-ender.

The irony was hard to miss. The anti-Galloway side had spent years trying to shut down any public questioning of the case—branding dissenters as rape apologists, pressing festivals and magazines to create blacklists. Now they argued that it was Galloway who was trying to silence them.

Thankfully, the B.C. Supreme Court rejected most of the application. So did the B.C. Court of Appeal. The Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear the case.

The crowd-sourced cash was gone. But the anti-SLAPP motions helped delay the trial for more than seven years. In the process, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Elaine Adair found grounds to believe that two of Galloway’s former UBC colleagues—Maillard and Annabel Lyon, who became acting co-chair of the program after Galloway’s suspension—had been reckless enough “to meet the legal test for malice,” and that Rooney, Jesse Brown’s gold standard for UBC truth-telling, “was motivated by spite and ill-will toward Mr. Galloway.”

Adair wrote that when A.B. had spoken to Maillard and Lyon about her lurid allegations against Galloway, the pair had “asked A.B. no questions. They simply accepted her version of events as accurate, and relied on what she told and provided to them as supporting and proving what she claimed to have happened.”

Rooney, Adair wrote, “accepted A.B.’s reports at face value as true, and never asked any questions before communicating [A.B.’s allegations] to more than a dozen people.”

On this score, I will pause to note that Brown did have one valid bone to pick with my 2018 article—even if it’s inconsequential in regard to the overall scandal. Eight years ago, I wrote that Rooney had been the first person to communicate the rape allegations within the UBC community in late 2015. Brown highlighted Rooney’s complaint that this detail wasn’t correct: Before Rooney took the lead in spreading the word and trying to drum up ancillary allegations, A.B. herself approached her thesis supervisor and then, the next day, wrote an email to UBC president Martha Piper. Following that, however, the two collaborated actively to spread the allegations: Adair found that A.B. actively encouraged Rooney to contact others, even supplying her with names; and that Rooney passed A.B.’s allegations to more than a dozen people on a no-questions-asked basis. Boyd similarly reported that Rooney was the one “spearheading the gathering of evidence” from the other complainants.

Much of the defamatory material that Galloway sued over had been communicated on Twitter. “There is no public interest in promoting the careless or reckless use of Twitter,” Adair declared. “Rather, in my view, the public interest lies in promoting the opposite.”

Adair also found that A.B. had made up a story to the effect that a CBC documentary crew was interested in her allegations, and that the CBC’s lawyers had scrutinised her claims and accepted them as true. This false information was presented to the faculty at a crucial November 2015 meeting. Adair called the stunt “a tissue of lies” and “a deliberate fabrication” meant to build a case against Galloway.

(For her part, A.B. admitted under cross-examination that the statement was not true, but said she didn’t regret communicating it because she “needed to keep myself alive and safe.”)

Perhaps the biggest bombshell to come out of the pretrial application was that in the summer of 2015, before there was any talk of rape, Maillard (who was also A.B.’s thesis advisor) and Lyon (A.B.’s second thesis reader) signed off on her thesis even though it was incomplete, thereby allowing A.B. to receive a UBC Master of Fine Arts degree.

Under cross-examination, Lyon confessed to signing off despite her clear understanding that the thesis was incomplete. Later that day, Maillard (who shares a lawyer with Lyon but was not privy to Lyon’s disclosure) denied doing so under cross-examination. Lyon testified that she was reluctant to agree with this course of action, but Maillard convinced her.

In her decision, Adair accepted Lyon’s account: “A.B. had not yet finished her thesis,” she wrote, and “Professor Maillard persuaded Professor Lyon to accept what A.B. had produced, so as to allow A.B. to graduate.”

“He [Maillard] asked for a phone call,” Lyon said, “and we talked on the phone and he basically said, you know, she needs to graduate. She needs to be finished.”

Lyon—who earns more than $200,000 per year as director of UBC’s School of Creative Writing—said she pushed back to the extent that she could, but that she relented to Maillard out of deference and respect for his seniority. When asked if this compromised her in regard to the events that would follow, Lyon said that she was not proud of what she’d done, but that she wasn’t compromised because she’d disclosed these details to the Dean of Arts.

At the time, that dean was Gage Averill, who himself played a key role in setting in motion the destruction of Galloway’s life. Much as Lyon has since been promoted to UBC’s Creative Writing director, Averill has since been promoted to a $459,000-per-year job as provost. (Lyon and Maillard both settled with Galloway last month under confidential terms.)

This past spring, A.B. asked the court to excuse her from examination for discovery, and to guarantee that doing so would carry no legal consequences; on the grounds that attending might cause her to commit suicide. She did not file an affidavit of her own, relying instead on reports from experts and treating clinicians.

In June, the trial judge, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Neena Sharma, dismissed the application. She found the expert evidence largely inadmissible, describing one report as “characterized by bias and advocacy,” and concluded that A.B. had not established “that her attendance at examination for discovery represents an unacceptably elevated risk of suicide.” Sharma ordered substantial accommodations: the examination could take place over Zoom, would last no more than two hours, and would allow frequent breaks and a support person at her side.

In the end, A.B. decided not to attend anyway. (At the end of the current trial, the judge will hear Galloway’s application to have her held in contempt of court for not attending discovery.)

A.B. later repeated the claim that she was at risk of suicide. Meanwhile, the two lawyers who’d been representing her withdrew from the case. Crucially, she then abandoned her defence of justification—i.e., the argument that her allegations were actually true.

A.B. remains a defendant, and will be represented in court by a (new) lawyer. But she will not take the stand to tell her story, as the only defence that she hasn’t withdrawn is the technical claim that some of Galloway’s claims were filed too late. Beyond that, the only argument her lawyer is expected to offer will go to the calculation of damages.

A.B.’s decision to abandon a justification defence sawed the branch out from under the other defendants, who suddenly were in the awkward position of having to explain why they’d repeated outrageous allegations that even the original source wasn’t prepared to defend. This helps explain why six of them—Chelsea Rooney among them—finalised settlements with Galloway on the eve of trial.

In November 2016, famed Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood tweeted, in regard to Galloway’s case, that “no one can be asked to believe or not believe a package of unknown things.” Rooney responded in a since-deleted tweet: “I…strongly disagree. We can be asked to believe a person who reports sexual assault. And we can believe her. And we do.”

In my 2018 Quillette article, I called that exchange “a debate between a writer who follows the evidence, and another who makes ignoring it a point of principle.”

In 2021, Justice Adair put it in legal terms during the anti-SLAPP proceedings. Rooney’s statements, she wrote, “were not about truth-seeking, or promoting truth-seeking. Rather, Ms. Rooney’s motivations were about confirming and vindicating her own very bad opinions about Mr. Galloway.”

It’s taken Rooney more than a full decade, but she’s now come around to this truth. In her apology to Galloway, she writes:

My understanding of, and approach to, the “believe women” movement was misguided. I should have understood that supporting people who come forward about sexual violence does not require, and cannot justify, acting in ways that may lead others to conclude that unproven allegations are true or failing to give the person accused a fair opportunity to be heard and considered.

She also concedes what my 2018 article reported: that she gathered complaints against Galloway at the request of UBC, A.B., Maillard, and Lyon. And she is blunt about why:

In soliciting these complaints, I was attempting to build a case against Mr. Galloway—the complaints were solicited with the intention of bolstering the credibility of A.B.’s allegations and building other allegations against Mr. Galloway.

You can read Rooney’s full apology, along with apologies from Brit Bachmann, Kiera Anderson, Marcelle Kosman, Ari Rombough, and Theresa Smalec, and earlier ones from Emily Kellogg, Wendel Schwab, and Alasdair Rees, at gallowayapologies.com.

Another member of this group, Marcelle Kosman, ran for Edmonton public school trustee last year under the slogan “Choose a champion of fairness and transparency.” (Her apology appears on the site under the name “Marcel,” an alternate name she apparently sometimes uses when doing her side-hustle podcast about witches.)

Which gets us back to Brown, who told us back in 2018 that if he ever botched a story in dramatic fashion, he’d retract it and apologise to the people he’d harmed.

That’s exactly what Rooney just did (albeit with some inducement from the legal process). Now it’s Brown’s turn.

“Please hold me to this,” Brown exhorted, after setting out his principled journalistic credo.

And so here I am, Jesse, holding you to your word, just as you asked.

Go ahead. We’re all waiting.