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Today, we’re going to talk about one of the great epics in the annals of Canadian cancel culture—a story so foundational to the genre that it precedes the popularisation of the term “cancel culture” itself.

I am speaking of the campaign against Steven Galloway, a successful Vancouver-based Canadian writer who once sat at the very pinnacle of the Canadian literary establishment.

Back before his cancellation eleven years ago, Galloway had not only achieved international stardom with his famous 2008 novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo, but he also occupied the top spot in the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia, one of Canada’s top schools.

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

Then it all came crashing down in late 2015 following false rape allegations by a middle-aged student at his school with whom he’d once had a consensual affair—a woman whose name is well known if you look for it online, but whom I’m not allowed to identify on this podcast for legal reasons that will be explained.

As you’ll hear, the rape accusations at the heart of the smear campaign against Galloway were baseless. Even the woman who originally made those allegations no longer argues that they were ever true.

But back in the era of #MeToo and #BelieveWomen, the grandees at UBC acted as if Galloway had already been tried and convicted. The university put out a mass-broadcast message to students suggesting that Galloway was some kind of predator. He was suspended and then fired from his job. His close friends within the department—including a woman named Annabel Lyon, who quickly took over the top position in the department following Galloway’s ouster—not only participated in this despicable mobbing. They led the mob.

And they didn’t just stop at rape allegations. These ex-friends and ex-colleagues deputised one of Galloway’s former students, a naïve young novelist named Chelsea Rooney, to go out and dig up more dirt on Galloway.

Rooney seemed to have been conned into believing the rape accusations were true. At one point, she boasted to Annabel and the other ringleaders that she’d lined up more than a dozen other women willing to claim that they too had suffered at Galloway’s hands.

But then, in 2016, the case against Galloway fell apart. The university brought in a real investigator—a retired British Columbia Supreme Court judge named Mary Ellen Boyd. And she concluded that the rape claims against Galloway were unsubstantiated. Indeed, the stories didn’t even make sense.

Steven Galloway Defamation Trial: Payback Time

As the former UBC professor exacts apologies and legal settlements from his accusers, Brad Cran offers a personal account of the collateral damage that the decade-long saga inflicted on the Canadian literary community.

QuilletteBrad Cran

Boyd also concluded that the other claims against Galloway that Rooney had harvested didn’t even have anything to do with sexual assault—they were just random complaints about his personal behaviour on this or that occasion. The whole case against him was a farce.

But this realisation came too late. The fix had been in from the beginning. At one point, Galloway’s former colleagues had even notified authorities in Ohio, where he was visiting when news of the false rape claims first broke, which resulted in him being detained in a psych ward overnight. This was the level of derangement—and arguably malice—that seized the UBC creative writing department during its propaganda campaign against its outgoing boss.

This propaganda campaign didn’t just destroy Galloway’s life. It also destroyed the fabric of the Canadian literary community. That’s because anyone within “CanLit” who dared stand up for Galloway’s right to due process was viciously attacked on social media as a rape apologist by the community’s ideological enforcers.

Even Margaret Atwood, one of the most successful writers in Canadian history, was denounced in this manner when she stated the obvious fact that Steven Galloway deserved the same presumption of innocence that everyone is supposed to get in a free and democratic society.

To give you a flavour of the ideological climate at the time, I’m going to play for you an edited and abridged two-and-a-half-minute section of a 2019 podcast from an obscure British Columbia writer named Hannah McGregor, a self-described “left queer public intellectual” who once ran a show called Secret Feminist Agenda. Her speciality was hectoring white Canadian women (such as herself) for their ideological sins.

And just to set the context here, you’re going to hear McGregor talk about something called UBC Accountable, which was the organising platform that Atwood and other dissenting writers used when they demanded due process for Galloway. As you’ll hear, McGregor clearly regards the very idea of Galloway getting any kind of due process as a kind of insult against intersectional feminism. 

McGregor also goes after me, as this was seven years ago, and Quillette had just published the definitive analysis of the Galloway affair by a writer named Brad Cran, which, by the way, is still a great read. If you want to step away from this broadcast to get the complete background, the headline to Google for Brad’s article is A Literary Inquisition — How Steven Galloway Was Smeared as a Rapist.

Feel free to stop listening here, read Brad’s masterpiece, and then come back to the show later.

Okay? You’re back. Or you never left. Either way, let’s listen to podcaster Hannah McGregor summarise, in her own words, the ideologically approved take on the Galloway affair as she saw it in 2019.

Okay, so that was a long time ago. But it’s all front-page news again here in Canada because in 2018, Galloway sued the aforementioned Chelsea Rooney, Annabel Lyon and numerous other defendants for libelling him as a rapist.

And after eight long years of cynical legal manipulations by his false accusers—including the woman who once claimed she’d been raped—Galloway’s case is now being heard in a British Columbia court.

I should say that most of the original defendants, including both Lyon and Rooney, are not in court, because they threw in the towel and settled with Galloway before trial on what are believed to be substantial financial terms. In Rooney’s case, she just wrote a lengthy 11-paragraph public apology to Galloway, admitting how naïve she’d been to operate as an inquisitor on behalf of his false accuser. That apology appears alongside no fewer than ten others at the website GallowayApologies.com. As part of Galloway’s legal settlements with these defendants, these apologies will remain posted at that site for the next decade.

The trial isn’t expected to be over till mid-November. And given what Canadians heard from the likes of Hannah McGregor and the other ideological enforcers within CanLit back in the late 2010s, you might think that the courtroom would now be a beehive of feminist fervour, with supporters of Galloway’s accuser present to demonstrate their moral solidarity.

But as today’s guest explains, that’s not the case. All of those once-fervent Canadian literati have slunk away, anxious to avoid getting sued in their own right. And perhaps also because they’re deeply humiliated by the way they, too, participated in the smear campaign against an innocent writer.

And they should feel humiliated. The entire Canadian literary community should be humiliated, in fact—with the exception of those principled individuals, such as Margaret Atwood, Angie Abdou, and Brad Cran, who put their names—and kept their names—on the UBC Accountable manifesto.

Why I Hate Margaret Atwood | Quillette

And yet, this being the bizarro world of 2018, Atwood’s role in Rak’s University of Alberta event wasn’t as a feminist heroine.

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As for ordinary Canadians like me, who aren’t poets or novelists, but just ordinary people who love watching justice get served, it’s a wonderful thing to see Steven Galloway get his payback.

Which brings us to my guest this week, Amy Hamm, who has a front-row seat on this historic Vancouver trial. She’s been covering the proceedings for the Toronto-based newspaper, the National Post. Over the next half hour, I’ll be talking to her about what she’s seen and heard in the courtroom. And she’ll explain to you why I still haven’t told you the name of Galloway’s false accuser.

We’ll also talk a little bit about her own history of being cancelled. As some of you will know, journalism isn’t Amy’s first career. She was a nurse in British Columbia for many years, until she was put through a Kafkaesque regulatory ordeal for the crime of saying that men and women are biologically different—something that apparently is still considered hate speech on Canada’s left coast.

I’m Being Investigated by the British Columbia College...

In November 2020, the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives (BCCNM) informed me that I was under investigation for my “off-duty conduct.” My…

QuilletteAmy Eileen Hamm

Speaking of which, if you want to take a second background reading break to bring yourself up to speed on Amy’s history, the article to read is—where else?—right here at Quillette under the title, I’m Being Investigated by the British Columbia College of Nurses Because I Believe Biological Sex Is Real.

Without further ado, here’s my conversation with National Post writer and Quillette contributor Amy Hamm.