https://quillette.com/2018/06/21/a-lite ... collapsed/
Chelsea Rooney, formerly a student in UBC’s Creative Writing Department, came forward with the shocking claim that Galloway, who had served as the UBC Creative Writing Chair since 2013, had violently raped an unnamed student four years earlier. Rooney would also make the stunning claim that she was able to bring forth no fewer than 19 other former or current UBC students who also alleged abusive behavior at Galloway’s hands.
“I saw Steven called a rapist,” said a Creative Writing instructor who still works within the department, and spoke to me on condition that they remain anonymous. “I saw anyone who dared defend him called a rape apologist. I’ve watched the department go from a vibrant, welcoming place to a place full of cautiousness and fear and closed doors.”
Annabel reassured him that they had been friends for 15 years (which was true), and that everything would be okay (which was not).
The trio repeatedly asked him if he was suicidal. Galloway told them he was not, joking that he was way too much of a coward to kill himself. His focus was on catching a plane in a few hours and meeting his partner in Toronto. Someone from UBC would also contact MC to tell her to not sleep at home in case Galloway turned up in Toronto to kill her. While he was speaking to them, one of the three people on the other end of the call phoned the police in Ohio.
Two officers showed up at Galloway’s hotel room in Ohio. After interviewing him, one attending officer contacted Lyon, who (according to the police report) told him Galloway was suicidal, manipulative, and would tell them anything to get what he wanted. The responding officer removed Galloway from his hotel in handcuffs, seated him in the back of a squad car and transported him to the psychiatric ward of Miami Valley Hospital where he was strip searched and incarcerated on a 72 hour involuntary psychiatric remand known as a pink slip.
Even by this time, none of the allegations against Galloway had been spelled out. All that was known—even internally—emerged from the series of lurid accusations from MC that were filtered through Rooney, and then again through an inner circle of faculty members who, conveniently, had just taken leadership of the department.
In a stunning breach of protocol and fairness, the Office of Equity and Inclusion conscripted Rooney—MC’s own spokesperson—to gather additional evidence of complaints against Galloway. UBC even provided Rooney—who was an ex-student with no official standing at the university— with a letter on Office of Equity and Inclusion letterhead, stating to Rooney’s recipients: “You are receiving this letter from me because the person delivering it to you thinks you may have a complaint against Professor Steven Galloway. As you are likely aware, the University is investigating a complaint against Professor Galloway.”
Beyond mandating a university-approved fishing expedition for accusations against Galloway—conducted by a complete amateur, with no apparent experience or expertise in the field of investigations, who already had announced her unwavering belief in MC’s accusations—the letter went further, actually encouraging recipients to take action on their own initiative: “Counseling Services can also provide information on options for filing a complaint and can facilitate the process should you choose to make a complaint.”
When it became clear that Boyd’s investigation wasn’t going to rubber-stamp the case against Galloway, his critics and accusers—who by now had become a well organized force on social media—simply bypassed official channels, and continued to prosecute Galloway on Twitter and Facebook. They also collectively attacked anyone who refused to accept the black-and-white narrative of MC as truth-telling sexual abuse survivor, and Galloway as sadistic villain. Even Boyd was accused of colluding with UBC to uphold the power structures of patriarchy.
But Boyd makes for a strange target. She is one of the most accomplished female jurists in B.C. history. And in cases where judges must be educated on the intersection of law and sex, Boyd would seem more likely to give lessons than receive them. In one 2001 B.C. Supreme Court case, Dr. Dutton v. BC Human Rights Tribunal et al., Boyd upheld a tribunal’s findings that a psychology professor at UBC had created a sexualized environment and discriminated against a student on the basis of sexual harassment. Boyd also presided over the trial of Barry Thomas Niedermier, who was convicted of viciously assaulting society’s most vulnerable and oft-ignored women, drug addicted sex workers. (Niedermier’s brutality was so severe that police once suspected him of murders now known to have been committed by infamous serial killer Robert Pickton.) Niedermier’s victims deserved justice and they found it in Madam Justice Boyd’s court.
In her report, Boyd was scathing of Rooney:
I have spent some time reviewing AC5’s [Rooney’s] specific complaints, since she is the one complainant who has most vigorously participated in this investigation, conferring with MC, speaking to [Creative Writing] program faculty prior to the November 15 meeting [at the home of Linda Svendson], and then spearheading the gathering of evidence…She was and is clearly defensive about her role in this matter.
After she provided her statement of evidence at my initial interview, I arranged to meet her a second time to ask further questions largely related to her dealings with MC and her subsequent identification of and contact with the Ancillary Complainants. When her Supplementary Statement of evidence was returned to her for editing, she refused to either confirm it or edit it, and instead returned a memorandum in which she disavowed her earlier recollections.
Suffice it to say that I found AC5 [Rooney] a biased witness, who has perceived every minor incident here through her own tainted lens. I am unable to place much, if any, weight on her evidence.
Rooney has criticized both the content of Boyd’s report, and the procedures surrounding its creation. But as already noted, she declined my request for further comment. MC did not respond to a similar solicitation.
When Galloway and MC called their affair off, they were both married. Both deleted the messages they had sent to one another to avoid having their affair discovered. Fortunately for Galloway, these messages were subsequently retrieved from the cloud. These include over 250 pages of messages between them proving an affair, the existence of which MC had denied to Boyd. They also serve to cast doubt on her allegations of assault on Galloway’s boat.
Amazingly, the only thing Galloway had done wrong—have a consensual affair with MC—was the one important thing that MC herself had tried to deny.
But this was not the result the mob wanted. And so even after Boyd submitted her report, UBC would once again look to one of the complainants to find more dirt on Galloway—this time tapping AC4, Sierra Skye Gemma, to investigate Galloway’s financial dealings during his time as department head.
It wasn’t true. For hash-tag purposes, however, it was sufficiently truthy.
But of course, people don’t live in social media. They live in the real world of human beings. And in that real world, Galloway would slip into a suicidal depression that would require his friends and family to keep him on round-the-clock watch. Anyone who has spent time with the man over the last two-and-a-half years can see not only the mental toll this has taken on him, but also the physical toll. And he would continue slogging through an arbitration process, the ground rules of which required that he say nothing—even as thousands of people told lies about him.
If UBC were a normal place, and the allegations against Galloway were treated in a normal way, one would think that this development would help lead some of Galloway’s detractors to rethink their views. Instead, they have again taken to social media to call him a rapist, mock his suicidal depression, and even threaten him with violence. This includes writer Susan MacRae, who wrote on Twitter that “this past week two actually talented and more successful individuals [Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade] did commit suicide without alerting the media first—they were even more successful at suicide than Steven Galloway.”
