Commentary
It was hard to say who the sympathetic hero was by the end of the Julia Roberts film “After the Hunt.” Released last year, the film was billed as a psychological thriller about a professor (Roberts) caught up in a sexual abuse scandal involving one of her students and another professor.
The petty politics of academia, the moral indignation and self-righteousness of both the liberal arts students and their professors, the double standards and betrayals—it was all very off-putting.
By the time the end credits were rolling, all of the main characters had diminished themselves by their behaviour and they all bore some responsibility for their sad downfalls. It was a very cold film in terms of tone and could rightly leave the viewer wanting nothing to do with how university life unfolds in this day and age.
The film came to mind when getting up to speed on the 13-year saga of novelist and former University of British Columbia professor Steven Galloway. A lot of people are now reviewing the various chapters of Galloway’s ordeal, as this week it’s finally before a judge in the B.C. Supreme Court.
The story begins in July 2013, when a married student older than Galloway and with whom he had been having an affair told UBC’s equity office that Galloway had raped her. This accusation happened in the same month that Galloway met the woman he would later go on to marry, and who was the first witness to testify on his behalf in court this week.
In late 2015, UBC announced that Galloway was suspended from his job with pay due to unspecified allegations made against him. From that December to the following April, a former justice of the B.C. Supreme Court conducted an investigation on behalf of UBC and, as Galloway’s lawyer later stated, found that on a balance of probabilities, Galloway had not committed sexual assault. Still, in June 2016 he was fired from the university for reasons that were unspecified in public statements.
While these bureaucratic processes were unfolding, other accusations and amplifications of those accusations were being made against Galloway both formally and on social media for all to see. It’s these utterances that are the subject of the case that’s now going to court, a defamation trial against four defendants who Galloway alleges wrongly accused him of sexual assault.
This was all happening at the advent of what later became known as the MeToo movement. The trial of Jian Ghomeshi was in 2016, and the CBC radio host’s acquittal for sexual assault charges caused a furor in Canadian arts and culture circles. The phrase “believe all women” began to be popularized around that time, basically meaning that an accusation made by a woman against a man should be assumed to be true until proven otherwise.
A number of literary luminaries came to Galloway’s public defence, including Canada’s most famous novelist Margaret Atwood. This itself caused an uproar, as Atwood had been a feminist icon for half a century and her suggestion that people reserve judgment for due process to play out was not well-received by those who subscribed to the new perspective on justice that had gripped certain circles at the time.
Meanwhile, UBC paid out $167,000 to Galloway in 2018 for violating his privacy rights and damaging his reputation.
The decade since, though, has shown that facts do matter and we shouldn’t believe an accusation just because it’s made by a woman. There are examples of men who engaged in heinous crimes and were found guilty and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, such as Harvey Weinstein. And then there are those who had false accusations made against them, were found innocent, and had settlements paid out to them for the abuse-by-process that they suffered.
The times have clearly changed. The pendulum is moving back to a more balanced position. This is perhaps why at least nine of the original defendants among those Galloway has sued have settled out of court or made apologies.
It should be noted that at no point was Galloway ever criminally charged, nor was the precipitating assault allegation from 2013 ever made to police.
This was not an ordeal that played out in the realm of law and order but within the confines of academia, both via its institutions and social circles.
There are extensive articles available online that have been written over the years offering many more details about the allegations, the social interactions of the various parties involved, and the conduct of the administrators. This highly anticipated trial will surely expose many more.
If all the details and drama had to be summed up in one line, though, it would be Sayre’s Law, attributed to Columbia University professor William Sayre who in the 1950s remarked: “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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