Margaret Atwood: The Steven Galloway case's red-hot money trail

We wuz robbed, as the comic books used to say. And we wuz robbed by UBC. Or it certainly looks like it.

Like everyone else in the Canadian literary sphere, I’ve been following the Steven Galloway defamation trial that started on Oct. 5. In the past weeks, there’s been one revelation after another.

So much was unknown before this trial; now, so much is known. For 11 years, nobody knew what exactly was Galloway supposed to have done. It was all under wraps. But now we know the times, the places, and the activities claimed by his accuser. You can’t rape someone unless you’re in the same room with them, and at the time he was supposed to be doing his raping Galloway was discussing hamburgers with a friend by text from a bar where he was watching a hockey game. (If Mr. Hamburger Helper had stepped forward earlier with these texts, he would have saved many people some pain. But I guess he forgot. As it was, Galloway himself found the text messages, though long after the initial investigation.)

More: The original two lawyers, Joanna Birenbaum and David Wotherspoon, who’d pursued this case from an anti-SLAPP suit to an appeal to another appeal to another appeal in an attempt to keep Galloway from having a trial, have disappeared suddenly as if by magic. Did they quit or were they fired?

Chelsea Rooney, whose word was the ur-source for the Galloway-is-a-rapist posse because, hey, she knew him, so it must be true, settled with Galloway for an unknown sum, making a very complete apology for the large role she had played in destroying his career and reputation. Legal pressure? If so, almost certainly from her own lawyers, since Galloway would probably have relished the chance to take her on in court. During discovery — which precedes a trial, and during which the opposing sides exchange documents and witness will-say letters — those lawyers must have taken a look at the hard evidence and counselled Rooney to settle, in no uncertain terms.

But one of the big developments had to do with UBC and the red-hot money trail.

I taught at UBC in 1964-65. I wrote my first published novel there, and put together my first real published book of poetry. I am fond of UBC. I even donate money to it. So do British Columbia taxpayers: it is a publicly funded institution. So do students: they pay fees.

So I was horrified to learn what UBC has been doing with our money.

For instance: They paid $30,000 of taxpayer and donor money to A.B. (rape accuser of Galloway, name protected) through her then lawyer. The money came from a student bursary fund. That means only students were entitled to it. A.B. was not a student. The usual amount of such bursaries is in the thousands, not the tens of thousands. This is misuse of public and donor funds by any reasonable standard.

There were also demands made by A.B. for a total of $3 million — and those demands were made after an investigation into the Galloway accusations by retired judge Mary Ellen Boyd concluded that there had been no rape. Might as well go for broke, I guess: several U.S. universities had made large payments to female sexual assault complainants, so why not UBC? We do not know whether UBC ever paid out. If they didn’t, why not? If they did, how much?

The bursary fund payment puzzled me at first. Why do anything so stupid? Why not just advance funds out of some other stash of money?

But then I reflected. Universities have boards of governors. Board members have fiscal responsibility. They have to look over the financial statements. “Hush money to dubious rape accuser who will make a big fuss if we don’t pay her off” doesn’t look so good on a balance sheet, but “student bursary fund” might slip past the board, even though the payment was unusually large. That’s my guess. If the board members had known about this iffy sum, surely they would have been concerned. But they know now. If there’s a thundering silence from them, then maybe they knew all along, or else don’t care.

UBC should have come clean years ago. They should have realized they were instrumental in trashing Galloway’s life by jumping the gun before a smidgen of due diligence had been done. They should have fessed up to their institutional failures instead of covering up.

Instead, they spent lots more money digging in. They supported the two profs who helped string up Galloway through all those appeals: that didn’t cost nothing. They commissioned the initial Boyd investigation. They had to pay Galloway for the two arbitrations conducted by the faculty association: that didn’t cost nothing either. When the two profs finally settled after discovery, someone must have paid out — maybe an insurance company? We don’t know, and we don’t know how much. Whatevs, as the kids say, all the money expended by UBC on this case is taxpayer and donor money. Why was it in taxpayers’ interest for UBC to stretch this case out for eight years, shedding dollars along the way? Answer: it wasn’t. Unless there’s some unfathomable public good that was served. If so, let’s hear about it.

Which brings us to accountability. In 2016, a number of writers who still believed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights signed an open letter to UBC calling for accountability. At the time, it was UBC’s unethical behaviour that was in question, specifically its violation of Galloway’s right to a fair, open and impartial trial — one of the fundamental rights we fondly think our society believes in. But now “accountability” is also about a different kind of accounting, the kind that involves accountants. How much donor and taxpayer money did UBC spend on this, in total? And why?

Margaret Atwood is the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Alias Grace, and The Robber Bride, among others. She is the winner of the Arthur Ellis Award and the Dashiell Hammett Award for crime fiction.