Jonathan Kay on the campaign against Steven Galloway

Steven Galloway was chair of the creative writing programme at the University of British Columbia and the author of The Cellist of Sarajevo, an international bestseller, when UBC suspended him in November 2015 over allegations it did not describe publicly. The university commissioned a retired BC Supreme Court judge, Mary Ellen Boyd, to investigate, and dismissed him in June 2016 citing “a record of misconduct that resulted in an irreparable breach of trust”. Boyd’s report has never been published; according to Galloway’s lawyer it found, on the balance of probabilities, that he had not committed sexual assault, and dismissed the other complaints against him. Galloway has acknowledged an affair with a student, for which he apologised.

In November 2016 the novelist Joseph Boyden circulated an open letter — signed by Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel and dozens of others, and later known by its website, UBC Accountable — criticising the secrecy of the process and the absence of due process. The letter split the Canadian literary world: signatories were attacked online, some withdrew their names, and Atwood was publicly denounced for saying Galloway was entitled to the presumption of innocence.

In 2018 UBC was ordered to pay Galloway $167,000 over privacy violations and damage to his reputation, and in October that year he sued the complainant — identified in court only as A.B. — along with around twenty others who had repeated the allegations. The defendants’ attempt to have the claim struck out as a SLAPP suit failed before Justice Elaine Adair in December 2021, was upheld by the BC Court of Appeal in January 2024, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused leave to appeal in October 2024. The trial opened in BC Supreme Court in October 2026 and is expected to run up to twelve weeks. Several defendants, including Annabel Lyon and Keith Maillard, settled beforehand on confidential terms, and a number have published apologies. The trial has not concluded.

We have followed the case as it has come to court — see our other coverage of Steven Galloway.

About the speaker

The commentary below is by Jonathan Kay, a Canadian journalist and editor at Quillette, where he hosts the Quillette Podcast. Kay joined the National Post at its launch in 1998 and became its comment editor, edited The Walrus from 2014 to 2017, and is the author of several books including Among the Truthers.

He is not a neutral observer of this story. Quillette published Brad Cran’s long account of the affair, “A Literary Inquisition”, and Kay is attacked by name in the 2019 podcast clip he plays here. The recording was posted to Quillette’s X account on 19 October 2026, while the trial was under way, and introduces a longer episode whose guest does not appear in this excerpt.

The video is on Quillette’s X account.

This is an edited transcript of the excerpt; the full conversation is in the recording. The views are the speakers’ own, and the allegations and characterisations in it are theirs, not ours. The trial is ongoing and nothing in it has been decided.

“One of the great epics in the annals of Canadian cancel culture”

Jonathan Kay: 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 actually precedes the popularisation of the term cancel culture itself. I’m 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 11 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 programme at the University of British Columbia, one of Canada’s top schools. 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 which 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 back in 2015 no longer is willing to argue in court that they were ever true. But back in the era of MeToo and Believe Women, 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.

The campaign

Jonathan Kay: His close friends within the department, including a woman named Annabel Lyon, who quickly took over his top position 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 former friends and colleagues deputised one of Galloway’s former students, a naive young novelist named Chelsea Rooney, to go out and dig up more dirt on Galloway. Rooney herself seems to have been conned into believing the rape accusations were true. At one point she boasted to Lyon 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 collapsed. 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. Boyd also concluded that the other claims against Galloway that Rooney had harvested didn’t even have anything to do with sexual assault, even in theory. They were just random complaints about Galloway’s personal behaviour on this or that occasion. The whole case against Galloway turned out to be 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 Galloway 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 the propaganda campaign against its former boss.

What it did to CanLit

Jonathan Kay: 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.

Now, 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 by 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 specialty in that show was hectoring white Canadian women, such as herself, for their ideological sins. And foremost among those sins was defending Steven Galloway’s right to a fair trial.

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. You’ll also hear McGregor go 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.

OK, 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.

The 2019 clip

Hannah McGregor (podcast clip, 2019): There’s been a number of really ugly and really public examples in the past few months of public shit shows, all of which have to do with white women using the kinds of power that comes from our whiteness and other kinds of power that have to proximity to powerful institutions, with access to media, with the support of powerful men backing them. Almost always Jonathan Kay, fuck that guy so entirely. Fuck I hate Jonathan Kay. My God, what a fucking monster.

Anyway, sorry, I worry a lot about being a quasi-public feminist myself, and I’m going to take these women as an example of the kinds of damage that you can do when you are wielding power thoughtlessly. And hopefully I will not one day be another shitty white woman.

I hardly know how to begin to unpack UBC Accountable and what has been going on for the past over a year. But essentially, a creative writing professor was fired. There were allegations of sexual assault. Margaret Atwood and about 80 other very powerful and well-known Canadian authors signed an open letter casting strong doubt on the legitimacy of the allegations against this professor. It’s a phenomenal example of somebody thoughtlessly using their power to harm others.

Atwood at least has spent a career writing books that have meant a lot to a lot of people. But in this moment, if she would stop and really, really listen to the many women who have talked to her and said, your actions are hurting us, your actions are making us feel unsafe, I think her stance would be different. I think for most of us, if we stopped and listened to people and thought about where their pain was coming from, if we took a deep breath before reacting and thought what people are actually asking of us, our reactions would be different. I think our reactions for the most part would be more compassionate. And that can be really, really hard to do. But if you are a white woman and you have a platform, then too fucking bad. I don’t care how hard it is.

“It’s all front page news again”

Jonathan Kay: OK, so that was a long time ago. But it’s all front page news again here in Canada, because back 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 naive she’d been to operate as an inquisitor on behalf of his false accuser. That apology appears alongside no fewer than 10 others at the website GallowayApologies.com. As part of Galloway’s legal settlements with these defendants, they will remain posted on 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 literary fervour. But as today’s podcast guest explains, that’s not the case. All of those once-fervent Canadian literati have slinked away, anxious to avoid getting sued in their own right, and perhaps also because they’re deeply mortified by the way they too participated in the smear campaign against an innocent man.

And they should feel mortified. The entire Canadian literary community should be mortified, 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. 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.