Jamie Sarkonak: ‘It got insane,’ Galloway recounts years living in Kafkaesque nightmare

On Wednesday, author and former UBC professor Steven Galloway testified in court at his defamation trial that none of the sexual assaults alleged against him by his former paramour ever happened.

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That woman, who can only be identified as A.B. due to a publication ban, told the retired judge tasked with investigating Galloway back in 2016 that the first sexual assault happened on his boat. A.B. claimed that they were chatting and playing cards when Galloway suddenly tried to kiss her, and when she leaned away, he grabbed her neck tightly to the point where it was difficult to breathe, kissed her, and said, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Then, went the allegation, he grabbed her and threw her in the bunk space above; she somehow got down, disembarked, and, though she had no memory of it, ended up at her home.

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“That never happened,” Galloway told the B.C. Supreme Court. “It’s hard to know how to dismantle (the allegation) because the entire story is fictional.”

He said he couldn’t comprehend a situation where you would choke a woman and ask her if it was that bad. Further, the marina was a busy place. The story also didn’t make sense given the size and configuration of the boat’s bunk.

“The idea that I could physically lift her up and throw her into such a space without causing major injury to a person is … just not possible,” he testified.

Galloway and A.B. had a consensual affair from 2011 to 2013. A.B. first accused him of sexual assault to the university in July 2013, but it wasn’t until 2015 that he — and the rest of Canada — became aware that such allegations existed. In a matter of days, Galloway’s career was destroyed. In 2018, Galloway filed a lawsuit against numerous defendants who repeated A.B.’s claims, as well as A.B. herself. Most defendants settled before the trial, which began Monday.

In court, Galloway said that he hadn’t taken the boat out at all in March 2011, but there were instances where he and A.B. would use it, sometimes at her initiation. She would remark to him that it was a beautiful day to go sailing. Galloway recalled that she had even asked to go sailing with him because, she told him, her husband’s violent brother was in town and she wanted a safe space.

The retired judge who investigated A.B.’s allegations in 2016 found that they were unsubstantiated, and that the sexual assault did not occur, based on a balance of probabilities. Now, A.B. will not be testifying to their truth at the ongoing defamation trial, nor will her lawyers be arguing the defence of truth.

It was on this basis that A.B.’s lawyer objected to Galloway’s testimony about his boat. The lawyer argued that because A.B. wasn’t going to argue that her allegations were true, and because the allegations made during the independent investigation weren’t the specific subject of the lawsuit, Galloway’s version of events was irrelevant to the court. Justice Neela Sharma ruled against the objection and gave several reasons why A.B.’s lawyer was wrong in law.

Galloway was thus free to speak to the second allegation against him, which arose from an end-of-semester party for the department that also occurred in March 2011. A.B. claimed that Galloway had offered to drive her home, but they ended up at his office where she purportedly woke up, naked, to him attempting to force himself upon her.

“None of that happened,” Galloway testified in response. While he did recall having intercourse with her that night, there was no scene where she woke up on her back naked to an attempted sexual assault. On Tuesday, he testified that their relationship was entirely consensual and that she routinely sought him out for contact.

Regarding the third sexual assault allegation, which was said to have occurred on May 5, 2011, Galloway testified that it was “entirely false.”

Once again, A.B. claimed that she woke up naked in Galloway’s office — but this time, there was semen coming out of her vagina and her assailant was at his computer watching hockey.

Galloway told the court that “This is not a situation where there were two people in a room, and there was a disagreement about what happened” — rather, he was not in the room to begin with. He was at Koerner’s Pub watching the Canucks game with a friend, and afterward attended a reading by another author who was visiting campus. As proof, Galloway’s lawyer presented the court with a text message chain starting at 6:41 p.m. (11 minutes after the game’s start time), in which Galloway’s friend wrote, “We are watching game at koerners if you’re early.” Galloway asked the friend to order him a burger and said he’d be there in 20 minutes.

Afterward, Galloway went to the reading with some others as a group. That event was scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Galloway remembered arriving at the event and feeling anxious about how the game would end.

Galloway added that he couldn’t stream games in his office in 2011.

The rest of Galloway’s Wednesday testimony painted a picture of a Kafkaesque maze through university procedure and beyond. When it came to his initial suspension, it was “verdict first, trial second.” When the retired judge began her investigation into the allegations, in 2015 Galloway had to sign a confidentiality agreement: “I could agree to these terms of this investigation, or I could be terminated,” he said. He would be terminated anyway. Throughout the investigation, his accuser’s name was omitted.

While the retired judge cleared Galloway of sexual assault, she found one instance of sexual harassment had occurred per university policy. Galloway testified that there was an inclination for those examining the situation to view him as chair of the department, a position he held in 2015. In 2011, however, he was just a lecturer, while A.B., though a student at UBC, had worked previously as a professor on the path to tenure. He said she presented herself as equal to, or better than, him.

“That was part of the attraction,” Galloway testified. “She was someone who had done things I hadn’t.”

In 2016, when a “tsunami of vitriol and hatred” engulfed the signatories of an open letter urging that Galloway be treated fairly, he released an apology through counsel for his conduct despite the retired judge’s finding that he had not committed sexual assault.

“They were facing terrible consequences,” he explained. “I think the thinking was … if I stood up and apologized for the affair and took a bit of heat myself, maybe they would lay off.”

The apology did not help. Instead, Galloway said, “it made it so much worse.” Some critics accused the apology of being too vague, but he was not able to release the retired judge’s report at the time.

“It got insane.… Everything I did made it worse. Doing nothing made it worse, doing something made it worse.”

When it came to the labour arbitration in 2018, he was once again bound by a confidentiality agreement. The arbitration decision, he said, ordered that neither he nor the university were to talk about his reasons for termination. He testified that afterwards the university restated what “got them in trouble in the first place” and tried to defend the termination. This resulted in another labour arbitration award in his favour.

Galloway returns to court Thursday to continue giving testimony.

National Post

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