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Bestselling Canadian author Steven Galloway denied in court Wednesday sexually assaulting a former UBC student, saying the majority of details described by his alleged victim were fabrications.
The former chair of the University of British Columbia creative writing department is suing four individuals for defamation, including his main accuser, “A.B.,” in a trial that began in B.C. Supreme Court this week.
Galloway says the defendants’ false statements ruined his career and reputation.
Details of A.B.’s accusations put into evidence are from a 2016 investigation prepared for UBC by retired Supreme Court justice Mary-Ellen Boyd. A.B., whose name is under a publication ban, is not testifying at the trial.
In one account, A.B. said she was on Galloway’s sailboat in March 2011 when he choked and forcibly kissed her, before attempting to throw her into a bunk, twice.
“That just flat out never happened,” said Galloway. He also called the claim of him lifting and throwing A.B. into the bunk “absurd” because of the tiny size of the door leading to it.
Galloway said another allegation that he sexually assaulted A.B. in his UBC office on May 5, 2011, was “entirely false.”
A.B.’s accusation included that he was watching a hockey game on his computer after the assault. But Galloway told the court that could not be true because there was no streaming in 2011. He said he wasn’t in his office on the evening in question because he was watching a Vancouver Canucks playoff game at a campus bar.
A.B. also alleged that Galloway sexually assaulted her in his office after a department party in May 2011. Galloway told the court that he had consensual intercourse with A.B. that night, but said her description of him forcing himself on her “did not happen.”
Galloway testified earlier that he had a two-year consensual relationship with A.B., who is 10 years older than him, starting sometime in 2011. Both were married at the time.
Galloway said he was “blindsided” in late 2015 when he received a phone call from a CBC the fifth estate producer asking for comment on the accusations. Galloway said he had only just been told by UBC about the allegations, and still didn’t understand fully what was happening.
Galloway said he learned six years later that A.B. had copied the CBC producer on the confidential disclosure letter she emailed to UBC president Martha Piper.
‘I was floored’
“That explains … the phone call that day,” he said. “To find out the actual formal letter that [A.B.] wrote to the president’s office was CC’ed to a television journalist … I was floored.”
Galloway said he was “horrified” at emails between A.B. and others in the UBC creative writing department that depicted him as a violent sexual predator, and he never understood why the university publicly announced his suspension in 2015 over what it called “serious allegations.”
Galloway said the public announcement wasn’t standard practice, calling it “verdict first, trial second,” but it made sense in the context of emails from A.B. in which he says she had been “threatening them with a big public thing, at a time when they were extremely concerned with their image.” He was fired in 2016.
Multiple defendants originally named in the lawsuit have settled with Galloway and published apologies.