THE MANDI GRAY CASE HIGHLIGHTS THE MODERN SEXUAL VIOLENCE COMPLAINANT AS A CREATURE OF CURIOUS DELICACY WHO CAN FACE THE MEDIA BUT WILTS ON THE WITNESS STAND.
That Mandi Gray has apparently lost her appetite for the fight against the patriarchy, or at least against one of its notorious symbols, Mustafa Ururyar, appears to be the most newsworthy development out of his appeal hearing held in Toronto Tuesday.
“It’s not worth it,” she told reporters outside the University Avenue courthouse of the possibility of a new trial for Ururyar.
“I don’t have another two years to take off of my life to be doing this,” Gray said. “I just don’t have the capacity to continue.”
It was an astonishing remark for a young woman who co-founded Silence is Violence, a sexual violence survivors group; filed a human rights complaint against York University (it was settled last December, with the only term made public that the university will work with sexual assault centres to provide counselling for survivors from the school); recently conducted an online survey of alleged survivors that asked them to attach dollar amounts to costs they incurred as a result of their assaults; and who just this week organized a RAPEnomics 101 protest outside the courthouse on the day of the hearing.
Ururyar was convicted last July by Ontario Court Judge Marvin Zuker of sexually assaulting Gray. The two were PhD students at York University — she in sociology, he in political science — at the time of the alleged assault in January of 2015.
The Zuker decision was so scathing and openly contemptuous of Ururyar, and leaned so heavily upon social science readings and academic commentary never raised at trial, that it led directly to his lawyer Mark Halfyard’s chief argument that the veteran judge, now retired, displayed a reasonable apprehension of bias against Ururyar and in favour of Gray.
Halfyard is also seeking a reversal of Zuker’s unusual restitution order that Ururyar pay Gray $8,000, in part to cover her legal costs.
Ontario Superior Court Judge Michael Dambrot is expected to release a decision on June 8.
(I was on vacation and wasn’t in court Tuesday, but have the lawyers’ written arguments on the appeal, transcripts of the six-day trial, sentencing and bail revocation hearing, and thus have read virtually every other word that was said in court in the Ururyar case. And much of all that has been well-covered in the press.)
But what would it mean if Dambrot were to order a new trial and Gray didn’t participate, as she has hinted she may not?
Presumably, either prosecutors would have to apply to have Gray’s evidence at the first trial read into the record of the second — to my memory, this usually happens only when a witness can’t be found or has died in the intervening period — or decide not to proceed because there would be no reasonable prospect of conviction without the only complainant in the witness stand.
It would also feed into the emerging modern sexual violence complainant as a creature of curious delicacy who can talk to the media at length about her suffering (often anonymously, and give Gray credit for waiving the standard publication ban), campaign politically on social media, organize conscious raising events and behave as a social justice activist — and yet who can’t face a normal cross-examination (and cross-examination is the norm in the criminal courts) without being grossly traumatized.
For instance, the complainant in the Steven Galloway case — he is the celebrated author and former University of British Columbia professor fired amid great secrecy about a complaint of a sexual nature — has remained anonymous while Galloway has had his livelihood and reputation savaged.
A private UBC-commissioned investigation conducted by a former judge appears to have deemed all but one of the allegations against Galloway unfounded — and the one she apparently substantiated (it’s difficult to say with certainty because only redacted copies of the judge’s report appear to have been viewed by reporters) was that he had a lengthy consensual affair with an adult woman in her 40s who was a student in the creative-writing program he then headed.
How the woman’s name has been so assiduously guarded is a bit of a mystery to me, though less of one than how an affair between consenting adults becomes, in the rear-view mirror, any sort of abusive behaviour.
In any case, since the Galloway complaint never went to any court, there can’t be any sort of publication ban upon the woman’s name. Yet it is honoured by all those who have written about it. Why?
I asked Joanna Birenbaum, the lawyer for that woman, who is known only as M.C. (for Main Complainant), why no one was publishing the woman’s name in an email Wednesday, but got no reply.
I also asked her if it was true that Galloway’s accuser was, as I’ve been told, in the courtroom this week in support of Gray.
Birenbaum also represented Gray in her human rights complaint: It’s a small old world among survivors.