IWAS INVESTIGATED ANDIWAS EXONERATED.

One of the most persistent claims related to the Boyd Report is that I have violated a confidentiality agreement by disclosing its contents. This is not true. While I was being investigated I was not permitted to speak publicly about the proceedings (a condition not imposed on any of the complainants, many of whom did speak to the media), and I am now not permitted to speak about the arbitration process (as ordered by the arbitrator), but the information contained in the Boyd Report is legally mine. Were I misquoting it, the other parties in possession of the report would be well within their rights to say as much. They have not.

I do not deny that my relationship with my accuser was unethical. I was, am and will always be deeply sorry for it. I let down my family, my employer, my colleagues, and the community to which I once belonged. I regret many things, like most people. I do not intend for the above to serve as my sole apology; I have and will continue to make my apologies personally to those whom I have let down. Before having any idea that MC was accusing me of sexual assault, I tried to apologize to her for our relationship, leaving a voicemail that has been reported in the press.

My apology to MC stands: I accept full responsibility for my part in our relationship. It has caused catastrophic damage, and we both owed ourselves and our families better conduct. I owed my employer better conduct.

For some, there is nothing I could say or do that will satisfy them. I accept that. Everyone reading this, or any of the words that may be written in response, is entitled to their opinion. I’m not going to spend my life arguing.

But I’m also not going to walk through this world in shame. It has been demonstrated amply that there are many people who consider it unacceptable for me to want justice or to be cared about by others. Anyone who tried to support me or the idea that what happened to me was wrong has been viciously attacked — Margaret Atwood was repeatedly called a rape apologist. Just consider that for a moment. Consider what someone like her (we have met only briefly and are not friends) must have experienced and seen and how hard she had to work to become “Margaret Atwood.” Read her writing. The notion that she is the enemy of women is beyond ludicrous. And yet, for example, she’s been called a “shitty white woman” by a professor in the SFU publishing program in her university-sanctioned podcast on feminism. Writer and actor Carmen Aguirre, whose family worked for the underground resistance movement against the Pinochet dictatorship and who, as a child, was raped at gunpoint in the woods near UBC by a serial rapist, was called an MRA propagandist by Keith Maillard for writing an article in The Walrus defending my right to due process and essential humanity. Writers, predominantly women, have been blacklisted from conferences, lost publishing and teaching opportunities, and been professionally ostracized for the crime of not instantly condemning me.

It is not an offence to survivors of assault, to women, to feminism, for me to be innocent of the claims being made about me. Accepting the fact that I was falsely accused does not and should not mean that women reporting sexual assault in the future will not be taken seriously.

The last two-and-a-half years have been a hell I would not wish on anyone. I do not desire for anyone, including my accuser and her supporters, to be subjected to online bullying. I support a process in which both complainants and respondents are treated fairly by the legal system, the press, and the public. It is only thanks to the support of my partner, family, and friends that I am still here. I have been humiliated and vilified, and I’ve felt it. To those who were hurling vitriol at me, congratulations. Your punches landed, and they hurt. Particularly those who knew me and rewrote me as a monster: I’m not a monster. I’m the person you knew who is flawed, who has made mistakes.

I know what I have done and what I haven’t. I’ve done good in this world as well as bad, and it is not for anyone to strip me of my humanity. Many of my former colleagues, people I loved, seemed to celebrate my destruction. I am forever unwelcome in the program that was my home since I was a 19-year-old undergraduate student (one professor once told the Globe and Mail that it felt like I was born in the halls of the Creative Writing Program). I became a writer because of my time as a student at UBC, and I wanted to pay the program back for that, to ensure that others could benefit the way I had. Instead I became a bogeyman, expressly presented as a danger to the student body, as an agent of harm. From the day I was suspended, it was inconceivable that I could ever safely walk those halls again, regardless of the outcome of the Boyd investigation.

The fact is, no faculty member, staff member, or student is currently safe at the University of British Columbia — not because of me, but because of how the administration handled allegations against me. UBC is an institution whose primary motivator is selfprotection. If you doubt this, ask yourself why the university has gone to such great lengths to hide the fact that one of their professors was cleared of sexual assault charges. In the current climate, exoneration is a PR nightmare.

When my first novel was accepted for publication I was 23 years old and encountered nothing but supportive people in the world of Canadian writing. That changed overnight. Recently, “CanLit” has been described as a dumpster fire. Though juvenile, the description is apt. I’ve watched what I always imagined to be a kind, inclusive, supportive community turn against itself. The cruelty some people have displayed has been shocking. There have always been those who seek to build themselves up by tearing others down, but I’d never seen so much of it until recently. We have been taken over by a bloodlust in a search for targets of indignation.

When one of my children comes to me and complains that one of their siblings called them a mean name, my response, which I got from my grandmother, is to ask them if they really are what their sister or brother said they were. They answer no, and I tell them knowing that is enough.

I’m taking my grandmother’s advice now. Though I have no wish to quarrel with anyone, I will no longer be silent. I won’t accept further shame or bullying, or the lies that have been told about me. I was investigated and I was exonerated. An arbitrator ruled that UBC violated my privacy rights and caused damage to my reputation. I won’t let others define me in ways that ignore these central facts.