Former Q worker speaks out on Ghomeshi
Kathryn Borel says she felt ‘discredited and stonewalled’
The CBC took two hits in the Ghomeshi affair Tuesday.
A former producer on CBC Radio’s Q with Jian Ghomeshi who says managers ignored her complaints about the host’s abhorrent behaviour publicly identified herself for the first time Tuesday and her union apologized for its failure to support her. Also, a senior manager at the broadcaster took exception to a CBC depiction of her role in a company investigation.
Kathryn Borel, the ex-producer, wrote a column in the British newspaper The Guardian detailing her efforts in 2010 to complain about Ghomeshi, who was fired on Oct. 26.
“A few months into my job in 2007, I let out a big yawn at a staff meeting and my host told me, ‘I want to hate f--k you, to wake you up.’ I was 27 years old. I made sure never to yawn in front of him again.”
Borel describes a Byzantine system in which her concerns were dismissed because they were brought to an elected union representative, not staff. She had meetings where no notes recorded her complaints. She writes she felt she was stuck in a “feedback loop” between the union and Canadian Broadcasting Corp. management; the union was “carefully parsing its words” to make it sound like she was lying and had never formally complained; and she felt “discredited and stonewalled by both the union and CBC.” In response, the Canadian Media Guild admitted it had failed to do its job and pledged to “do better.”
Borel, who quit Q in 2010, said senior leaders at the CBC “obsessively propped up” Ghomeshi and are now covering themselves.
“The CBC allowed a two-tier workplace to emerge, in which Ghomeshi didn’t have to comply with either the law or workplace norms as long as he kept pulling in listeners, and workers like me only had job security so long as we accepted his abuses of authority,” she wrote.
She notes a former executive producer of Q, who was aware of her allegations in 2010, was moved to another show at CBC, not fired.
“No manager or executive who was complicit in creating or maintaining a workplace in which Ghomeshi was allowed to operate with impunity has lost his job, let alone apologized.”
Meanwhile, in an internal email sent on Monday and obtained by The Globe and Mail, the network’s director of talk radio, Linda Groen, took issue with an interview that executive director of radio and audio Chris Boyce gave last week to the CBC’s own The Fifth Estate.
According to the newspaper, Boyce told the news program that in conducting an internal investigation into Ghomeshi in July, CBC executives, including Groen, spoke to former Q employees after “a red flag” was raised about Ghomeshi’s behaviour. In her email, Groen wrote that she was not part of the probe and that “to characterize, post facto, my role as investigative, however loosely defined, is a misrepresentation of facts and surprising,” the newspaper reported.
Groen also referred to Boyce’s comment that those interviewed by the CBC said the Q host had never harassed them and that they were not aware of inappropriate behaviour by Ghomeshi, the newspaper wrote. “We didn’t speak to everybody on the (Q) team, but I know we spoke to a number of people on the team,” Boyce said.
The Fifth Estate itself reported last week that network executives did not ask a single Q employee any questions in their investigation.