The defamation trial of bestselling author Steven Galloway against a handful of remaining defendants has pulled back the curtain on a university in crisis, revealing how two distinct sexual misconduct scandals collided on the University of British Columbia campus in the autumn of 2015. Glynnis Kirchmeier, a former history graduate student representing herself in B.C. Supreme Court, testified Tuesday that a campaign to hold the institution accountable for its handling of a predatory PhD student in the history department became inextricably entangled — in the media’s eye and the administration’s inbox — with the explosive allegations against Galloway, then the celebrated chair of the creative writing programme.
A Campus on Edge
Four days before Kirchmeier stood before microphones at a November 22 press conference to denounce years of institutional inertia regarding the history student, UBC had announced Galloway’s suspension over “serious allegations.” The timing was combustible. Reporters at the campus event peppered Kirchmeier and her colleagues with questions about Galloway, asking whether the suspended professor was the subject of a forthcoming CBC fifth estate documentary the national broadcaster had been promoting.
“The journalists who came to the press conference… I do recall some asking if Mr. Galloway was included in the documentary, but one of the other women said ‘no,’ and ‘we don’t know anything about that,'” Kirchmeier told the court. She had participated in the documentary herself, which focused on the history department case.
The conflation was immediate and, Kirchmeier argues, structural. The university was simultaneously fielding media inquiries about the history student — the subject of the CBC investigation — and the creative writing chair. The two scandals, distinct in their particulars, merged in the public imagination into a single referendum on UBC’s culture of silence.
The Tweet at the Centre of the Storm
Galloway’s 2018 lawsuit named nearly two dozen defendants. Most have settled. Only Kirchmeier, the complainant known as A.B. under a publication ban, and two others remain at trial. Galloway, who has never faced criminal charges and has consistently denied sexually assaulting A.B. — describing their relationship as a two-year affair — claims the allegations destroyed his career and reputation.
Kirchmeier’s defence rests on fair comment. The flashpoint is a 2018 post on X, then Twitter, in which she criticised The Walrus magazine for a feature she believed Galloway had principally sourced.
“That piece said Galloway had an ‘affair,’ which we now know is what he calls raping/sexually harassing a student. But it set the narrative for 1 + year,” the tweet read.
Under cross-examination by Galloway’s counsel, Daniel Coles, Kirchmeier dissected her own punctuation. Drawing on Chicago citation style from her history training, she argued the forward slash denoted alternatives — sexual assault or sexual harassment — not a confession of both. Coles rejected the reading. The exchange crystallised the trial’s linguistic battlefield: how language frames power, and who gets to define the words.
The Boyd Report and the Architecture of Distrust
Kirchmeier’s testimony traced the roots of her scepticism toward institutional process. In late 2015, UBC retained former B.C. Supreme Court justice Mary Ellen Boyd to investigate A.B.’s allegations. Boyd’s 2016 report concluded that, on a balance of probabilities, sexual assault and assault could not be established. She did, however, find that Galloway had sexually harassed A.B. and committed other misconduct.
For Kirchmeier, the finding was not vindication. It was confirmation of a pattern.
Private emails entered into evidence Tuesday laid bare her fury. “This all sucks. SG sucks. UBC sucks. Boyd’s a shill. The Walrus is nasty and uncritical,” she wrote to A.B. and fellow defendant Mandi Gray, a criminology professor at Trent University.
Pressed by Coles on whether she believed UBC had hired Boyd for a “predetermined outcome,” Kirchmeier did not flinch. She said she did, citing her experience with the investigation into the history PhD student — a process she viewed as similarly engineered to protect the institution.
The Letter That Linked Two Cases
The connective tissue between the two scandals was a letter. On November 10, 2015, Kirchmeier circulated an open letter to her network of history students and faculty, condemning UBC’s failure to act on complaints against the PhD student that had spanned years, allowing more women to become victims.
The letter reached A.B. The next day, the former creative writing student forwarded it to Galloway and a senior professor in the programme.
Kirchmeier met A.B. in spring 2016 and began advising her on how to hold the university to account. What began as parallel advocacy — two women, two departments, two battles — became, in the university’s corridors and the court’s record, a single narrative of resistance.
Witness testimony is expected to conclude this week. The trial resumes Friday with Gage Averill, UBC’s then-dean of arts, called by the defence.
Why it Matters
This trial is no longer simply about a tweet or a reputation. It is an anatomy of institutional power in the #MeToo era — how universities manage scandal, how media narratives flatten complex harms into binary spectacles, and how women who refuse silence are recast as conspirators. The courtroom has become a rare space where the machinery of dismissal is exposed: the investigator hired to legitimise a foregone conclusion, the language policed to obscure violence, the parallel cases merged to dilute accountability. Whatever the verdict, the record now exists.
