A defendant in Steven Galloway’s defamation lawsuit has described the mental health struggles of the woman who accused the author and former University of British Columbia (UBC) professor of rape and sexual assault, allegations he denies.
Mandi Gray continued her testimony in the B.C. Supreme Court trial on Monday, saying she was concerned about the potential for self-harm by the woman shortly before the allegations against Galloway came to light in November 2015.
Gray, now an assistant professor at Trent University, said she had become a “safe person” for the woman, known as A.B., whose name is subject to a publication ban.
She said A.B. had talked of a “suicide plan” and expressed “suicidal ideation” during a phone call, though Gray acknowledged hers was not a clinical assessment.
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Gray said A.B. indicated she was upset because Galloway, the author of novels including The Cellist of Sarajevo, had called her multiple times in a short time span.
She recalled telling A.B. something like, “I know you’ve been weighing whether or not you want to report, and now there are these voice mails and this unwanted contact, this could be a time.”
Gray also said A.B. told her she had initially tried to report the claims against Galloway to a UBC official in 2013, but it was, “to put it mildly, an unpleasant experience.”
Gray said A.B. did not want to go further “at that time, due to the lack of institutional infrastructure that they could communicate what the next steps would be.”
A retired judge hired by the University of B.C. later found the assault allegations against Galloway unsubstantiated.
The university fired Galloway, who has said the claims destroyed his career.
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Galloway is suing A.B. and other defendants, alleging they defamed him by publishing the unproven claims on social media and elsewhere.
His accuser, A.B., is not testifying in the case, citing mental health struggles.
The court learned last month that A.B. was no longer asserting in her defence that Galloway assaulted her, rather that she reported he had done so.
Gray cried as she testified Monday, saying it had been “so hard to watch” A.B.’s mental health deteriorate in the lead-up to the trial of Galloway’s lawsuit in Vancouver.
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Gray testified last week that she regretted some of her online posts about Galloway.
Her lawyer, Vanshika Dhawan, told the court last Thursday her client was no longer defending some of her online statements as responsible communications or arguing they were made honestly under “qualified privilege.”
But she said Gray was still defending certain statements as fair comment.
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The court previously heard Gray had been involved in a high-profile sexual assault trial during her time at York University in Toronto, in which the conviction of the man she alleged raped her was overturned on appeal.
