Reva Seth remembers exactly where she was when the news broke. “It was the International Festival of Authors,” she says. “I went to a book party at the Gardiner [Museum] and that was the Sunday he posted the Facebook thing.”
Seth is the author of The MomShift and a Toronto-based lawyer. She’s talking about the Facebook post written by then-CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi on October 26, 2014, explaining that the CBC had fired him due to what he said were false allegations “pursued by a jilted ex girlfriend and a freelance writer.”
There are a few moments in Canadian history where almost anyone can tell you where they were when it happened. The shootings on Parliament Hill or the breaking of the Rob Ford crack scandal—stories big enough that they shake the collective country into stopping, just for a second, to make sense of what the hell just happened.
The Jian Ghomeshi allegations, which came to public conscious just over a year ago, is one of those kinds of events for a lot of people — especially those in media.
That night at the Gardiner, Seth drifted through the crowd, making idle chit chat at a publishing party. What the rest of us didn’t know then was Seth had her own set of assault allegations against Ghomeshi, ones she would write about for The Huffington Post Canada. “From random group to random group, the bias was so totally surely ‘beloved CBC Jian can’t have done that,’” she says. “I remember leaving with my husband and thinking, Interesting.”
Even if you don’t remember what the specific allegations were, you know the end result: Ghomeshi no longer works at the CBC, and the CBC faced deserved public and internal scrutiny for how they handled the initial complaints of sexual abuse and workplace harassment. Ghomeshi now faces five criminal charges for sexual assault and one for choking.
For years, women in media used backchannels to talk about Ghomeshi’s behavior amongst ourselves. These clandestine warnings helped keep each other safe, and kept us from suffering the professional punishment we might have faced if we had spoken up publicly.
There were always rumours about Ghomeshi, but when he posted on Facebook that the CBC fired him over these allegations, it opened the legal door for Jesse Brown and Kevin Donovan to make those allegations public. Allegations that said Ghomeshi choked, assaulted, and raped women.
The severity of the allegations and the fact that they were made against a public persona like Ghomeshi led many to declare this a watershed moment for how we talk about workplace harassment, sexual assault, and violence against women in this country. CBC’s The Current debated whether we had reached a tipping point, as did Maclean's. (Others were calling bullshit. “I don’t get what is known now that was a mystery yesterday—or why what was ignored yesterday is now so urgent to address,” wrote Globe and Mail columnist Denise Balkissoon after the allegations were made public. “All that’s different now is that we know one guy’s name, and that guy happens to be famous.”)
The case involved someone so beloved and considered so gentle by the general public, and the allegations were so brutal, so detailed, and so consistent that it seemed impossible for us to turn back. We said it to ourselves over and over in the weeks following: we weren’t going to let this happen again.
Darren Calabrese / The Canadian Press
Twelve months have passed. Was this tipping point really a tipping point? Or is it another example of women being abused, the world paying attention momentarily, and turning its back again because some things are too hard to look directly in the eye.`
Wherever you were at the time, the Ghomeshi case felt like the big one—this was the thing that would make us talk about workplace harassment and sexual assault differently. “He was not Rob Ford. He was not a nameless, faceless CEO,” says Marc Lafrance, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. “He was none of those things that we might more typically associate with a culture of sexual corruption.”
Indeed, Ghomeshi came from the hallowed CBC, not necessarily known for its aggressive personalities, and he himself was your prototypical Public Male Feminist, all dulcet tones and liberal talking points. But for the people within the industry—namely the women—one of the most pressing conversation amongst female journalists was how expected this actually was.
“When Jian Ghomeshi lost his job because of alleged sexual misconduct in the workplace, I was not at all surprised,” says Kelli Korducki, co-editor of Torontoist. In the aftermath of the Ghomeshi allegations, she wrote a piece for ChartAttack outlining Canadian media’s quiet awareness of his misconduct. “I think because jobs are so scarce in journalism right now, there’s an inclination, even more than in the past, to try to put on a happy face and not complain.”
Workplace harassment isn’t necessarily more of an issue in the media industry than it is in other industries, but it does come with unique challenges: long work hours, little pay, few jobs, and many journalists in the country are actually on contracts, making their employment precarious at best.
Jesse Brown, founder of media-watchdog Canadaland and one of two reporters who broke the Ghomeshi allegations last fall, says that changes within the industry may be more about protecting institutions than employees.
“Purely from an ass-covering point of view, managers don’t want to be in a position the CBC found themselves in of having ignored obvious warning sides,” he says.
Nothing scares management more than watching a company’s biggest star be torn down, and fair enough: the CBC was indeed forced to make plenty of changes.
“I think that across the country, men in media organizations, chills ran down their spines as they’ve considered every shitty thing that they’ve said or done to women they work with,” Brown says.
In addition to Ghomeshi’s dismissal, a report was commissioned from employment law firm Rubin Tomlinson to determine what the CBC needed to do better. Two key people were fired: Chris Boyce, executive director of radio and audio, and Todd Spencer, executive director of human resources and industrial relations. It was proven that they both knew, or should have known, about Ghomeshi’s behavior in the workplace, and that they should have done something about it. (It took until April of this year for them to be fired, after being on leave since January.)
The Rubin report also put forth nine recommendations, from familiarizing the staff with CBC policies on bullying and harassment, and establishing a confidential workplace hotline, to better employee surveys and “spot audits.” Susan Marjetti, Executive Director of Radio and Audio, was put in charge of implementing the recommendations. “Everything is in process,” she says of all nine recommendations, citing specifically the active helpline and a completed employee survey. (Full disclosure: I'm a regular guest on the new iteration of q, as well as other CBC programs.)
Marjetti didn’t directly answer whether the Ghomeshi allegations would have been dealt with by the CBC had a third party not reported on them, but says that it isn’t an indication of a larger issue.
“I don’t think harassment is either a part of media culture or particularly a part of the CBC’s culture,” Marjetti says. “I think that whenever you have people, you need clear guidelines and you need to deal with problems swiftly.”
Toronto Star
CBC employees I spoke to all said their work-life has improved since the allegations were made public. One woman working in radio at the time of the allegations suggests that men at the office may have learned some greater awareness; she recalls that after the allegations, a co-worker made a passing comment about another woman being a “bitch.” Later, he emailed to apologize for it, citing the Ghomeshi case as his learning curve. (The employees all asked that their names not be used for this article.)
Some journalism schools were forced to make changes too. Carleton University reviewed its records to see which students had internships at Q under Ghomeshi, and did some student outreach, including an optional "information session" on harassment. (Two people came.) Carleton paid particular attention, perhaps, because the @bigearsteddy Twitter account that accused Ghomeshi of physical assault in a series of tweets was linked to the school in one tweet. Susan Harada, associate director of the School of Journalism, sent an email to students reminding them about the school’s sexual assault services and counselling services. Female students at Carleton say they did notice the school react to the allegations, and more than that, it was appreciated.
Students at Ryerson and Western, however, said they didn’t hear anything from the administration at their schools. Some students recall their teachers talking about how the reporting of the case was handled, but none said they heard anything from the program itself. Across the board—even at Carleton—female students said they were hoping to hear more from their school about how to handle workplace harassment.
At its very least, though, the Ghomeshi case did make people more aware of their behavior. “I think probably what it’s done has helped people become more responsive to complaints,” Korducki says. “Has it magically made people who lack self-awareness become self-aware? I doubt it.”
At least they’re talking. And in the last year, the public—and fellow media members—have learned plenty about how their press works. How celebrity can blind responsibility, how abuse can fester in even the most wholesome-looking places, how icons are not infallible. Internally, though, the biggest lesson may have been about how we report on these issues, particularly when they pertain to ourselves.
“I think the idea that this was some sort of turning point neglects the fact that it was a complete fluke,” Brown says. The Star, according to Brown, was unable or unwilling to publish the story he and Donovan had been working on, largely due to legal issues. It was Ghomeshi’s Facebook post that actually let the story come out. (Libel laws in Canada are far more stringent on the accusers than the one being accused.)
“If the next person who’s accused by multiple people of terrible things also makes the mistake of writing a defense on Facebook, then we’ll see,” Brown says.
Last year after the allegations, I wrote a piece for Hazlitt about why predators can fester in the journalism industry. I mentioned an anecdote about a former coworker who kissed me on the forehead in the newsroom. It bothered me—it still bothers me—but he was far from the worst tormentor I’ve had to encounter. The thing that actually made me angry was that after the piece went up, he tweeted about it, completely unaware that I was talking about him. He mentioned it so many times, in fact, that my then-boss asked me if I wanted him to intervene somehow. I said no—I didn’t want to get involved any further. (A handful of women messaged me privately asking if it was odd that someone who was clearly a harasser had no clue while talking about my story on harassment).
The last time I saw him, he was close-talking to a female journalism student at an industry event. She was alone.
Darren Calabrese / The Canadian Press
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