The women who accused Jian Ghomeshi of sexual assault, abuse and harassment took extraordinary risks and gained nothing. If Ghomeshi is guilty, their courage may have prevented others from being harmed by him, and it has certainly emboldened others to speak out about sexual assault and abuse. These women have changed the way people think and talk about domestic violence, workplace harassment and sexual assault.
Since they came forward, police have charged Ghomeshi with seven counts of sexual assault and one of choking, for which he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted (he has pleaded “not guilty” to all charges). But instead of feeling vindication, or at least relief for having told their stories, some of these women are now filled with dread, because Kevin Donovan – the Toronto Star investigative reporter with whom I reported the allegations against Ghomeshi – is writing a “tell-tale, behind the scenes” book about Ghomeshi’s “secret life”. He has promised readers “the whole story” with “greater detail and background than we would ever include in a newspaper story”.
The problem is that the stories Donovan and I collected contain dozens of details that could compromise the anonymity of our sources, and Donovan has refused to proactively consult these women on the removal of these details. Instead, he tells me he “doesn’t work with sources”, that he plans to tell the “full story” and that his relationship with sources “is not a partnership”.
One of these women emailed me:
are you still in contact with Kevin? tell me exactly what to say to him to make him stop publishing my stuff?
When I first asked Ghomeshi’s original accusers to tell me their stories, they agreed to do so on the condition that I would protect their identities. This protection, I promised them, went beyond merely leaving their names out of articles: it meant working closely with them to make sure I would use only as much information from their personal lives as needed to report their claims – but not enough so that they would be identifiable. When I took the Ghomeshi story to the Star, I explained these terms and demanded that the newspaper sign an agreement promising to honor them, which they did.
Before my articles with Donovan were published, I went over parts of them with our sources to make sure that we didn’t accidentally include identifying details. Donovan has refused to give his assurance that he’ll do the same with his upcoming book and, though Canadian courts routinely ban the publication of the names of complainants in sexual assault cases like these, such bans don’t cover the publication of the names or identifying details of any individuals whose cases didn’t result in criminal charges, and the precise definition of identifying details is determined on a case-by-case basis.
He won’t call up these women and tell them what intimate details from their lives he plans to publish to ensure those details do not inadvertently identify them. Instead, he’s assured me that he will not include any identifying details about them, and said that if any source has a concern, they should call him about it.
They have plenty of concerns, but take little comfort in his offer – which requires them to guess which details he may have used. They worry that, in guessing, that they could accidentally divulge new information that they haven’t shared with him before, and their concerns ultimately won’t be respected – a circumstance which at least one woman has already experienced during Donovan’s original reporting. And from what I learned during my time working with him, I think they are right to be worried.
During our short partnership – based on my interactions with him – I believe that Donovan displayed an ambivalence about reporting the Ghomeshi story at all, a tendency that he knew better than our sources what was best for them and a troubling editorial attitude toward who would be deemed a credible enough victim.
For example, last spring Donovan emailed me shortly after we met with one woman: “The problem with (her) story is she stayed with him for so long ... we need people who were assaulted and walked away to come forward.” I argued that if remaining in a relationship in which you know you’re going to be abused means you’re not being abused, then the majority of abuse victims don’t exist. He told me it wasn’t that he didn’t believe her (his first words after interviewing her were “well, I believe her.”), but that he thought she was just the wrong kind of victim.
On 24 June, 2014, Donovan and I confronted Ghomeshi with the claims of my original four sources in an emailed letter; he denied everything and threatened to sue if we published or continued to investigate him. His lawyers singled me out and demanded that I cease asking questions or they’d take immediate legal action.
Donovan told me to stop investigating. He said the story was in “babysitting” mode. “We’re not devoting a ton of time to this,” he said on the phone on 25 June, the day after Ghomeshi’s response. “We have many investigations. We don’t wake up every morning looking for a way to run this story.”
I continued to investigate; Donovan disappeared for two months. I emailed him with my progress; he didn’t reply. In September, I emailed:
Since you’ve chosen not to publish based on the information we have and we’re not actively pursuing any more information, then I think it’s reasonable to conclude that The Star is passing on this story.
“You are correct,” he wrote back, two days later. “This is not a story the Star is passing on because we do not think it is valid. We are passing, for now, because it is not a story that can be proven to the level we demand.”
I asked him what that level might be, and how many allegations it would take. Donovan wouldn’t answer: he just wished me luck in taking the story to a rival publication.
I took the story to VICE, but they passed too. I tried to reconcile myself to the fact that, even though a reporter at the biggest newspaper in Canada believed that one of the biggest celebrities in Canada may have horribly abused a series of women, the allegations would never be reported.
Then in October, I promised my podcast listeners a “monster story” that would be “worse than embarrassing” for certain parties. Ghomeshi heard about it and assumed I was talking about him. I wasn’t – but Ghomeshi tried to get ahead of the story he thought was coming by showing CBC management pictures of an ex-girlfriend’s injured body along with messages from her, hoping to demonstrate that she had consented to the abuse. Instead, they fired him. He next used Facebook to prepare his fans for what he claimed were false accusations from a “freelance writer” with an agenda and a lying “jilted ex” – which gave The Toronto Star the justification it felt it needed to publish the story it had been sitting on for nearly four months.
Writing on deadline, Donovan and I clashed frequently: I described our sources as “credible”; he vetoed that phrasing, saying that it suggested The Star was taking their side. Instead, he described Ghomeshi’s accusers as “educated and employed”; readers were rightly appalled. They asked if that meant we wouldn’t have believed the women if they had been uneducated and jobless. Donovan brushed off the angry letters, comments and tweets.
Donovan then filmed a video to accompany our article in which he said that, despite our best efforts to get our sources to reveal their names, they wouldn’t. I never urged the women who accused Ghomeshi of sexual assault to divulge their names. Other journalists may scoff at me for this – it’s standard practice to push sources to go on the record. But I knew that their fears of disbelief, public shaming and online harassment from Ghomeshi’s thousands of fans were reasonable and well-founded. Perhaps Donovan did urge the women to go on the record when he interviewed them but, at the time that he filmed the video, I was only aware of him having spoken to two of them. I worried that other potential sources might be discouraged from coming forward if they saw the video and thought that they, too, would be pressured into having their names published, so I tweeted that Donovan’s claim was inaccurate. He was incensed.
Thankfully, more women did come forward – including Lucy DeCoutere, who agreed to tell her story of violence at Ghomeshi’s hands on the record. (Ghomeshi’s continued to issue blanket denials of wrongdoing.) As more accusations began coming in than we could handle (there are currently 23 separate allegations of harassment or assault by Ghomeshi), I proposed to Toronto Star editor-in-chief Michael Cooke a project to collect and investigate all of the claims.
“We have enough victims,” he wrote back.
I ended my partnership with The Star. Shortly after, I received a series of panicked texts from one of our sources, who wrote that Donovan was about to publish a specific detail about her relationship with Ghomeshi – something that she had asked us never to use, and which added no substance to the story but could cause her identity to be revealed. She wrote:
I feel like my hands are tied bc I don’t want it reported but how can I even stop it?
I emailed Donovan and told him our source was certain that publishing this detail would reveal her identity. He ran it anyhow, and told me she had agreed to it.
When I asked her if this was true, she said that she told Donovan that she wasn’t comfortable with it, but he persisted, telling her it was bound to come out anyhow and she was better off letting him report it than someone else. When I later confronted Donovan, asking him exactly who else but him would have exposed this detail, he told me he expects that it will come out at Ghomeshi’s trial. Yet at the time that he reported it, no charges had been brought against Ghomeshi.
Kevin Donovan assures me that his book won’t expose our sources and I think he believes that. I respect his decades’ worth of work, but his view that it’s for him to decide what will and what won’t endanger vulnerable women is dangerous and wrong. There’s no way he can know better than them what small detail might expose their identities and re-victimize them; there’s no reason not to enlist their help to make sure that this doesn’t happen. If it does and they are exposed by his book, then I will be partly responsible for having asked them to trust Donovan in the first place. His publishers, Kobo and ECW press, who told me on Tuesday simply that “The manuscript doesn’t identify anyone who asked to remain anonymous”
and that “We will honour the commitments Kevin has made”, will also bear blame. It’s not too late for them all to take simple, decent steps to prevent this.
It’s a sad reality that women have to hide their names, not for anything they did but for things someone else allegedly did to them. It’s a sad reality that in order to have a voice, these women had to trust a couple of men whom they didn’t even know to speak for them. What they told me they feared from Ghomeshi, they now tell me they fear from Donovan’s book: having their “full stories” laid bare to the public, being exposed and shamed. This is not an acceptable way to treat the women to whom we owe this story.