#159 Julie Macfarlane: A Force of Nature Against Patriarchal Abuse
We are delighted to speak with a remarkable force of nature called Julie Macfarlane. A fierce advocate for survivors of sexual violence as well as survivors of institutional abuse, Dr Julie Macfarlane has spent her adult life teaching in law schools in four continents, researching and working on progressive causes that she feels passionately about. She is the author of Going Public: A Survivor’s Journey from Grief to Action which merges the worlds of personal and professional, activism and scholarship. Drawing upon decades of legal training, Macfarlane decodes the well-worn methods used by church, school, and state to silence survivors, from first reporting to cross-examination to non-disclosure agreements. At the same time, she lays bare the isolation and exhaustion of going public in her own life, as she takes her abuser to court, challenges her colleagues, and weathers a defamation lawsuit.
In this episode, Raquel Rosario Sanchez learns about the work of such a force of nature and Julie’s inspirational journey from survivor to activist game changer.
Julie Macfarlane
Listen Here (Transcript below):
Julie Macfarlane is a law professor whose research, writing and activism has resulted in a paradigm shift for the courts in Canada. In 2019, she was selected as one of Canada’s 25 Most Influential Lawyers and has recently published her latest book called Going Public. Notably, as founder of the National Self-Represented Litigant Project, Dr Macfarlane has inspired debate on self-representation and provided invaluable services, resources and education tools to individuals confronting the judicial system.
The National Self-Represented Litigants Project (NSRLP) builds on the National Self-Represented Litigants (SRL’s) Research Study conducted by Dr Julie Macfarlane from 2011-2013. The core of their work is to advocate for better and deeper understanding of the needs, motivations and challenges of self-represented litigants.
Julie’s podcast is called Jumping Off the Ivory Tower. Weekly episodes tackle topics from across the social justice universe, including stories of self-represented litigants, innovation and change in the legal profession, work on sexual violence, racism and Islamophobia, disability rights, and legal education.
Please support the global campaign to ban NDA’s, organised by Dr Julie Macfarlane and campaigner Zelda Perkins, when it launches in September 2021. The campaigns guiding principles are:
Legislative change to ban all NDAs (other than protection of commercial proprietary information) is our ultimate goal.
Promote and supported by regulatory reform of legal practice, and business codes of practice, banning NDAs.
Prioritizing the protection of victims, including identity protection (at their option) and no constraints on speaking about any personal experiences other than usual legal obligations (defamation).
Accountability of workplace harassers/ abusers/ bullies, tortfeasors, institutions and employers via radical transparency.
You can buy Going Public from Between the Lines and all respectable bookstores. Follow her personally on Twitter and the National Self-Represented Litigants Project as well. There is more information about her remarkable, ground-breaking work to uplift survivors and women’s rights on her personal website.
Transcript:
In conversation with Raquel Rosaria Sanchez from FiLiA.
Raquel: Hello everyone. Welcome to the FiLiA podcast. My name is Raquel Rosario Sanchez and I'm the spokeswoman for FiLiA. Today we are delighted to speak with a remarkable force of nature called Julie Macfarlane. She is a distinguished professor of law and a fierce advocate for survivors of sexual violence, as well as survivors of institutional abuse.
Julie Macfarlane is committed to making access to justice affordable to all. Her activism has resulted in a paradigm shift for the courts in Canada, notably, as founder of the national self-represented litigant project, she has inspired debate on self-representation and provided invaluable services, resources, and education tools to individuals confronting the judicial system, a professor of law and a distinguished university professor at the University of Windsor, for more than 25 years, she is also known for her writing on sexual violence and her advocacy for survivors as well as for her study of Islamic divorce. So Julie, your life is remarkable. It’s hard to know where to even begin. But first of all, how are you?
Julie: I'm good and thank you for that lovely introduction.
I think that part of what I want to say in this podcast to people listening is that we are all given different kinds of opportunities in our lives to try to make a difference. And really all I'm doing is trying to make a difference with the opportunities that I have. But thank you very much for that very nice introduction.
Raquel: Well, let's begin by addressing the fact that you are a professor of law and you have a career that spans over four different continents, right? You have taught law school in four different continents, researched and working on progressive causes that you feel very passionate about.
So how did you decide to become a professor?
Julie: Well, the answer to that question is entirely by fluke. I most certainly when I completed law school, when I was much, much younger, I was actually fairly disgusted with what I'd learned about the legal system. And I did not see myself, at that point in time as being any part of a legal system, I think I did something very melodramatic, like burning all my law notes in my back garden.
So I ended up teaching law simply because I was in a new city where the options for employment seem to be either working in the local grocery store, which I did do for a while, but I was exiled for trying to organise a labour protest. So the other option I had was to teach as a temporary adjunct sessional lecturer at the local law school and because I had been taught previously by a professor at my UK law school, he was willing to vouch for me.
So, by a completely serendipitous route, I became the first law professor that was ever appointed at University College Cork. And I realized that I loved teaching and that I saw an opportunity here to try to make a difference to the ways in which lawyers were being trained and taught that I hoped would make a difference to the ways in which they worked with their clients.
Raquel: Had you already had experience going through the justice system by the time that you decided to become involved?
Julie: No, I had not. I mean, I have only very recently actually had my own direct experiences of using the justice system or the legal system as I'm more comfortable calling it because for many people, it's not very just.
I've only had that experience in the last five years or so, as I have decided that I needed to confront some of the things that happened to me when I was younger.
Someone who abused me sexually from being in, in public life effectively where he could abuse others. But it's been an extraordinarily humbling experience because before then I had all this experience of training lawyers and lots of experience of doing research. I'm an empirical researcher. So I had for many, many years being gathering the stories of people who go through the legal system and realising just how awful that is.
Both for people who have lawyers who represent them, and then even more awful for people who don't have lawyers to represent them. But somehow, no matter how many stories I heard when it actually happened to me too, when I had my own personal experience, that really brought home to me in a whole different way, just how desperately unbalanced the legal system is.
And, you know, if you think about the fact that I, in the last five years in both the civil and the criminal case have had, you know, enormous advantages as somebody who was already trained in the law, understood what would happen and understood the culture of the legal system.
If it was as traumatic as it was for me with all of that background and, you know, relative confidence and familiarity, I can't even begin to imagine how traumatic it is for people who don't come from such a privileged place.
Raquel: Are you referring to the situation at your current academic institution? Where you're an academic and a distinguished professor in a top university in Canada, and you experienced significant institutional gas-lighting by this institution.
Essentially, there was a cover-up with your university. The university wanted to protect a colleague that was accused of sexual harassment of students. And you state that there is sexual harassment of students.
The university denied that this happened and discredited you including discrediting you in the media. After this colleague was terminated by the university, you discover documents that prove that there was harassment of students and faculty members so that you were right all along, but the university continues to deny it.
Julie: This, this is a different case. I mean, I've had a lot more experience in the legal system in the last five years than I have in the whole of the rest of my life and much more than I would ever like to have again, I have to say, but I was referring earlier to my own cases to try to remove a church minister from a position of power who had sexually abused me when I was a teenager, but you're quite right Raquel that there has been another issue involving my university.
I actually did know, as a matter of very close hand experience that this professor was sexually harassing students because the students came to me to tell me what was happening. And it was clear that this was a problem that had been going on for a long time. When the university finally did agree to investigate and ultimately to remove him, what I didn't expect was that they gave him a nondisclosure agreement.
And the first I realised of that was when I started to get phone calls from other university law schools, to whom he had applied for a job. And they were asking. Why did he leave Windsor? So in other words, they had not been told he was terminated for sexual and other misconduct of students. There were a whole variety of issues relating to intimidation and bullying and harassment, generally of students.
So, of course, when I was asked, I told the truth, and this was the point at which the university decided to discredit me and try to claim publicly that this was no such thing, and I didn't know what I was talking about, but of course I have the documentation now, I didn't then, showing the reasons for which he was removed, which were exactly what I knew them to be.
Also I have a copy now of the non-closure agreement (NDA) they gave him. So they promised to completely clean all of his personnel files, remove all complaints. And they also, I have this too, wrote him a letter of recommendation that he was then able to take to other universities, which was why I started getting those phone calls
Raquel: So they themselves said he had committed sexual harassment against students?
Julie: Correct. The letter that terminates him, it doesn't use the word sexual, but the harassment was sexual. It describes the harassment, and it's obviously sexual. And I know that from my own work with the students and the stories they have told me, but the words that it uses are harassment, intimidation, bullying, and abuse of power.
And if you put that next to their letter of recommendation, in which they say, he's a jolly good fellow and you know, why don't you hire him? You do wonder what that means for the morality of educational and other institutions that use NDAs. When you can say on the one hand, we need you to go because of your appalling misconduct and at the same time saying to another potential employer, this is a good person. Why don't you hire them?
Because obviously what that's doing is simply passing the trash, as it's sometimes called, passing someone, who's a problem onto another institution.
Raquel: And perhaps most importantly you're exposing that person to more vulnerable students.
Julie: Exactly. Exactly.
Raquel: You're a part of academia, but you've also encounter a lot of problems in academia.
From your point of view, why would an institution an academic institution essentially protect or cover up this kind of abusive behaviour?
Julie: Well, I think what's become increasingly clear. And again, let me just say, not just universities, but also schools, hospitals, any kind of corporation, organisations, such as the Boy Scouts or different kinds of organisational groups. And of course, churches are all giving NDAs.
And your question Raquel is why? They're doing it because they know that if it becomes publicly known that they have harboured somebody who has behaved in this way, because you realise of course that by the time these complaints finally come to a head, there has been years and years of complaints that haven't been taken notice, which have been swept under the carpet.
So by the time you get to the point that you're actually terminating someone, as in the case of my colleague, this has been going on for a long time. And so organisations don't want the stigma of it being known that they had such a person working for them. And they very likely did not meet their obligations to keep people safe, whether those were students, patients in a hospital, school children, or members of a church community, they don't want that kind of stigma.
So they have the same interest as the perpetrator, which is to cover it up. So this collusion fits very well together that they cover it up.
Raquel: Meanwhile, you have the victims who are the survivors who are left with the trauma and in some cases with the gaslighting and the institutions pretending that nothing happened to begin with.
Julie: I want to actually just, just sort of momentarily go back and emphasise that point. Raquel, because you mentioned institutional gaslighting. All of the people with whom I worked at the University of Windsor and I have, I have now left the University of Windsor in disgust. I haven't retired fairly obviously, but all of the students that I work with there and subsequently students that I've worked with in other universities facing the same issues, people that I work with and support who are bringing cases against church ministers and other harasses in other workplaces, because I hear from people all the time. It's the gaslighting and being told no, no, you're crazy. That is actually one of the very worst parts. I mean, many people have said to me that in some ways it's the gas lighting and the process they have to go through to get any kind of redress is in some cases as bad or worse than what actually happened to them in the first place, because it's such a betrayal of trust.
There's been quite a lot of work done on this idea of, of institutional betrayal now. And I think that if it's an institution that you feel some commitment to, maybe that's your church or your community group or your workplace or your school, and then you find that in fact, they put your interests behind those of someone who is a known harasser or a bully. And you also find that they're willing to call you a liar. I mean, of course, People get called liars all the time by more powerful employers. I think one of the things that's really interesting about what happened to me was I was one of the most senior people in the university. They were happy to call me a liar.
I just won the Order of Canada. They were still happy to call me a liar. So can you imagine how much worse it was for the students in that situation? And this continues to be the case across Canada and in other countries as well.
Raquel: So you were protecting and standing up for those students and the university was looking at you and saying, even though you're such a distinguished professor, we're going to try to tarnish you for essentially exposing abuse in the institution.
Julie: That's right. And I think it's a very cynical calculation. I mean, we don't tend to think of universities as corporations, but really they're no different in the sense that, you know, they want to make money and they make money based on their reputation and based on how many students want to study with them.
So anything that tarnishes that image is seen as a threat to the commercial profitability. And I think that wherever there is that at stake, then commercial profitability tends to take precedence over the right thing to do. And one of the thing I would mention Raquel, I don't know whether this is the right pace to mention it, but.
One of the things that I have found the most disturbing about my experiences and not just at my own institution, but others, is the reluctance of many other people who, like me, hold powerful positions, a professor holds a powerful position, who have been unwilling to speak up for students, who have just been, I sometimes say hiding under the bed because they know that becoming involved in a complaint brought by students against the faculty member is going to be painful.
But the lack of courage that I see being exhibited all around me, by people who I think are extremely privileged, is just truly shocking to me. And it tells us something about people's fear, I think, of being gaslit, of bad things being said about them, but Hey, you know, I feel like I've now got to the point in my life where many bad things have been said about me.
You know, starting from the beginning of my work as a reproductive rights activist in Ireland, where you can imagine many people said bad things about me in the 1980s, through my work in Hong Kong, where I set up a free legal advice clinic for women and was reviled in the media for encouraging women to divorce their husbands, all the way through my work with Muslim communities, which I got a lot of hate mail about that.
To me, it almost feels like if there's somebody out there saying bad things about me, well, that's probably because I'm being affective and doing the right thing.
Raquel: Yes. Yes, I agree. But there's an element of this that seems counterproductive. Like you would think that if an institution, be it the church or a corporation or an academic institution, if their interest was protecting their reputation, don’t you get more respect and support by publicly denouncing or taking a stand against people who are sexually harassing your students or abusing your students and their position seems to be to protect the harassers. That doesn't make any sense to me.
Julie: No, it's a very, very good point you make. And other people have said this. I spent several years trying to persuade the university of exactly that point.
And in particular, in relation to non-disclosure agreements, I spent several years trying to persuade them that if they came out and said, we're not going to do this any longer, because it's a really bad thing to pass the trash, that they would get a lot of terrific PR. There would be a lot of people who would see them as being, you know, the first to stand up and say, we did something wrong here and we're going to do it right in the future.
Raquel: And what was their response?
Julie: Their response was they weren't interested in changing at all. And after two years of trying to persuade them, writing policies for them, I finally realised that they were never going to do it. And that was when I turned my sort of lens, my perspective, away from just working in my own university, towards more internationally.
And this has led to the beginnings of a campaign that will be officially launched at the beginning of September, in which I have teamed up with Zelda Perkins. Zelda was the first woman to break her NDA with Harvey Weinstein, publicly, to stand up and, and call it out and break it.
And she and I have become very good friends. We are working together. At the moment we are talking to legislators and politicians in the UK, the Republic of Ireland in several different parts of Canada and several different parts of Australia about bringing forward new legislation, new law, which will take the option away from universities and other organisations and corporations, and will say that it's no longer legal to silence people and therefore enable someone who has perpetrated harassment and other kinds of misconduct to be secretly passed somewhere else.
Raquel: I was going to touch on the NDAs campaign in a little bit, but I just wanted to say that I do agree with you when you talk about how the gaslighting. You underestimate how profound the impact of that kind of abuse is.
And I've thought about this a lot. And I think that it really shakes you because you have no expectation of someone who harasses students, like you have no expectation of a bully. You have no expectations of someone who intimidates people, however, you do have expectations of an institution that claims to care about your wellbeing. If you experienced any sort of abuse, then the mask has already slipped. The abuse has already taken place, there's no hiding for the person who committed the abuse. But when it’s an institution that has policies that says there is no place for harassment in here. There is no place for rape or bullying in this institution. And you're watching that being done to you and being protected by the institution. It confuses your mental wellbeing.
Julie: Yes, it does. That's absolutely true Raquel. One thing that I will share with you is the story that I've explained is in some ways, a very simple one.
This was a known harasser. His behaviour was described as being an open secret on campus. This was known by everybody by the time we had persuaded the university to investigate him. Yet because of the way the university behaved and then subsequently thought it was appropriate to side with him. Oh. And so did his union by the way, which is also my union at the time. You start to wonder whether in fact you're really going crazy and you've missed something.
One of the students that I was the closest to who's still a very good friend. We had an agreement with one another that no matter what time of the day or night, and it was usually at night, if one of us woke up thinking, wait, am I going crazy here? Why are they protecting the harasser? that we could always text one another and say, please just remind me that we're not crazy. We had this little kind of code. And you know, we did that a few times because one or other of us we'd wake up at three o'clock in the morning and think. Wait, I must be missing something. How can this be happening? And I think that that feeling for people who are in many, many ways powerless, because I was a relatively powerful complainant, for people who are powerless and maybe have nobody to talk to about this and no one who can text them back in the middle of the night and say, no, you're not crazy. it's devastating.
This is about how institutions and organisations respond. And at the moment what they're doing in their responses, is just as the abusive behaviour in the first place.
Raquel: So let's talk about your campaign and non-disclosure agreements. So you're launching it towards the end of July.
Julie: No, we're going to launch at the beginning of September because we're aiming this at legislators. So when the parliaments of the world come back after the summer recess, which pretty much every parliament is on recess at the moment and will reconvene in September, that's when we're going to be launching, but I can certainly talk about the campaign and what we're aiming to do as we're gearing up for that launch.
Raquel: As you mentioned, is the campaign that you're launching with Zelda Perkins, who was one of the first woman to break her nondisclosure agreement with Harvey Weinstein, who is now a convicted offender.
The campaign states non-disclosure agreements or NDAs have become the default solution for organisations, corporations, and individuals and public bodies to settle cases of sexual misconduct, racism, pregnancy discrimination, and other human rights violations. Disagreements, which are being used to threaten people with legal consequences are being used to cover up abuse and in some cases, criminal acts. Not only are NDAs used to cover up abuse in workplaces schools, youth clubs, universities, and religious institutions, they also keep settlements secret where revealing the details like gambling addictions, paying off harassers with public funds, would embarrass the responsible party.
So you have joined forces with Zelda Perkins to stop the expanding misuse of NDAs by demanding new legislation and regulation to stop gag orders from being used to settle these cases about this campaign>
Julie: Well, both myself and Zelda, for reasons that are obvious, feel very strongly indeed about what happened to us and what we know is happening to hundreds of thousands of people at the moment. Originally non-disclosure agreements or NDAs were developed in the 1980s to protect trade secrets, especially during the tech bubble, when people started to develop new software, new communications languages, and there was an obvious need and I think a legitimate one for companies to try to keep information private to them, if it was something that they were using to trade.
So that was the original use of NDAs. Now they've basically turned everything that anybody ever experiences at work into a trade secret, so called, by saying that an NDA can stop you talking about it.
So the fact that people can't talk is nothing to do with the fact that they might want to protect their own privacy. Many, many people obviously do not choose to do what I did and to go public with what happened to them. And that's what one would expect. But most people want at least to be able to talk to their families or their friends. Or perhaps to a professional counsellor or a therapist.
What NDAs do is they take away the ability for people to do all of those things as well. And although technically speaking, they cannot take away the ability to report a crime to police, some of these NDAs are certainly forced upon women in a way that makes them believe that they would not be able to report to the police either without breaking their NDA.
And the people live in fear having signed up for something that they often didn't properly understand in the first place, because it's in very complicated legal language and it wasn't properly explained to them. And now they feel like they have this kind of threat hanging over them that if they even inadvertently or unintentionally say something about what happened to them, that they might be sued or taken back to court.
And what happens is that people are told you must sign this or you won't get a settlement. And of course, many, many people in this situation desperately need money. They need that settlement compensation to compensate for what has happened to them. And they're being told that they cannot have that unless they sign.
To be totally candid. This is bullshit because almost all cases, legal cases, settle before a trial. They have done now for 30 years and they've been settling without non-disclosure agreements for most of that time. But this is a current fashion, shall we say? that lawyers are highly complicit in for the most part.
And they tell people that they must sign in order to get it done. And so it's just been a kind of default as you explained earlier, that has been taking over and what Zelda and I doing is pulling the curtain back. And saying this isn't necessary. It's also immoral. It's also causing danger to other people because these folks then just get passed along and we need legislation to stop people doing it because evidently lawyers have adopted this as part of their practice. And now we need to take this away from them.
Raquel: I think it is so fascinating to be speaking with you today because well, everyone who will be listening to this, a lot of them will know that I, myself, am in litigation against the University of Bristol and there's been a lot of movement going on behind the scenes.
And one of the things that happened led me to learn about Zelda Perkins and I watched videos of her speaking about her situation with Harvey Weinstein and she talks about it. She was the assistant of this massive media Hollywood mogul. And she talks about how there was sexual harassment against her colleague and Zelda confronted Harvey Weinstein. And then their studios made both the woman who was harassed and Zelda, who was trying to protect her, they made both of these young women when they were very young women, like 25 or something, they made them sign NDAs. I remember that in one of the interviews she talks about being in a room full of lawyers who were obviously massively experienced, and she was just a 25-year-old, 20 something year old assistant who was being forced to sign or coerced to sign this agreement that prohibited her from speaking about what had happened, even with a counsellor or a therapist. Like there were all these clauses that you just cannot speak about it.
Julie: Those are standard clauses. People tend to say that, what happened with Zelda was an extreme version of an NDA. It isn't. I see those clauses in NDAs all the time now.
Raquel: Yeah. I just think it really takes my breath away to sort of see how this whole thing connects, but I also wanted to point out that, you know, NDAs are a formal agreement that you sign, but there's a lot of silencing that happens that is not signed. Like for example, in my dispute with the University of Bristol, they would argue that they never made me sign a nondisclosure agreement. But the reality was that when I filed my student complaint over bullying and harassment, what they immediately said is you cannot tell anyone that this is happening. You have to remain confidential, you have to maintain and protect confidentiality because this will protect the process. And that the facts of the matter are that that process took from January 2018 to December 2019. So almost two years in which you had an institution saying this is so confidential, you cannot talk about this with anyone.
And from the perspective, like looking back at that young woman in February 2018, you're having conversations with lawyers at this university, in another country. I'm not from the UK I’m from the Dominican Republic. And I'm having this conversation with these lawyers and they're saying confidentiality is the most important thing. You have to make sure that you never speak with anyone about this because otherwise you will ruin the process. And I can see now that the entire purpose of confidentiality was obviously to protect the institution,
Julie: To protect them and to shut you up.
Raquel: But it was framed as to say, no, no, no, you have to do it because this will help you.
When you were talking about the NDA I was just thinking, an NDA, you put your signature on it, but there is a lot of coercion that is happening. There's a lot of silencing.
Julie: And what you're talking about, Raquel about it being something that is a prerequisite to going into and making complaints, I'm seeing that all over the place as well.
We've actually just had a new process introduced in the Canadian Senate, which is part of our parliament for making complaints of sexual harassment, because there have been some scandals and that process also effectively requires people to sign a nondisclosure agreement before they even begin making the complaint.
Now, let me just point out as well that there's no reason that you can't sign a one-sided agreement that protects you. So if I was giving advice to someone who was going to speak to an investigator as part of a complaint, I would say you need to make sure that there is an undertaking to protect your identity. The person who's telling the story, the survivor, but there's no reason to make an agreement to protect the identity of the other person, the alleged perpetrator nor to protect the identity of the university or the institution. I mean, that's just complete nonsense. It can be something that protects the survivor.
And I think people are being told you can only have protection for yourself if you agree to protect the other parties too. And that's just wrong.
Raquel: In my case, the University of Bristol told me that I had to remain confidential about everything that had happened. I mean, the bullying that I was experiencing, because it was about protecting the process.
And then when they decided to terminate the process, they turn it around and said like, no, no, the purpose all along was to protect the bully.
Put yourself in the position of an international student in another country. I mean, and the reality is like, I'm from the Dominican Republic, I'm from the global south. You go to a university that is a top university in the UK. You have all these lawyers talking to you. You have no legal representation. You become intimidated. There's a massive power imbalance,
Julie: Huge power imbalance. I mean, really that's what all of this is about. I mean, where we began our conversation as well, which was on trying to use the legal system to pursue justice to get redress.
There is a massive power imbalance because many, many people who are bringing forward complaints as survivors don't have access to legal representation. And even when they do, that legal representation is often complicit in them signing an NDA. There is a very poor level of trauma informed practice out there in the legal profession.
There are exceptions. We do know, and we do see, and we glory in the fact that there are beginning to be exceptions to that, but they are very few exceptions. So in your position as an international student, and I hear a lot actually Raquel from international students. I mean, that is a group who are especially disadvantaged in all kinds of ways.
You're cut off from your family. You may not have as your first language, the language that the institution is working in. You're right, they are a very, very powerless group and they're being exploited in this way. And this is not the way that we ought to be responding to something that we know is an endemic problem in our culture. And that is sexual violence.
Raquel: How can we as FiLiA help the campaign to ban non-disclosure agreements?
Julie: Well, I would love it if FiLiA would consider, and I would provide you with the documentation for this, would consider becoming a formal ally of our campaign because we are beginning to build a list of formal allies and endorses individuals and organisations that will speak to media and on your own social media about the importance of this campaign and the importance of taking away this terrible scourge of NDAs that we're seeing at the moment.
So I'm really hoping that it can be an opportunity to empower people.
One of the things that we're going to have on our website, when it goes live is information for people who are being asked currently to sign an NDA, which will really set out in a very clear way, the deceit’s in that process and what it would really amount to and involved for them to sign an NDA and how that is not necessary for them to protect their own identity and confidentiality.
And there will also be information there for people who have signed NDAs and now regrets it, which I talked to a lot of those people all the time. And we are also putting a testimonies page up where people will be able to anonymously because we want to protect them anonymously, tell their story. And I'm hoping that that can really help to educate and empower others.
Raquel: Yes, I'll talk with the team about it, but I can see that we would obviously want to support this campaign.
I want to speak with you about your book Going Public, and there are other areas of your life that I would like to discuss with you. But before we move on from this university area, I have been meaning to ask you, I read about the case of sexual harassment that you spoke out about.
And I do, I did have the question of what if you were still a professor at that university, how did you cope being inside of the institution that was doing all of these things? So how did you survive that term of your life?
Julie: Well, first of all, I really appreciate you asking that because I think a lot of people don't really realise how hard it was.
It was a terrible time in my life. I was also, I'm a cancer patient and I was also going through chemotherapy at the time and the university knew all of this. Of course, how did I survive? Well, one of the ways that I survived was I spent as little time as possible actually in the law school, I would go for my students, but I would not be there when I didn't need to be there.
And I think the other thing that happened, and this is very important, is that the student movement and particularly an organisation called Students for Consent Culture, Canada, which works on sexual violence issues on university campuses, were enormously supportive of me. They organised the national petition. They were personally supportive to me. Colleagues and other institutions reached out to me. There was another national petition that went around amongst feminist law professors. So those were, you know, the bright moments and the things that sustained me. And I'm also very, very fortunate to have an incredibly supportive partner and kids who were absolutely behind me.
They were not saying, as you know, maybe sometimes happens in families, please don't get yourself into any more trouble, just forget it. They understood why I had to do this, but it was a very, very dark and difficult period. And it really did affect my belief, I think in universities as a force for good.
And in the lack of courage that so many people in strong positions in institutions will show about this particular issue. Very disappointing.
Raquel: Could you tell us about the moment that you decided I've had enough of trying to sustain both ideas in my head? The moment you decided that was you needed to leave.
Julie: I knew. Probably about a year and a half, two years into this, that I was going to have to leave, but I just couldn't be a part of this in the same way this institution, any longer. It was almost like there was a force field around me by this point. None of my immediate colleagues really communicated with me any longer.
I don't know whether they thought it was contagious or something, but I felt that if I was going to stay true to myself and also just kind of maintain my sense of self and sanity that I needed to separate myself from the university of Windsor. Now a lot easier said than done because the National Self-Represented Litigants Project, which I still direct, is hosted by the university of Windsor, but that's on its way to becoming independent in the sense that it's going to be a charity.
But you know, I was not willing to walk away from that until we had put it on a, on a strong financial footing that could move forward and that has begun to happen now. So it wasn't that it was easy to disentangle myself because there were projects that are extremely important that I had created. I wanted to make sure they would continue.
But it's very difficult to work in a situation when you have seen the very worst side of the institutional culture. And I have seen the very worst side of the institutional culture and the lack of caring. All the lip services paid to ‘we must protect students’ and ‘we must protect people who suffer sexual violence’ And it is just performative. It's not about actually doing anything meaningful and they weren't even prepared to hear the fact that it wasn't doing anything meaningful. So it wasn't possible for me to stay in that situation.
Raquel: Thank you for sharing that.
The realities that I know about your work, I found out about your work through the University of Bristol.
And I think you and I have shared some experiences, but something that we're also going to share.
So my case against the University of Bristol includes a negligence claim and you need expert’s reports, psychiatric experts reports on me. So the expert at the university suggested is a man called Tony Maden.
Julie: Oh no. Oh no.
Raquel: So they suggested Tony Maden, everyone can Google this person on their own. But the thing is that Googling him, I found out about your work. And I found out about the work that you do against clerical abuse and the work you do for survivors. And I found your book. I bought your book, there is no positives in my legal case against the University of Bristol. But the only thing that, that I'm grateful happened is that through their decision that they do want to stick with Tony Maden, that this is the person that they want to be working with me through that decision and their power. I found out about your work.
And now I really want to continue supporting your work, particularly your campaign against NDAs. But yes, I think that that is something that we're going to share.
Julie: I had no idea Raquel until you told me that. Tony Maden is completely discredited as a psychiatrist and a psychiatric expert witness.
And there has actually been recently, I don't know whether you've seen this, that has actually been a court decision in which a court decided that they would not rely on his evidence because it was not seen as being sufficiently credible because of the number of complaints that have been brought against him by survivors and complaints made including one by myself to the General Medical Council.
Now, every time the General Medical Council receives the complaint, they just whitewash it. But you know, these things do have a way of sticking to people because people keep complaining. The idea though that it has taken this amount of efforts to stop the church, using someone who is known to be unqualified for what he's doing and completely partisan and biased.
I mean, that's shocking.
Raquel: The university of Bristol is very confident in his skills and his work, and they are determined that he's the right person to use
Julie: I’ll send you the court decision because you might want to use it sometime in the future.
Raquel: What was your experience with him?
Julie: Well, he was the expert who examined me as I was suing civilly, suing the Anglican church for clerical abuse that had occurred when I was much younger. And I knew something about him beforehand. And when I was interviewed by him, it was completely obvious that what he was doing was trying to find an alternative explanation for any kind of ongoing and chronic PTSD that I had.
It was not possible for him to say, I didn't have chronic PTSD, which would cause my own psychologist had described in the court materials and was the consequence in part of that clerical abuse, but he tried to come up with alternative explanations. The fact that I had cancer, the fact that my mother and I had a very difficult relationship, and this is what he does in every single case, he minimises the impact of the abuse that is the sub subject of the legal action.
And he makes up basically and fabricates other reasons why people might have ongoing trauma.
Raquel: Well, I can see why the University of Bristol is so keen on him.
Julie: Yeah. But they may find it a regrettable decision at some point, because I think the end is coming now for Tony Maden. I think that we're starting to see the tide turning there.
Raquel: I want to speak with you about what you've just mentioned, that you are a survivor of clerical abuse by the Church of England and you are massively courageous because you spoke out about I and it's such a challenging topic.
Would you, could you speak to our audience about your decision-making to speak out?
Julie: First of all, I would not say I was massively courageous. I think that one of the things that people don't necessarily understand is that the world isn't divided into survivors who are courageous and speak out and survivors who aren't courageous and don't speak out. The pressure on survivors, first of all, not to believe in themselves.
And you know, the whole experience of being a victim of sexual abuse, is in itself a gaslighting experience because you're basically being told something which you know, is terrible, is really okay, at least from the point of view of the perpetrator. So that experience really undermines people's trust in themselves. And the belief that they really are not the person to blame. There is so much self-blaming that happens from victims.
So I don't think that we’re divided into people who are courageous and people who aren't. I think that different circumstances come together to either make it possible or in some cases maybe not possible. And in other cases, not possible for a very long time for people to speak out.
In my case, this abuse happened to me. It was one of a number of experiences I had when I was younger of sexual abuse and rape. And this happened to me when I was 16 years old. It wasn't until I was in my fifties that I actually did something about it.
So that's a really, really long time. And the reason that I felt that I was able to do something about it has two parts. One is that I felt really, really guilty that I knew this person was still out there practicing as a church minister and almost certainly still abusing young women and girls. And secondly, because I was at the point in my life where I had a very strong and supportive partnership where my kids were, you know, I wasn't going to have any more children. They were young still, but I felt like, I had my family life and I was also in a position in my own work where I was finally able to feel relatively financially secure.
And I think those were the conditions that enabled me to do this, to respond to what had been a guilty conscience all these years of not speaking up. And in fact, when I did speak up and then subsequently there was a civil case. There was subsequently a criminal trial as well because another woman came forward when she read about my civil case in the papers.
She came forward and told exactly the same story about the minister and being abused by him several years later. And when I heard her testify, well, I didn't hear her testify, but because I couldn't be in the courtroom, but when I knew that she would testify and I listened to her video recording in the criminal case, I wept because I felt like if I had come forward earlier, maybe that wouldn't have happened to her, maybe he would have already been removed.
So for me, it was a combination of feeling like I had to do something about it, but also finally being in a place where I felt strong enough to do so.
Raquel: Well, thank you for explaining that and I can see your point of view. And I agree, you know, there's so many factors playing out in this kind of situation that determined whether you can come forward or you cannot come forward, when you do it, are you stable enough to do it, who else do you think you might be protecting by not coming forward yet.
What was your experience going through the legal system against the church of England?
Julie: Well, it was terrible because what I had naively imagined was that when the case was filed, when my solicitor filed the case on my behalf, that you know, the evidence was so clear and I had such credibility as a witness, as a law professor. I just imagined that they would Google me and then decide, well, we probably should just settle this and keep it quiet. So that was my naive belief and it wasn't at all what happened. In fact, they spent two years basically pissing me around and refusing to meet to talk about this.
And so. I decided that I needed to write something to call out the behaviour of the churches lawyers because the church says publicly, as of course do universities and other organisations, you know ‘we’re so concerned about survivors. And we're so concerned about doing the right thing’ but then privately, they behave completely differently.
And I wanted to call out the fact that the church kept saying they were very, very sorry about clerical abuse, but they were fighting my claim, which was so clearly credible, tooth and nail and refusing to negotiate.
So I wrote a piece for the Church Times, which is the world newspaper of the Anglican church, and a very courageous editor was willing to publish it, even though there were numerous threats of legal action against him for doing so by the church.
And once that happened, by the following week, suddenly the church wanted to talk to me and so I told them that what I wanted as an agreement in my case, because I wanted this to be different for other people going forward, was for them to change the entire claims process for survivors and to ensure that people had support and to ensure that they were treated respectfully to ensure that they were not told to sign NDAs and that they did not use bogus arguments with them about consent.
Because church ministers just like university professors are in a position of power. And the idea that the church was still claiming, and they tried to claim this in my case, too, that as a 16-year-old girl, I was somehow consenting to being sexually abused over a year by a church minister. I mean, it's just ludicrous, we know better than this.
And so the policy that was put in place by these churches insurers was the outcome of my negotiations with them over my own civil case.
Raquel: Well, when you were talking about the power imbalance, I was also thinking, well, if you add the faith factor and you've been an impressionable 16-year-old girl, like obviously it's not equivalent.
Julie: No, no, no. I mean, I thought this was a man of God. I went to him with doubts about my faith. I was a Christian and he told me that he would help me to resolve my doubts. But apparently the way I was to do that was to give him oral sex on a regular basis.
Raquel: That's awful. This maybe a very personal question, but did you lose your faith as a result of him?
Julie: Oh, absolutely. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.
Not just my faith.
For very, very long time, it was very, very hard for me to be able to relate to anyone I knew who had any kind of religious commitments at all, which, you know, isn't really healthy because people choose different religious commitments as expressions of their values. And, you know, the work that I actually did for a number of years with Muslim communities in North America, I think has really helped me to re-establish a respect for people who hold genuine religious beliefs. But it certainly took away my faith.
And as I say, for a long time, made me feel very, very, very negative about any kind of organised religion.
Raquel: Yes, naturally. So I want to ask you about your role.
You are the Director of the National Self-Represented Litigants Project. The website is representingyourselfcanada.com.
The National Self-Represented Litigants project builds on the national self-represented litigants research study conducted by you, Dr Julie Macfarlane from 2011 to 2013.
In the core of the project's work is to advocate for better and deeper understanding of the needs, motivations, and challenges of self-represented litigants.
Now the legal system is not generally sympathetic to claimants who represent themselves. I know that's an understatement. I studied a lot of critical race theory when I was in Oregon.
And I'm sympathetic to the view that the justice system exists to protect the interest of people who are rich and powerful.
So what inspire you to create that project?
Julie: Well, the research that I did that you just referred to was to collect the stories of people who are representing themselves across Canada and their stories that they told me.
This research now has been replicated in a number of other countries, including New Zealand, Northern Ireland, and the U S and the stories that they told me were just astoundingly consistent.
In no other piece of qualitative research that I've done in my life, have I ever come across such consistency in people's stories and exactly the same results came out of the work in the U S Northern lions and New Zealand as well.
And basically people were saying. It's not that I think I can be a good lawyer. I mean, there's this whole kind of stereotype that self-represented people are crazy people who think that they can play act at being lawyers, that is not what's going on here. People are representing themselves for a very simple reason.
They can't afford a lawyer. And given the costs, the hourly cost of lawyers, most of us can't afford a lawyer for more than a very short period of time and public legal aid no longer covers very many people at all. So you've got the shrinking of public assistance and the increase of the private, hourly rates of lawyers.
And the result is that most of us fall into the middle. We can't afford a lawyer. So I wanted to with the project, continue to build on that research to raise awareness that this was what was really going on, that painting people who go to court without lawyers, as troublemakers, who are just trying to disrupt the system in this really pompous way that many people still think about them, including unfortunately many lawyers and judges still think about self reps that they're just doing this to be annoying.
People are doing this because they're desperate they're doing this because they don't have any other alternative, if they want to ensure that they get some child support or they get access to their children, or they can bring an action for discrimination against their employer or some other human rights abuse.
That's what the goal was here and continues to be the goal. I think we've started to move the needle on the understanding of the public and the legal profession of what self-representation is really being caused by. And what we've tried to do is to continuously develop resources.
So for example, starting in January of 2022, we have been funded to run an online school for family self-represented litigants, who will be able to take part in a 12 class course online that we will be offering them to try to get them both practically and emotionally ready to represent themselves.
It's still going to be really hard, but at least they can feel some support. And that's been another very important part of the project to connect self-represented litigants with one another. And you know, people are extraordinary. People support one another, they go to one another's court dates and, you know, go have coffee afterwards.
They are bonded by their common miserable experience.
But I want to say one other quick word about the people who weren't part of my study and who don't go to court as self-represented litigants. And those are people who don't have any idea of how even to begin to do this.
And I'm talking about people, for example, in the most vulnerable groups, indigenous people, people with disabilities, especially people with cognitive disabilities, people whose first language, isn't the language of the courts.
People who are newly arrived, immigrants, all of these groups, they don't even try. Because they can't even imagine being able to do this. So as well as being very concerned about people who go through the process of self-representation and are treated miserably, I'm also very concerned about the people who just aren't even bothering to use the legal system, because they feel, probably rightly, that it's hopeless to do so without the lawyer.
Raquel: Yes. And that stereotype that if you attempt to represent yourself, it's because you want to be disruptive. That's so beneficial to the lawyers who are, you know, making a ton of money and to the powerful institutions who depends on those claimants being discredited.
What have you heard back from those litigants who are representing themselves?
What has been their experience based on your study and your project?
Julie: It's just miserable, really, they feel they're not treated with respect by many of the actors within the legal system. They begin by feeling often relatively optimistic because they look on Google and there seem to be a lot of resources that would help them do this themselves.
But when they actually start to do it, they realise that the resources aren't really very user-friendly, which is why we've tried to develop better ones. And that, every step of the way is going to be very, very difficult. Plus, we know from quantitative data that it's very often the case, usually the case, it won't surprise you Raquel, that self-represented litigants lose their cases.
So the experiences is one of misery. You know, there are very occasional exceptions to that, but generally speaking, it's a terrible experience and it's not giving people a meaningful access to justice.
Raquel: Would you say that in that sense, the justice system is working as it was intended?
Julie: I think it's working as it was intended if everybody has an expert agent. Unfortunately, that reality is no longer the case. It's a system that's been designed by lawyers for lawyers, and it rests on the assumption that everybody has a lawyer helping them, who can translate the language and understand the conventions and everything else, who are part of the club that gets it, but if you're in the legal system and you're not part of that club, well, maybe the system is working the way that the lawyers want it to work, but it's certainly not working the way that serves the interests of the people.
Raquel: I want to speak with you about your book Going Public.
Your book is called Going Public, a survivor's journey from grief to action. And the book is described as:
Going Public merges, the world of personal and professional activism in scholar. Drawing upon decades of legal training, Julie Macfarlane decodes, the well-worn methods used by churches, schools and state to silence survivors from first reporting to cross-examination to non-disclosure agreements. At the same time, she lays bare the isolation and exhaustion of going public in her own life. As she takes her abuser to court challenges her colleagues, and weather it's a defamation lawsuit, the result is more than a memoir. It is a courageous and essential blueprint on how to go toe to toe with the powers behind institutional abuse and protectionism.
So, tell us about the moment you decided, you know what? I want to write a book about this because I know that my experience is not rare and there are many more who are going through this and might need to hear these words.
Julie: Well, it's a good question. I'm not sure there was an actual moment that I decided, but I had thought that I wanted to write a book about the different kinds of activism I've done at different points in my life on different issues.
Many, many of them women's issues. I had a, kind of an outline of what that book would look like. And one of the chapters was going to be my work on sexual violence, and I thought I would just start where I felt like starting, you don't have to start at the beginning. So I started by writing the chapter on sexual violence. And then I realized that this was going to be a whole book because there was so much still happening. It was actually still going on at the time as I was writing it, I was going through the criminal trial, which was two criminal trials as I was writing the book as I was finishing it off and also the defamation action against me.
So I felt that I had a story that lots of other people could relate to. And that I was, again, privileged to be able to tell because I'm accustomed to writing, I'm a writer by trade. And I knew that I would be able to, although it was very different from anything I'd ever written before, I knew that I would be able to write this in a way that could be meaningful to other people.
And I hope to give them some support and recognition and call out. I mean, this book is for all the women and girls who have suffered sexual violence, whether or not they're ever going to be public in their disclosures, whether or not they're ever going to bring forward a formal complaint, but it's a recognition and acknowledgement of what they have experienced.
And I think that because I am so candid about how long it took me to come to terms with what happened to me and how deeply I buried it for so many years before I finally was able to do something. I think I'm showing my vulnerability in a way that I hope will help other people to feel that it's okay to have their own vulnerability.
Raquel: Your book is so helpful, really it is and you're a very powerful writer. Your book has been very challenging for me to read. I have it in my hand right now. It has been very challenging for me to read because it feels like, now, I'm in the middle of litigation against the university. And it feels like I have your voice. I mean, I just heard your voice right now when we started this podcast, but it feels like there's someone right next to me who is walking with me.
And it feels very raw and very vivid, you know, but that aspect that you mentioned, you know what, this is an acknowledgement that everything that is happening, that you described about the whole way of institutional abuse, how these power entities work. It's an acknowledgement that is not only in your head, you're not the only one who knows that these things are wrong. And I just wanted to say that that aspect of seeing in black and white, a woman who has gone through similar stuff, putting down pen to paper and saying, this is wrong and this is everything that has happened to me. That's so significant.
Julie: Well, thank you, Raquel. That's really why I wrote this book. And that means a great deal to me to hear you say that. And I hope lots of other people will read the book and feel the same way. I've heard from literally hundreds of people since this book came out, men as well as women, and it's been tremendously rewarding to know that it has been helpful and it has touched people.
Raquel: We will put the link to the book in the texts for the podcast. It’s very meaningful. You know, it's one of those books that is not an easy read, but someone's with you. Well, at least I feel like someone's with me while I'm going through this.
Julie: I’m really glad. And it's also supposed to be empowering because we can turn this into a story of our own empowerment too.
Raquel: So is it safe to say that you don't regret going public?
Julie: No, I don't regret it for a second. Not for a second.
Raquel: I wanted to ask you just as a final question.
If you, if you could speak to women and girls, to everyone who's going through similar situations like we've talked about, institutional abuse from universities, from the church within the legal system, if you could speak directly to someone who is going through the situations that you have experienced and feels overwhelmed. It feels at so many points, you feel overwhelmed, exhausted. You feel like you're going mentally insane. You feel demoralised. If you could speak to someone, a young woman, a woman, a girl who's at that stage, what would you say to them?
Julie: I would say that I have never yet met a survivor who regrets telling their story at least to me, or, possibly to the family as well. That I have never come across anyone who wishes they had never started to talk about it.
What people always say is that although the journey to disclose whether that's to family or to friends or in therapy or wherever it is, although the journey to disclosure is a very, very tough one, they are so happy that they have disclosed and that that's the beginning of their own healing.
And I would say that if you can find one person that you can tell your story to and who, you know, will walk with you through this, you will be able to do this. You will be able to do this and you will ultimately come out a stronger and healing. Not healed perhaps, but a healing person.
And I would really encourage people to find that one person to find a way that they can at least talk about this with one other human being. And they will realise so quickly that their experiences are shared by so many other people and they will feel validated and they will feel recognised.
Raquel: Abuse, praise and silence.
Julie: Which is exactly why we have to ban NDAs now.
Raquel: Yeah. It relies on people, you realise on a cultural fear, intimidation and silence. So I think that is so powerful to realise that, you know what going public doesn't mean that you have to get on the most widely read newspaper or TV show on the land. It just also means talking to someone that you can trust.
Julie: Just talking to somebody.
Raquel: Thank you so so much, Julie.