Salon.com has an interesting article by Rebecca Traister which presents evidence that FOX News commentator Rachel Marsden falsely accused a Canadian professor of rape, seriously damaging the man's career and life.

According to Traister, Marsden had been very dismissive of the damage caused to the falsely accused Duke University lacrosse players, and perhaps had her own, personal reasons for it. Traister writes:

"Marsden [dismissed] possible repercussions for the woman who claimed she was raped by members of the Duke University lacrosse team a year ago. 'Charges are laid, charges are dropped,' said Marsden. 'It happens all the time. Unless she can get charged with mischief and they can prove she lied, then no, [she shouldn't be punished]. That's the process and the process works.' But, argued [FOX News commentator Gutfeld], 'Don't you think that being accused of rape is as bad as being raped? Those guys' lives were ruined!' Marsden bit back, 'Let's give it 10 years and see if their lives were ruined.'

"...in the Duke exchange, any viewer who knew anything about Marsden, whom Fox is clearly grooming for brand-name pundit stardom, might have felt a fleeting moment of sympathy for her. That's because the 31-year-old columnist is already well known in her native Canada as an oft-accused and once-admitted stalker who made questionable rape charges of her own 10 years ago, in a case that eventually cut short the career of a university president and changed the tenor of harassment cases all over Canada. In 1999, a professor at the same university went to the police with charges Marsden was stalking him, and in 2004 she pleaded guilty to criminally harassing a former Vancouver radio host...

"[Marsden was a competitive swimmer.] It was swimming that led Marsden to meet Liam Donnelly at the Westminster Club where they both swam in 1990, when she was 15 and he 22. Three years later she enrolled to study biology at the famously progressive, Utopian Simon Fraser University, where Donnelly was swim coach. In 1995, she accused Donnelly, who was not her coach, of sexual harassment and date rape, claiming that he repeatedly molested her over the course of a 16-month friendship/relationship. Donnelly claimed he was innocent, and on the advice of a lawyer, boycotted the university's investigation into Marsden's claims.

"In 1997, SFU fired Donnelly. The university agreed to pay Marsden $12,000 to compensate her for injury to her feelings and the academic scholarship she lost during the case. It was reported that they denied her request to be part of the hiring process for a new swim coach.

"Donnelly fired back, alleging that it was Marsden who had done the harassing. He handed over photos of the scantily clad student that he claimed she had slipped under his door, and released an e-mail she had sent him after the date of the alleged molestation that read in part, 'I suggest that you just relax and let me undress you, touch you ... If you want, you can undo the garter and take off my stockings, take off my lace bra and underwear, and let your hands explore my body wherever they want to.'

"According to Donnelly, Marsden had been stalking him for years, making multiple hang-up calls and showing up at his home. Donnelly claimed that this behavior had begun as early as 1992 but had worsened over time. He alleged that by 1995, someone he believed to be Marsden had vandalized his car, strewn condoms in his driveway, posted graffiti advertising his number as a phone-sex line in campus bathrooms, subscribed to Playboy in his name, and left phone messages for him with a voice-altering machine. Donnelly later told the press: 'She was everywhere. She would turn up at events where I was working. She was phoning me all the time ... She admitted she bought a voice-altering machine. That was the one that scared me the most. It sounds like the devil.'

"Donnelly had lodged complaints with his local police departments about these occurrences in 1992, and again in 1995, when he named Marsden as the person he suspected was behind them. Sgt. Don Brown, the policeman who had investigated his claims in 1995, told the Vancouver Sun that Marsden was not charged at the time, because 'there were lots of little bits and pieces, but some of it was hard to attribute to one person'...

"Marsden admitted to some of Donnelly's counter-charges, while refusing to back away from her rape claim. She held a press conference in which she said she was a virgin at the time of the rape; she asserted that she gave Donnelly the sexy photos of herself after he had picked them out of her modeling portfolio, and she played the tape of a male voice she said was Donnelly's saying, 'Call me.' She claimed to have sent the suggestive e-mails in 'a desperate attempt to entice [Donnelly] into meeting with me so I could obtain accountability and an apology from him for the abuse, harassment and rape I suffered at his hands.' She had also admitted to sending him the Playboy subscription, reportedly telling the SFU panel in 1996 that she did it 'with the hope that he would be able to take out his sexual frustrations on the magazine instead of on real women.'

"Two months after his firing, Donnelly was rehired, exonerated by the university of all charges. According to the mediation agreement between SFU and Donnelly, the original findings of the harassment panel had been based on Marsden's credibility, which had been cast into doubt by 'inconsistencies between her statements before the panel and her response to Mr. Donnelly's harassment complaint [against her].' The school paid Donnelly $35,000 in legal fees and expunged his record of harassment charges. Marsden also kept her $12,000, meaning that SFU paid out to both sides of the conflict. An examination into what went wrong with the university inquiry culminated in the eventual resignation of president Stubbs, who stayed on as a history professor at the university.

"Simon Fraser's harassment policy coordinator Patricia O'Hagan, with whom Marsden became close during the university's investigation into her claims, also left her job in the wake of the scandal. O'Hagan later alleged that Marsden had harassed her, claiming to reporters that the student had called her more than 400 times, tracked her down after she'd changed her number, and signed letters, 'love from your daughter who loves you a lot.' Marsden responded in kind, claiming that she referred to O'Hagan as mother to 'set boundaries' with the older woman, who she said had repeatedly hugged and kissed her. 'I felt strange,' Marsden told the press, 'and wondered what her intentions were.' O'Hagan's lawyers told the press she 'vehemently denie[d]' that she had had 'any type of physical relationship' with Marsden. Two days after O'Hagan's harassment claim, it was reported that Marsden showed up at a conference at which O'Hagan was the guest speaker."

According to Traister, Marsden also was accused of stalking criminology professor Neil Boyd,  author of Big Sister: How Extreme Feminism Has Betrayed the Fight for Sexual Equality, and Marsden pled guilty to criminal harassment against former Vancouver radio host Michael Morgan in 2002.

Read Traister's full article here.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 1:46 am and is filed under Feminism/NOW, Men's rights, Crime/Criminal Justice System/Police, False Accusations, Gender Issues (Misc.), Women's Studies. You can trackback from your own site.