Blasted as Predators, Professors Are Fighting Back With Lawsuits

Over the span of several months, Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim says he watched his reputation plummet from that of a highly respected scholar to “a pariah” in his field. It all started, the McGill University professor insists, with a consensual relationship with an undergraduate student that exploded into scandal. Now he’s suing a student and a colleague for defamation, accusing them of instigating a smear campaign that he says sank his tenure bid and destroyed his career.

Ibrahim, an assistant professor of Islamic law at McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies, joins a growing list of faculty members accused of sexual misconduct who are taking their accusers to court. The trend has sparked fears that it could make victims of harassment and assault even more reluctant to file complaints and bystanders less likely to speak up.

But for those who feel they’ve been unfairly swept up in a movement to identify and punish abusers, defamation suits serve as both a warning and a bid for redemption.

Ibrahim suggested he had little to lose when he filed a $600,000 defamation suit last month against Sarah Abdelshamy, a McGill student, and Pasha M. Khan, an assistant professor and colleague at the Islamic studies institute.

He’d already been denied tenure and concluded that, his reputation in tatters, he’d never find another job in his field.

The student he sued wasn’t the one with whom he’d admitted having a yearlong sexual relationship, but instead one he contended spread misinformation and gossip about him. The relationship he admitted to in his defamation suit started in the spring of 2014, after the student took a class from him. In an email on Saturday, Ibrahim said “She was not my student when we became involved.” He said the relationship ended in the of spring 2015, and that she worked as his research assistant for several months after it started. A university policy that discourages, but doesn’t ban, relationships between teachers and students didn’t take effect until 2016.

Abdelshamy took a class from him in 2017 and got upset during a heated discussion about Islamophobia, which she later wrote about in a column in the student newspaper. According to the lawsuit, she vowed to get Ibrahim fired, and, based on rumors that had been circulating, labeled him a rapist during a university meeting about a new campus policy on sexual violence. His colleague, Khan, had warned at least one student to be careful around Ibrahim.

In an email to a doctoral student looking to change supervisors, which the student later shared with Ibrahim, Khan wrote that “Ahmed Ibrahim has been guilty of having relationships with multiple undergraduate students” and that Khan’s own students “were subject to Prof. Ibrahim’s amorous attentions.”

Last fall stickers appeared in campus bathrooms branding Ibrahim a sexual predator who was up for tenure.

In May he learned that his tenure bid had been denied, a decision he believes was heavily influenced by what he considers a libelous campaign to discredit him.

In the lawsuit, Ibrahim’s lawyer said his client’s accusers had portrayed him without evidence as someone who “manipulated vulnerable young women into sleeping with him.” His sex life, the lawsuit states, is no one’s concern and “certainly should not have been brought to his place of employment or his tenure-review process.” As the case has splashed across social media and local newspapers, “all potential employers, regardless of the field, can find out about the rumors in the click of a mouse.”

A central question in this case and similar ones is whether a consensual relationship is possible between an undergraduate student and a professor, given the inevitable power difference between them. When rumors circulated that Ibrahim had been sexually involved with multiple students, he was branded a rapist and predator. His lawyer thinks that’s unfair and a sign that the #MeToo movement has gone too far. Ibrahim’s accusers counter that such behavior shouldn’t be tolerated and that students and faculty members have a duty to warn one another when someone who abuses his authority poses a danger to students.

‘A Message to Survivors’

Carly N. Mee, interim executive director of the victims’-rights group SurvJustice, says that “there’s definitely been an uptick” in defamation suits, which she views as a strategy to silence survivors. “It sends a message to survivors that if they file a complaint, they’re going to put themselves at risk for a huge emotional and financial burden even if they’re telling the truth.”

When word of Ibrahim’s defamation suit broke this month, the Students’ Society of McGill University issued a statement calling the lawsuit “blatant intimidation” meant to silence students who have been protesting what they see as the university’s inadequate response to sexual-misconduct complaints.

“We made it clear to the administration that when institutional complaints procedures are inadequate, and when known predators remain employed year after year, students have no option but to share knowledge informally in order to help protect one another,” the statement says. “The fact that a student is now facing a defamation lawsuit for doing just that is a stark indictment of McGill’s institutional culture and its lack of proper accountability mechanisms.”

Similar statements came from students within the Islamic Studies program and McGill’s Black Students’ Network.

A McGill spokesman said the university doesn’t comment on matters that are before the courts. But in a written statement, university officials denied that campus leaders had ignored reports of sexual misconduct by faculty members, saying the university “does not tolerate sexual misconduct in any form.”

Abdelshamy declined to comment, but her lawyer, Audrey Boctor, released a statement saying her client is being sued “for speaking out against inappropriate conduct” in a university setting.

“We will defend her right to do so,” Boctor added. “Lawsuits like this are very troubling because they are extremely intimidating and can have a chilling effect on students and others who might otherwise come forward.”

In an email to The Chronicle, Ibrahim characterized the criticism aimed at him as “mobbing” and suggested that it was at least in part racially based. “Generally in new mobbing strategies in academia, the issues at stake include the utilization of racial stereotypes and the general atmosphere on campus around sexual politics to censor certain class discussions and advance ideological agendas,” he wrote.

He cited an article by Eve Seguin, a professor of political science at the University of Quebec at Montreal who suggested that pampered, prickly students who are too quick to equate sex with danger sometimes take aim at “a new figure of bogeyman: the ‘professor-predator’ who harasses and assaults students.”

‘A Dim View of #MeToo’

Other professors who have been accused, anonymously, of sexual harassment have complained that “mobbing” can turn to vigilante justice when their accusers feel the university isn’t taking their complaints seriously enough.

Ibrahim’s lawyer, Julius H. Grey, declined to discuss the specifics of the case, but said that, in general, “I take a dim view of #MeToo.” The movement has resulted, he says, in “punishing someone based on mere accusations for things that are sometimes serious, sometimes not, and sometimes for acts that were considered acceptable at the time they happened.”

Grey likens the movement to McCarthyism, saying both are excessive responses to real threats that end up dragging innocent people through the mud.

Brett A. Sokolow, a Title IX legal expert whose Ncherm Group advises colleges on a variety of risks, said he’s seen a slow increase over the past few years in the number of defamation cases filed by accused professors.

“Sometimes, a defamation suit is the desperate tactic of the guilty,” he wrote in an email. “Other times, faculty members feel they are facing false allegations, and a suit is either the only way to prove that, or a way for them to seek compensation for their reputational harm.”

Most allegations that have emerged in the #MeToo era are credible, Sokolow said, but as credible allegations have increased, so too have baseless ones. That results in more defamation suits, which can backfire when they are seen as an act of retaliation against someone who has already been victimized.

Khan, the faculty member accused of defamation, did not respond to requests for comment, but his supporters have been vocal.

“After this case, there will be even fewer men in academia that would risk their careers to warn students about a male colleague who abuses his power,” said Simona Sharoni, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Merrimack College. Sharoni, a leader in a group called Faculty Against Rape, faced a fierce backlash herself after reporting on a colleague at a conference who jokingly asked for the lingerie department while they were in an elevator together. Sharoni sees both the threats against her and the defamation suit at McGill as evidence of an “escalating backlash against the #MeToo movement.”

A Student’s Account

In all of the recent public discussion about Ibrahim’s reputation, few details have emerged about the specific behavior he is accused of.

McGill’s current guidelines, updated in 2016, discourage intimate relationships between teachers and students but don’t ban them outright. The guidelines state: “Although consent to sexual activity may legally be given within such a relationship, consent is vitiated where it was induced by conduct that constitutes an abuse of the relationship of trust, power, and authority between a member of the teaching staff and their student.” That’s open for interpretation, but the way the student group reads it, sex between a faculty member and student is inherently a violation of trust given the power dynamics involved.

The university is reviewing that policy as part of a broader attempt to strengthen and streamline responses to sexual misconduct, officials say. Starting this fall, it will also have a special investigator to look into all reports of sexual misconduct.

Back in 2015, an anonymous student wrote an article, published in the McGill student newspaper, that recounted her intimate relationship with an unnamed professor. The essay described how a policy that doesn’t clearly ban sex between professors and students can lead to confusion and hurt. The McGill student group that blasted the defamation lawsuit says the piece is “widely known to have been written about” Ibrahim. But because the names of both the student and the professor are omitted, Ibrahim’s lawyer says there’s no way to prove that. The author tells how she and her professor became sexually involved after she took a course from him and became his research assistant.

She didn’t file a complaint, she wrote, because she’d heard that the process was traumatizing and might lead nowhere.

Universities on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border are re-evaluating their policies, spurred by legal challenges from both accusers and the accused.

In 2016 a professor at the University of California at Berkeley filed defamation suits against three students who had spoken out publicly about the sexual harassment they said they’d suffered before he was fired last year.

Blake Wentworth, an assistant professor in the department of South and Southeast Asian studies, accused the women in two pending cases of defamation and “intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

A lawyer representing the women said California is one of more than two dozen states with so-called anti-SLAPP laws that protect against meritless lawsuits that are meant to keep people from speaking out about matters of public interest. (The acronym stands for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.)

The increase in defamation suits, in the United States, at least, may be due in part to the messages coming from the Trump administration that campus adjudication efforts had tilted too much in favor of the accusers. The Education Department, under Betsy DeVos, its secretary, scrapped certain Obama-era guidelines that had put pressure on colleges to quickly respond to reports of sexual violence. It released interim guidance that gave colleges a little more leeway in how they act on complaints. Those who complain that the accused aren’t getting a fair break have gotten a sympathetic ear in the current administration.

Last year a top Education Department official told The New York Times that 90 percent of campus sexual-assault complaints “fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk’” and involve a regretful female student.

Even though the official, Candice E. Jackson, later apologized, the impression that the administration didn’t believe most accusers stuck, said Colby Bruno, a lawyer at the Victim Rights Law Center, in Boston.

“If the message being sent from above is, You don’t need to take these complaints seriously because 90 percent of the accusers are liars and you’ve already been harmed, what good would it do to complain?”

Add to that the threat of a defamation suit, and it’s no wonder, Bruno said, that many alleged victims decide not to pursue complaints. Ten years ago, it was rare for an accuser to come to Bruno with a defamation threat hanging over her head. Today, that’s the reality for about half of the callers she hears from.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.

Update (7/14/2018, 4:21 p.m.): Documents connected to this case have been removed from this article at the request of some of the witnesses whose identifying information was included in the court filings. The article has also been updated (7/15/2018) with comments from Ibrahim about the timing of his relationship with a student and when a policy that discourages teacher-student relationships took effect. In addition, in a passage about the attitude of the Trump administration toward campus adjudication efforts, an erroneous reference to “the accused” has been corrected to read “campus adjudication efforts had tilted too much in favor of the accusers.”