Lindsay Shepherd Files Massive Lawsuit for Free Speech Abuse
Lindsay Shepherd is Suing Wilfrid laurier over the incident last year where she was chastised over the airing of a debate between Jordan Peterson and others about gender pronoun use.She alleges that she has become unemployable due to the attacks against her and is seeking 3.6 Million dollars.SUPPORT JOURNALISM. Become a patron athttp://www.patreon.com/TimcastSupport the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
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Many of you may recall the story of Lindsay Shepard, the teaching assistant up at Laurier University in Canada, who got in trouble after she showed her class a TV Ontario public broadcaster debate between Jordan Peterson and another professor over the use of gender pronouns.
And now she is once again in the news because she has filed A $3.6 million lawsuit against the university, and one of the claims she's making is that they have made her unemployable and have derailed her career track.
So, what's happening with Laurier, why is she suing, and what else has Lindsay Shepard been up to?
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The story from the province.
Teaching assistant Sue's Laurier University claims attacks rendered her unemployable in academia.
Lizzie Shepard claims harassment, intentional infliction of nervous shock, negligence, and constructive dismissal.
The attacks on her have rendered her unemployable in academia.
She claims, and forced her to abandon her career plans for further graduate study and teaching.
The statement of claim, which seeks $3.6 million, was filed Tuesday in Waterloo, Ontario, and as yet, no statements of defense have been filed.
In addition to Laurier, Shepard's suit names Nathan Rambucana, the professor of the course for which Shepard was a teaching assistant, Herbert Pimlott, master's program coordinator, and Adria Joel, acting manager of gender violence prevention in the diversity and equity office.
It describes them as predators who were bullying Shepard in a disciplinary meeting, a recording of which Shepard and Later released publicly.
In an emailed statement, Laurier said it received notice of her lawsuit on Tuesday, which it describes as one perspective of a legal matter in pursuit of a financial claim.
Since Shepard first raised her initial concerns, the university has taken numerous measures to address the matter, including issuing an apology to her, the statement reads.
The apology still stands.
In her suit, Shepard claims she had not even taken a side on the pronoun issue, disagreed with what she understood to be Peterson's perspective, and presented the debate neutrally.
Still, she was attacked as a protege and supporter of Peterson.
According to the Toronto Sun, Lindsay Shepard is seeking $1 million in punitive damages, and $500,000 apiece for harassment, intentional infliction of nervous shock, negligence, aggravated and general damages, plus $100,000 for constructive dismissal.
Defendants created a toxic environment and made it unbearable for her, said her lawyer, Howard Levitt.
It astonishes me even months later they are being hoisted on their own petards.
I've practiced labor law for 39 years, and I have never seen anything like this.
Ron Buchana ludicrously claimed that her showing the TV Ontario clip breached the Charter of Rights and Federal Rights Code, and was illegal, the lawsuit alleges.
Shepard was accused of targeting trans folks, even though Shepard had chosen no side, the lawsuit alleges.
The university failed to fairly investigate and respond to the allegations of harassment, and instead, Shepard was wrongly attacked by members of the administration until public and alumni outcry.
Forced the university to retreat.
The suit alleges that the apology from Ranbukana to Shepard was forced, and that he continued to lie about there having been a complaint, even though we know there was no complaint, because an independent investigator found no one actually complained about what Lindsay Shepard had done.
It was a TV Ontario broadcast.
That's like in the U.S.
if we aired PBS in a college.
I don't think anybody would care about that, but apparently one of these administrators did, and thus we see ourselves here today.
Shepard first raised her initial concerns, the university has taken measures to address the matter, including issuing an apology to her.
The apology still stands, a statement from UniversityEdit.
The University initiated review, which found no wrongdoing on Ms.
Shepard's part and offered concrete recommendations for next steps.
Many of those steps have already been taken, including training, a review and update of the University policies, and the establishment of a task force that prepared a statement on freedom of expression approved by the University Senate and Board of Governors, the statement added.
The university's portrayal of its conduct in its statement today bears scant resemblance to reality, said Levin.
Following the incident with Lindsay Shepard, many people thought she was going to go the e-celebrity route, and she kind of did.
She got a lot of Twitter followers, but you can't say that she strategically created a Twitter following.
People were just interested in what was happening, so they followed her on Twitter.
And since then, she hasn't actually, for the most part, created a YouTube channel, Patreon,
and done a standard kind of like e-celebrity thing.
That was one of the main criticisms, that she was doing this for publicity, that the
whole point was to generate a following, to make money on Patreon, and that's just not
likely when you look at what she's actually doing.
She has made a couple YouTube videos, but that's far from establishing herself as a e-celeb, personality, or speaker.
What she has done is actually tried to set up speaking events with academics and some other controversial figures.
Back in April, she tweeted that the Laurier Society for Open Inquiry invited Faith Goldie to return to speak for our club on April 30th for an event with Dr. Ricardo Duchenne, professor at UNB, after a fire alarm was pulled in protest at our original event on March 20th.
Following this, she tweeted, $28,500 is the confirmed figure, University Waterloo said, we would need to pay for security and police presence.
Apologies to everyone who was planning on attending, there is no way we can pay that, we are going to cancel the event.
Lindsay then announced another speaking event, and can you guess what happened?
On May 4th, my student club, the Laurier Society for Open Inquiry, is being charged $5,473 in security fees to bring in a university professor to talk on the Wilford Laurier University campus.
Can you help us cover the cost?
And there's a link to her GoFundMe.
And in just about one month, she did exceed her goal, raising $6,740 as of today.
But sure enough, protesters still showed up to our event.
Last night's talk by Dr. Frances Widdowson at WLU went well, a civil Q&A session even though there was disagreement.
Protesters were still outside afterwards.
Here's a little gem.
And then she shows this video of protesters yelling and So why is it relevant that Lindsay Shepard is being forced to pay these exorbitant security fees?
Well, for one, we've seen something similar with a bunch of other events in the United States, that many speakers had to pay exorbitant fees if they wanted to speak at these events.
And a lot of events in the U.S.
were run by student organizations.
This, typically, is prohibitively expensive.
Fortunately, Lindsay Shepard was able to raise money to have this session.
So going back to the e-celeb narrative, where people have criticized her claiming she's just trying to be famous, it would seem that she's not really doing that all too much.
She's actually just organizing speeches at her college.
Which is pretty typical of any college student.
Why all of this attention on what she's trying to do?
Especially when the talks she's giving are only somewhat controversial.
And so there are a few things about this lawsuit that I do want to bring up.
It seems like Lindsey Shepard is going on the offensive.
She has tried to just hold events and she has been essentially roadblocked every step of the way.
So it's no surprise then that she's taking an offensive approach and filing a lawsuit against the university.
Because it's not just about this one incident.
where they pulled her into an office and essentially attacked her for doing basically nothing.
And that's by their own admission.
Independent investigators found she did nothing wrong.
But beyond that, she can't even hold an event at her own school without protesters trying to shut it down and without being forced to pay exorbitant fees.
So it seems only predictable that she's going to try and strike back against the university for what is going on.
However, no one is above criticism, so I just have to say, in terms of arguing that she has become unemployable, that's actually not really Laurier's fault.
From the Toronto Sun, the attacks on Shepard have rendered her unemployable in academia, resulting in her abandoning her previous ambitions of obtaining her PhD or even teaching as a master's graduate, the lawsuit alleged.
But we have to be reasonable.
When Lindsay Shepard was brought into that office and was yelled at by three administrators, that's pretty screwed up.
Because like I mentioned, we all know she didn't do anything wrong.
However, if it just ended there, nobody would be talking about it, and no one would even know who Lindsey Shepard is.
However, Lindsey had the foresight to record, secretly, this meeting, and then it was somehow handed to the press, who published it, and thus the whole fiasco began.
If she walked out of that meeting upset, and just ignored what happened, then we wouldn't be here, there'd be no lawsuit, and Lindsey Shepard would be completely employable.
So I do think it's fair to point out that you can't really blame Laurier for the publicity and the attacks on Lindsay Shepard because of this incident.
At the same time, you can't expect people to take things lying down.
And so there is an argument that Lindsay didn't do anything wrong and she was in her right to show the world what had happened to her after showing a public debate in a class.
The university was in the wrong the whole time.
They've lied about what happened with her.
They claimed there was a complaint when there wasn't, and so she recorded it.
Because of this, she garnered tons of publicity, and it has damaged her reputation in many ways.
So thus, the debate, the fight, the culture war continues.
This is up in Canada.
It's not in the U.S., but, you know, we share a lot of culture with Canada.
It's almost identical, except they've got french fries and gravy, and we have cheap knockoffs.
But this university problem is a real thing.
People try to speak all the time and protests try to shut them down and it's been going on longer than this culture war.
It's been happening a lot longer than just this past year.
So it is interesting to see someone taking an academic approach and then actually going for a lawsuit to combat this kind of regressive mentality from these universities.
So look, I have no idea if she's going to win, if the university is going to settle, and how this will play out in the long run.
But maybe you have some thoughts, so you can comment below and let me know what you think about all of this.
Is Lindsay in the right to file this lawsuit?
Is the university at fault for all of the attacks against her, and for potentially making her unemployable?
