Zoe Charlotte Greenberg, a Montreal filmmaker and mature university student who has worked on Jewish themes, accused Leah McLaren, the well-known (and at times boundary-lacking) Canadian journalist, of having joined a mutual (male) friend in sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers.
I reached out to Greenberg for comment to The Canadian Jewish News, but she did not respond. Frustrating stuff for any journalist—but, look, it’s understandable.
According to her widely-shared Medium post, Greenberg’s battle is really with Penguin Random House Canada, the publisher of Where You End and I Begin—a memoir that also drew advance objections from the author’s own mother and a rebuttal published by the Toronto Star.
McLaren tells the story of the event in question, but in a way that does not present the incident as an assault, but rather as messy teenage hijinks.
If Greenberg has an audio recording of her Laapologizing for the incident, that sounds… not good for McLaren. It also seems relevant that McLaren was 14 (or 13?) years old at the time (to Greenberg’s 16). This would presumably have implications both for her potential culpability and for how well the now-47-year-old woman remembers something that happened that long ago.
It also seems important that McLaren is a famous person (in Canada, in media, at any rate), with the potential to sell a lot of books, while Greenberg, by all accounts, is not.
Some of the ethical conundrum of personal writing—catching onto a theme?—is asymmetry. As the American author and essayist Meghan Daum explored recently in her newsletter, writers’ lives are often mined for material, with that changing only once the author (generally a woman) ages out of that sort of writing, or rather of that sort of writing selling. But if the titillating stories are about teens or young adults, it doesn’t necessarily matter if the author herself is well past youth.
But I digress. My point is that the written-about party is generally not a professional writer with a platform of their own. Or even if they are, they might be one who prefers other topics, or values their own privacy and that of their loved ones. Even in the most generous interpretation, wherein Greenberg and McLaren simply have different recollections of the same incident, there’s the thing where only one side gets excerpted in newspapers and whatnot.
The alleged poolside violation was the main topic, but there was also this, from the manuscript McLaren (per both women) asked Greenberg to review:
“The pages went on to invent a number of conversations between us, as well as ugly lies about my family, even an antisemitic joke.”
Per the coverage at the revived gossip website Gawker, which included a link to the relevant excerpt—which had been freely distributed as the opening chapter—much of what Greenberg objected towards does not appear to have made it to the final version.
Greenberg’s j’accuse included Canadian actress, director, and activist Sarah Polley, who had endorsed McLaren’s memoir, but had since, it would seem, removed that endorsement.
McLaren responded to the accusations in a concise newsletter post, denying any wrongdoing.
The publisher has acknowledged the existence of…something. Its “internal processes” will be reviewed.
Given that the TTC also promised to look into it when I tweeted recently about the West Toronto streetcars being a mess (which they truly are), my faith in we’ll-look-into-it is slim. But the stakes are higher, or at least less mundane, so maybe this will get sorted out.
The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @bovymaltz
