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A defamation case against a student and a professor at McGill University raises worries that accusations are being silenced.
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...