Former McGill student union president settles defamation suit with 15 more students

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Former McGill University student union president Darshan Daryanani said he is getting “closer to closure” now that he has reached an out-of-court settlement in his $750,000 defamation suit against the Students’ Society of McGill University, 12 of its representatives and three other students, all of whom he claims sullied his reputation unjustly.

“This is a good step in the right direction,” Daryanani said Friday in an interview. “I hope that I can move on and reach my potential, but psychologically and physically and professionally, there is significant damage that was done.”

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As part of the settlement, one of the defendants, Danielle Fuchs, former president of the Jewish student organization Hillel Montreal, sent a written apology to Daryanani for social media posts she made about him in the spring of 2022.

“Based on new information which was not available at the time, I now realize that I should not have characterized you as ‘sexist’ nor as a ‘misogynist’ without any basis or evidence,” Fuchs wrote in that apology. “Furthermore, given that I had never met you or spoken to you, making any adverse comment about you was unjustified. You didn’t deserve that.”

The SSMU meanwhile, posted a notice of the settlement on its website, noting that details of the settlement remain confidential and the settlement itself “does not imply any admission of liability.”

The only remaining party that has not yet reached a settlement with Daryanani in the affair is McGill University itself.

Two campus newspapers reached agreements with Daryanani last March, with both papers publishing agreed-upon statements referring to the importance of student media and all actors in the student political process taking into account “fundamental principles of due process, procedural fairness and natural justice.”

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In the suit, Daryanani claimed his political rivals falsely accused him of sexism and other misbehaviour in order to oust him from his role as SSMU president. He blamed the newspapers for publishing baseless accusations and McGill’s administration for doing nothing to help him.

Daryanani was elected president of the SSMU in March 2021. In his lawsuit, he claims several SSMU officials deliberately spread lies about him and manipulated student governance processes to remove him from the role of president, which came with a salary of $45,531. He was suspended for many months from that role without being informed of the allegations against him.

An independent investigation exonerated Daryanani of alleged psychological harassment, but he was ultimately impeached on April 11, 2022, three weeks before the end of his term. He maintains the impeachment violated SSMU regulations, and was inherently devoid of fairness and transparency.

The settlement of Daryanani’s defamation case may have been helped along by an anonymous email message sent to his attorneys in November 2023, apparently from one of the defendants in the defamation case. The email described a plot against Daryanani by other elected members of the SSMU executive “based on nothing but a deep animosity and rivalry” they harboured against him.

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The email accused some SSMU executives of inventing “a misleading (and possibly defamatory) narrative about ‘harassment’ and ‘misogyny’ without any evidence, and forcing the rest of us to go along with it. While some colleagues tried to ‘expulse’ Daryanani right from the start, others jumped on the bandwagon later, once McGill newspapers had amplified the negative rumours about Darshan. One SSMU colleague even contacted Darshan’s employer, in order to get his employment revoked.”

Daryanani’s lawyer, Chris Spiteri, said universities have an obligation to protect students from political machiavellianism, even though student unions should generally operate at arm’s length from university administrations. Spiteri also represented former vice-president of the SSMU, Declan McCool, who successfully appealed a sexual assault complaint by a fellow student and reached an out-of-court settlement with his accuser and several other student politicians.

“What I have seen is that there is a culture that has permeated universities where people feel they have the right to label people in such a way that … meets their ends,” Spiteri said. “And if that means destroying the person, removing them, injuring them, getting even with them. … There is a culture where allegations have become weaponized and I do believe the universities, given this culture, need to stand up and insist that responsibility be taken.”

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Daryanani is still in the dark as to why his colleagues in the SSMU executive turned on him.

“I have been trying to grasp why did they choose me, and some people have alluded to race. I was the only person of colour in an overwhelmingly white executive so that had an impact, some say. Some say it had to do with my pro-Palestine position.”

The campus group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) McGill publicly supported Daryanani when he announced his candidacy for president. Soon after his election, Daryanani supported an SSMU decision to investigate allegations that there was a “black list” of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students circulating on campus.

Daryanani said it was particularly hurtful that his adversaries chose to label him as sexist or misogynistic when he had campaigned on a platform to fight sexism and misogyny.

“I advocated to support survivors of sexual violence, of gender-based violence (so) it was really disheartening to see the language of social justice being co-opted in a way that was weaponized for personal gain or for political reasons.”

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“Unfortunately I think it was for very petty reasons that they did this and they thought they could do this because there was no accountability mechanism,” he said. “It was just a means to an end, whatever it took to take me out. If it meant using the worst allegations possible to build on the momentum of the me-too movement, that is what they were going to do.”

Daryanani is currently working as an assistant at his lawyer’s firm and hopes to apply to law school. He graduated from McGill in the spring of 2022 with a bachelor of arts degree, majoring in political science.

“This experience has taught me that fighting for the little guy is a very rewarding experience and it’s necessary,” he said.

“Overall experiences like this, we have to take them as a lesson, to prevent this from happening to others and to support those who experience such abuse.”

mlalonde@postmedia.com

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