Garrison’s response to Jon McTaggart’s letter of Jan. 23, 2018

Jon McTaggart’s letter was in response to a blizzard of listener anger, all of it richly deserved, after MPR expunged shows that people loved. And listeners smelled a rat. Listeners know me far better than MPR management does and they know I’m not abusive. Management, when it heard a complaint back in October, did not have the good manners to call me, a part of MPR for fifty years, and sit down with me face-to-face and talk about what had happened. If they had done that simple courteous thing, this all would’ve been avoided. Instead, they have been duplicitous from first to last, starting with how they began their Potemkin“ investigation”  up until the very moment when they issued a letter in the midst of mediation where we had agreed to not to make any public comments.

How to respond to so many untruths in a short space?  The woman who complained was a friend, had been hired as a free-lance researcher, an employee of mine, not MPR’s, working a job that she did from home by email. I hardly ever saw her in the office. Our friendship – which was mutual, reciprocal and respectful — continued in frequent emails about our kids and travel and family things that continued to my last show and beyond. She signed her emails “I love you” and she asked if her daughter could be hired to work here, and so forth. She still features “A Prairie Home Companion” prominently on her Facebook page.

Her complaint was drawn up by her attorney, a highly selective and imaginative piece of work.  MPR depended on the complaint, it never spoke to the complainant.

If I am guilty of harassment, then every employee who stole a pencil is guilty of embezzlement. I’m an honest fiction writer and I will tell this story in a novel.

I’m a writer and I have better things to do than fight with a committee of faceless people who are in a panic.  And I’m glad not to have any connection with an organization that operates like that.

 

For general information, contact Katharine Seggerman at garrisonassistant@gmail.com.  For media, contact Linda Berg at likeberg220@gmail.com.

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