Falsely Accused

“Someone leaked a copy of the speech you wrote.”

My boss had called me into her office, and she was speaking carefully but purposefully. “And it wasn’t the final version. The wording that showed up in the media followed your draft. Do you know anything about this?”

I was working as a writer in the office of a Canadian cabinet minister, the equivalent of a federal agency head in the United States. I had started with correspondence and press releases. But more recently, even as a “landed immigrant” from the U.S., they had entrusted me with information and access needed to write sensitive political speeches. This one in particular was being delivered by the minister himself.

In actual fact, I hadn’t leaked this speech. Since it wasn’t me, it had to have been one of his close advisors. Had this person—whoever it was—deliberately given out the version I’d drafted in order to shift the blame onto me?

I was in no position to make an accusation like that. All I could do was deny responsibility and hope for the best.

It soon became clear that my superiors no longer trusted me. I was taken off speechwriting and put back on correspondence duty. I could sense their suspicion.

One of my co-workers told me about a time when she’d been accused of leaking information to the head of one of the opposition parties in the Canadian parliament. It was well known that she and this man were acquainted, and since she’d had access to the information, everyone assumed she was responsible. In her case the party leader went to her superiors and assured them personally that he hadn’t gotten the information from her.

No one came forward to do the same for me.

During the days that followed, I thought often of what Peter wrote in his first letter: “If you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example . . . he did not retaliate . . . he made no threats . . . he entrusted himself to him who judges justly” [2 Peter 2:19-23]. I followed this teaching as best I could, doing my work honestly and well, in hope that the truth would eventually come out.

A few months later, there was another leak, to the same media source. This time I’d had no access to the information. Since I hadn’t given any other reasons for suspicion, my superiors concluded that the original leak had probably come from whoever was responsible for this one, not from me.

They never said anything officially, but they began to ask me to write speeches again. Eventually, before moving back to the United States, I even got to write a speech for the Canadian Prime Minister.

Not everyone’s story turns out this well. Sometimes a falsely accused person is never cleared or restored. Some people live a lifetime under a cloud of suspicion, never getting the opportunities they deserve. But in other cases, like mine, the truth eventually does come out.

Either way, as Peter writes, we must entrust ourselves to God and his ultimate judgment.

Post by Christopher Smith. Image by S Falkow. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr.