False claims of bullying in retaliation to genuine allegations of bullying

It is known that bullies, once accused by their target of bullying, will then make a malicious claim that it is they who are the target and that the real target is the bully. That is the case of Kathy McCabe.

However, a responsible employer will be wise to this tactic and carry out a thorough investigation. Stirling University is not a responsible employer. It is the complete opposite of a responsible employer. It went further, and upheld Kathy McCabe's malicious complaints and ignored my own allegations. They seem to think that that is somehow clever. Far from it! It stinks!

To add insult to injury, Mark Toole dismissed me, claiming that not only did I bully my manager (as if), I also bullied my colleagues, or at least the female ones. He goes on to say that their gender was my motivation for bullying them.

In my letter of dismissal, he gives an example of me bullying women on the basis of their gender. It happened before he even joined the university, and I had never been spoken to about it. I raised a grievance against my colleague, Eileen MacDonald, who was due to go off on maternity leave a few weeks later. He claims that I deliberately timed it to maximise her distress while on maternity leave.

I had notified his predecessor, Peter Kemp that I wished to raise a formal grievance against her. That was more than two months before her maternity leave. He asked me to write back with the details of my grievance, and I did. I sent them to Peter Kemp, but not to Eileen MacDonald. It was Peter who informed Eileen of the grievance; not me. Then he decided not to process my grievance, which makes me wonder why he bothered to tell her about it.

In court, I asked Mark Toole what would have been an acceptable length of time to raise a grievance against a woman who may be about to go on maternity leave. He refused to specify a length of time.

This has to be sex discrimination, in my view, because it can only apply to women. And he is not saying that it was ordinary bullying, but bullying specifically based on gender. And since he refuses to state the period of "grace" that a woman should be allowed, it may not ever be permissible, in his mind, for a man to raise a grievance against a woman.

Not only that, Mark also considers that by raising that grievance, I contributed the main part in the alleged breakdown in our working relationship. So regardless of her maternity leave, it was still part of his reason for dismissing me. He does not dispute that the content of my grievance was genuine, so basically what he is saying is that you can be sacked for raising a genuine grievance. Nowhere in Stirling University's Grievance Procedure will you find reference to this extraordinary information.

My grievance against Eileen was never processed. Instead, Eileen was invited to complain about me without any risk of her complaints being investigated.

I asked Human Resources Director, Martin McCrindle, about the disciplinary process used by Mark Toole. If an employee had made a malicious complaint against me, at what point in the process would that have been discovered? He said that it would have been discovered by Mark Toole's judgement. He didn't think it would have been necessary for any of the complaints to be investigated.

Basically, employees at the university have no rights whatsoever. All it takes is for someone to make a false allegation against you, and no matter whether or not you can prove that it is false, you can be sacked for it.

And as in my own case, where management were anxious to get rid of me, they can actively encourage those false allegations from colleagues with a grudge.