Anne-Marie Robinson
speaker
409 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Anne-Marie Robinson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The halls are quiet. The students have left for the day. There are brief pleasantries with the school's current administrator. Eastern Commerce is no longer a high school. It's now the home of the First Nations School of Toronto, known as Wandering Spirit Survival School. This building is almost 100 years old, and it's been going through some significant renovations lately.
Anne-Marie leads the way. Two administrators and I follow. She heads towards the music teacher's office.
It's now an elevator. Anne-Marie has a worried look. What if the music room is gone too? She tells the administrators why it's important she finds it.
We walk upstairs, then down a hallway, the one with floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out onto the parking lot.
The music room is still there. It's under renovation, but it's there. There's a long chalkboard, five white lines, a music staff are etched across the board. But Anne-Marie walks directly towards a door in the wall. She knows exactly where she's going. She opens the door, a closet. She walks right in, and I follow.
Yeah. The administrators hang back, waiting out in the hallway. They give us space. But we don't linger. When she's seen enough, we head back out to join them. They ask Anne-Marie if she's okay. She says she is. And she tells me she's ready to leave.
You don't, you know, we went in there, you said, I feel like I'm going to cry, but I'm not. And you don't often get emotional. Is that just like a protection mechanism that you have now built in?
But you were very strong to go in there today. Thank you.
Just days before the podcast production wraps up, Anne-Marie hears from another former high school bandmate. This woman played French horn beside Anne-Marie when they were 16. I call her.
She wanted me to know what she had witnessed in a hotel room on a band trip to Belleville in 1977, the night Anne-Marie told a court she was raped. This woman says a bunch of band kids were in the teacher's hotel room. Doug Walker was kissing and groping Anne-Marie in front of everyone.
The fellow student says the next morning, Ann Marie appeared at breakfast, distraught and robotic, with a blank stare. But it's too late for this witness, these memories, to help Ann Marie's case.
After a 2021 preliminary hearing, a judge determined there was no evidence Anne Marie had not consented to sex with her teacher in that Belleville hotel room. So the case never went to trial. This is a witness and evidence the police never found. Because as far as Anne Marie knows and files reveal, the police never looked. Still, Anne Marie sees it as validation.
It's yet another new detail in a growing body of corroboration and documentation. Well, it's just so frustrating, right? It's just so frustrating. Over the past 18 months of this investigation, I've found evidence that 15 women were sexually exploited, harassed and or assaulted by the same teacher, William Douglas Walker. I've spoken to most of those women.
It all started around 1974, Walker's first year of teaching. And from the start, superiors were told about his sexual encounters with kids, students. Subsequent administrators were told again and again.
Ali's experience in 1987 is the last we know of. But in 1988, the music teacher was still being warned to stop his inappropriate behavior with teen girls. After that, he moved schools four more times. We don't know why. Then, by 2001, he was banned from teaching. So far, any attempts to have this former teacher convicted have failed.
And most of the survivors say success will only come when they see him behind bars. But that's not the only measurement here. Because on this journey, something pretty wonderful has happened. Come on, Arch. Come. Come see. Somebody's at the door. Who's at the door? Who's that? See, you don't bark at her anymore.
Archie the Aussie Doodle has come to know Anne-Marie Robinson well. He doesn't even bark when she arrives at my door, but he's happily wagging and wiggling.
This is where we first met in 2020, on my front porch in Ottawa. Archie was barking at the squirrels. At our first meeting, I couldn't see the deputy minister Anne-Marie used to be. I saw someone who was broken and lost. She hid under oversized clothes. Long bangs hung over her face like a shield. Since then, I've witnessed a metamorphosis.
Today, she arrives in fashionable pink pants and a deep purple blouse. I can see her green eyes. In fact, they sparkle with a different kind of energy. The confident leader has reemerged. But this process wasn't easy. I took her down roads that I know caused more trauma.
When you look back at the goals we sort of set, you set from the beginning. Do you feel that we've met the goals? Oh, absolutely.
Showing 381–400 of 409 · page 20 of 21
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