The John Brownlee sex scandal occurred in 1934 in Alberta, Canada, and forced the resignation of the provincial Premier, John Edward Brownlee. Brownlee was accused of seducing Vivian MacMillan, a family friend and a secretary for Brownlee's attorney-general in 1930, when she was 18 years old, and continuing the affair for three years. MacMillan claimed that the married premier had told her that she must have sex with him for his own sake and that of his invalid wife. She had, she testified, relented after physical and emotional pressure. Brownlee called her story a fabrication, and suggested that it was the result of a conspiracy by MacMillan, her would-be fiancé, and several of Brownlee's political opponents in the Alberta Liberal Party.
MacMillan and her father sued Brownlee for seduction. After a sensational trial in June 1934, the six-man jury found in favour of the plaintiffs, awarding them $10,000 and $5,000, respectively. In an unusual move, trial judge William Ives disregarded the jury's finding and dismissed the case. The Supreme Court of Canada eventually overturned the decision and awarded MacMillan $10,000 in damages. This award was affirmed by the Judicial Committee of the British Privy Council, Canada's highest court of appeal at the time. All of this was largely academic to Brownlee, who resigned after the jury's finding. During the next election, his United Farmers of Alberta were wiped out of the legislature, losing every seat.
Background John Brownlee became Premier of Alberta in 1925 as the leader of the parliamentary caucus of the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA). Early in his premiership, he achieved a number of successes, including winning control of the province's natural resources from the federal government, but by 1933 the Great Depression was taking its toll on his government's popularity. Political forces were advocating radical overhauls of the financial system. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and elements of the UFA's grassroots favored socialism and government ownership of the means of production, while the Alberta Liberal Party, many within the UFA, and William Aberhart's new provincial movement favored social credit, although in differing forms and with differing levels of enthusiasm.
In 1934, Brownlee was embroiled in a sex scandal, with major consequences to his political career. Those involved with the scandal gave widely disparate accounts of the surrounding facts; on only a minority of details did the parties agree. In 1930, Brownlee visited Edson while campaigning in the 1930 provincial election. While there, Allan MacMillan—the mayor of Edson and a political ally of Brownlee's—took him to a farmers' picnic. On the way to the event, Brownlee chatted with MacMillan's daughter, Vivian, then seventeen years old and unsure as to her future. The premier encouraged her to come to Edmonton and study business at Alberta College. She did so and, after graduating in June 1931, started working in the office of the provincial Attorney-General as a stenographer on July 3.
While in Edmonton, she became close to the Brownlee family. On July 5, 1933, while the rest of his family was vacationing at Sylvan Lake, Brownlee was taking MacMillan for a car ride when he noticed they were being followed. In the pursuing vehicle were John Caldwell, a suitor of MacMillan's and third-year medical student at the University of Alberta, and Neil MacLean, a prominent Edmonton lawyer and Liberal Party supporter who had been opposing counsel in the acrimonious and high profile divorce proceeding of Brownlee's Minister of Public Works, Oran McPherson. Brownlee made a series of sharp turns and reversals, in an effort to first ascertain whether he was indeed being followed and, once satisfied that he was, to evade the other car. Unable to do so, he dropped MacMillan off at her home and returned to his.
That August, Brownlee received a letter from MacLean reading in part "We have been instructed to commence action against you for damages for the seduction of Miss Vivian MacMillan." Later that month, he took advantage of a recess in the federal Royal Commission on Banking and Currency, of which he was a member, to visit Allan MacMillan in Edson. He spoke instead to Mrs. MacMillan, who initially refused to let him into the house and asked him to leave. She eventually relented and let him in; he told her that pursuing the matter could ruin Vivian's future, to which she responded "what about you?" Concluding that the meeting was pointless, Brownlee parted by announcing "I am not asking you to refrain from your action, but I want to tell you that the allegation is not true and I will face them frankly and answer any questions ... If its money you are after, I haven't got it."
On September 22, MacLean filed a statement of claim before Judge John R. Boyle on behalf of Allan and Vivian MacMillan. The claim was made under the Alberta Seduction Act, and sought damages of $10,000 for Vivian and $5,000 for Allan. It alleged that Brownlee, after arranging for Vivian's move from Edson to Edmonton, had seduced her in the fall of 1930 when she was eighteen, and had had regular sexual contact with her for a period of three years. Brownlee denied the allegations immediately (and made a rejected offer to resign from the Royal Commission) and on November 13 filed a counter-claim against Vivian MacMillan and John Caldwell, alleging that they had conspired to obtain money through false allegations.
Vivian MacMillan's story According to Vivian MacMillan, when she met Brownlee in 1930 he told her that she would "grow up to be a beautiful woman", urged her to move to Edmonton, and offered to arrange a government job for her. He further offered to act as guardian to her and allow her to live in his house until she found a place of her own. On his advice and assurances, she moved to Edmonton and, after graduating from Alberta College, received the stenographer's position that she claimed had been arranged for her by the premier.
Immediately after her arrival in Edmonton, she said, Brownlee had telephoned her—commenting that "a little birdie" had told him that she was in town—and invited her to his home to meet his family; she soon became a regular visitor there. She alleged that in October 1930, while Brownlee was driving her home after one such visit, the premier took her hand and asked her what she knew "about life". On her response that she knew probably as much as any girl of eighteen, he invited her out the next evening for what she presumed would be some advice. Instead, he drove her west of town on Highway 16 and parked on a side road before asking her to have sex with him. He said that he had been madly in love with her from the start, that he was lonely, that he and his wife had not lived together as man and wife in a long time, that his wife (an invalid) would be endangered by a pregnancy, and that he could not be premier any longer unless MacMillan agreed to have sex with him. He told her that if she refused him, he would be forced to resume his sexual relationship with his wife, and that this would likely kill her. MacMillan reacted fearfully, and asked if there was anything else she could do to help Brownlee and his wife; he replied that there was not.
The next week on another ride home, a similar conversation ensued, this one culminating in Brownlee forcing a resisting MacMillan into the car's back seat where he partially penetrated her against her will. Two weeks later, she alleged, they had complete consensual intercourse. After, when she expressed concern about becoming pregnant, he told her that "he knew of some pills that he would give me and if I took them at the end of each month before I menstruated that they would be very safe and there would not be any danger of me becoming pregnant." MacMillan recounted that their relationship continued in this way, with sex occurring an average of three times per week. In September 1931, she stayed in the Brownlee house for three days while Mrs. Brownlee was in Vancouver; she alleged that during that time, Brownlee had his son, who usually slept in Brownlee's room, transferred to a different room so that Brownlee and MacMillan could have sex.
Some of MacMillan's most sensational allegations concerned a six-week period in the spring of 1932 when she was filling in at the Brownlee household for an absent maid. She said that she slept in the maid's room, one of three bedrooms on the second floor of Brownlee's house; a second room was occupied by Brownlee and his son Jack, and the third by Florence Brownlee and her son Alan. During this six-week period, she claimed, she and Brownlee had had sex every night; Brownlee would signal her to leave her room by turning on the tap in the second floor bathroom, and then flush the toilet and walk in lockstep with her to mask the sound of her movement. Once in the premier's room, they would have sex next to his sleeping son, taking care to be quiet. She recounted how on one occasion Jack had seemed to stir, and Brownlee had turned on the light in the middle of intercourse to make sure that his son was all right.
MacMillan said that during the summer of 1932 she experienced a nervous breakdown (for which Florence Brownlee paid the hospital bills), and that she met and fell in love with Caldwell soon after. She resolved to end her affair with Brownlee but he reacted angrily, telling her that it would mean his wife's death and MacMillan's inability to find a job anywhere in Alberta. That evening, she confided the affair to her landlady. On October 31, 1932, she had dinner with Brownlee's sons and visited Brownlee, who was sick in bed. Despite her protestations that she was on her way to a Halloween party with Caldwell, he insisted that they have sex, which they did. Thereafter, the affair resumed. On another occasion, he called her away from her visiting mother to have sex with him at the legislature building.
In late January 1933, Caldwell proposed to her. She broke down and told him of the affair. She described his reaction as sympathetic, though he rescinded the marriage proposal. In May, at Caldwell's urging, she consulted a lawyer, but continued the affair until July 5, the night of the fateful drive.
MacMillan testified that for the duration of the affair she continued to have sex with Brownlee "from terror and because he told me it was my duty to do it and he seemed to have an influence over me which I could not break." She claimed that there had been no love accompanying the sex, and that it had been physically painful for her on each occasion.
John Brownlee's story Brownlee denied absolutely MacMillan's claims. He said that there had been no sexual activity between him and MacMillan, likening their relationship instead to that of an uncle and his favourite niece. To claims that he had induced MacMillan to move to Edmonton and arranged a position for her in the Attorney General's office, he asserted "in the thirteen years I have been in public life I have never promised any person in this Province a position." He denied having convinced MacMillan to move to Edmonton and stated that he had not even known that she had done so until Christopher Pattinson, Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for Edson, told him. He further claimed that his sex life with Mrs. Brownlee was what he would consider normal for a husband and wife (which was corroborated by his wife).