My Response to MPR

By Garrison Keillor, Star Tribune

27 January 18

he MPR committee’s letter to listeners 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, an employee of fifty years, and sit down with me face to face and talk about what had happened. If they had done the simple courteous thing, this all would’ve been avoided.

How to respond to so many untruths in a short space? The woman who complained was a friend, had been hired as a freelance 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 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 attended the last show in L.A. 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 me or 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.