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The case seems like a familiar story turned on its head: Avital
Ronell, a world-renowned female professor of German and
Comparative Literature at New York University, was found
responsible for sexually harassing a male former graduate
student, Nimrod Reitman.

An 11-month Title IX investigation found Professor Ronell,
described by a colleague as “one of the very few philosopher-
stars of this world,” responsible for sexual harassment, both
physical and verbal, to the extent that her behavior was
“sufficiently pervasive to alter the terms and conditions of Mr.
Reitman’s learning environment.” The university has suspended
Professor Ronell for the coming academic year.

In the Title IX final report, excerpts of which were obtained by
The New York Times, Mr. Reitman said that she had sexually
harassed him for three years, and shared dozens of emails in
which she referred to him as “my most adored one,” “Sweet cuddly
Baby,” “cock-er spaniel,” and “my astounding and beautiful
Nimrod.”

Coming in the middle of the #MeToo movement’s reckoning over
sexual misconduct, it raised a challenge for feminists — how to
respond when one of their own behaved badly. And the response
has roiled a corner of academia.

Soon after the university made its final, confidential
determination this spring, a group of scholars from around the
world, including prominent feminists, sent a letter to N.Y.U. in
defense of Professor Ronell. Judith Butler, the author of the
book “Gender Trouble” and one of the most influential feminist
scholars today, was first on the list.

“Although we have no access to the confidential dossier, we have
all worked for many years in close proximity to Professor
Ronell,” the professors wrote in a draft letter posted on a
philosophy blog in June. “We have all seen her relationship with
students, and some of us know the individual who has waged this
malicious campaign against her.”

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Critics saw the letter, with its focus on the potential damage
to Professor Ronell’s reputation and the force of her
personality, as echoing past defenses of powerful men.

“We testify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual
commitment of Professor Ronell and ask that she be accorded the
dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international
standing and reputation,” the professors wrote.

Mr. Reitman, who is now 34 and is a visiting fellow at Harvard,
says that Professor Ronell kissed and touched him repeatedly,
slept in his bed with him, required him to lie in her bed, held
his hand, texted, emailed and called him constantly, and refused
to work with him if he did not reciprocate. Mr. Reitman is gay
and is now married to a man; Professor Ronell is a lesbian.

Professor Ronell, 66, denied any harassment. “Our communications
— which Reitman now claims constituted sexual harassment — were
between two adults, a gay man and a queer woman, who share an
Israeli heritage, as well as a penchant for florid and campy
communications arising from our common academic backgrounds and
sensibilities,” she wrote in a statement to The New York Times.
“These communications were repeatedly invited, responded to and
encouraged by him over a period of three years.”

Two years after graduating from N.Y.U. with a Ph.D., Mr. Reitman
filed a Title IX complaint against his former adviser, alleging
sexual harassment, sexual assault, stalking and retaliation. In
May, the university found Professor Ronell responsible for
sexual harassment and cleared her of the other allegations.

Mr. Reitman’s lawyer, Donald Kravet, said he and his client have
drafted a lawsuit against N.Y.U. and Professor Ronell and are
now considering their options.

Both Mr. Reitman and Professor Ronell’s descriptions of their
experiences echo other #MeToo stories: In Mr. Reitman’s
recollection, he was afraid of his professor and the power she
wielded over him, and often went along with behavior that left
him feeling violated. Professor Ronell said that Mr. Reitman
desperately sought her attention and guidance in interviews she
submitted to the Title IX office at N.Y.U., which The New York
Times obtained.

The problems began, according to Mr. Reitman, in the spring of
2012, before he officially started school. Professor Ronell
invited him to stay with her in Paris for a few days. The day he
arrived, she asked him to read poetry to her in her bedroom
while she took an afternoon nap, he said.

“That was already a red flag to me,” said Mr. Reitman. “But I
also thought, O.K., you’re here. Better not make a scene.”

Then, he said, she pulled him into her bed.

“She put my hands onto her breasts, and was pressing herself —
her buttocks — onto my crotch,” he said. “She was kissing me,
kissing my hands, kissing my torso.” That evening, a similar
scene played out again, he said.

He confronted her the next morning, he said.

“I said, look, what happened yesterday was not O.K. You’re my
adviser,” he recalled in an interview.

Image
Professor Ronell’s defenders pointed to her “keen wit” and her
“international standing and reputation,” after she was accused
of sexual harassment.
When he got to New York, the behavior continued, he said, when
after Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, Professor Ronell showed
up at his apartment because her power had gone out. He said
that, despite his objections, she convinced him that they could
both sleep in his bed together. Once there, she groped and
kissed him each night for nearly a week, he said.

“Professor Ronell denies all allegations of sexual contact in
their entirety,” Mary Dorman, Professor Ronell’s lawyer, wrote
in a submission to the Title IX office. Professor Ronell said
she only stayed for two nights after the hurricane, at Mr.
Reitman’s invitation.

The Title IX report concluded that there was not enough evidence
to find Professor Ronell responsible for sexual assault, partly
because no one else observed the interactions in his apartment
or her room in Paris.

In the semesters that followed, Mr. Reitman said he was expected
to work with Professor Ronell, often at her apartment, during
lengthy work sessions nearly every weekend. Professor Ronell
frequently detailed her affection and longing for him, according
to emails from her that Mr. Reitman provided to The New York
Times.

“I woke up with a slight fever and sore throat,” she wrote in an
email on June 16, 2012, after the Paris trip. “I will try very
hard not to kiss you — until the throat situation receives
security clearance. This is not an easy deferral!” In July, she
wrote a short email to him: “time for your midday kiss. my image
during meditation: we’re on the sofa, your head on my lap,
stroking you [sic] forehead, playing softly with yr hair,
soothing you, headache gone. Yes?”

In a submission to the Title IX office, Professor Ronell said
she had no idea Mr. Reitman was so uncomfortable until she read
the investigators’ report.

Mr. Reitman also said that Professor Ronell retaliated against
him for complaining to her about her behavior, in part by
sending pro forma recommendations on his behalf, thwarting his
job prospects. But the Title IX report found that her
recommendation letters “were comparable to those for other
former students” and he did secure two postgraduate fellowships.

Professor Ronell and some who are backing her have tried to
discredit her accuser in familiar ways, asking why he took so
long to report, and why he seemed so intimate with Professor
Ronell if he was, in fact, miserable. Maybe, Professor Ronell
suggested, he was frustrated because he just wasn’t smart enough.

“His main dilemma was the incoherency in his writing, and lack
of a recognizable argument,” Professor Ronell said in a January
2018 interview submitted to the Title IX office.

Diane Davis, chair of the department of rhetoric at the
University of Texas-Austin, who also signed the letter to the
university supporting Professor Ronell, said she and her
colleagues were particularly disturbed that, as they saw it, Mr.
Reitman was using Title IX, a feminist tool, to take down a
feminist.

“I am of course very supportive of what Title IX and the #MeToo
movement are trying to do, of their efforts to confront and to
prevent abuses, for which they also seek some sort of justice,”
Professor Davis wrote in an email. “But it’s for that very
reason that it’s so disappointing when this incredible energy
for justice is twisted and turned against itself, which is what
many of us believe is happening in this case.”

Title IX was intended to address a long history of sexual
harassment and assault of women at school, according to Dana
Bolger, a co-founder of Know Your IX, a national advocacy group
that teaches students about their Title IX rights.

“I would say that the vast majority of Title IX cases are
protecting male victims from male perpetrators, or female
victims from male perpetrators,” Ms. Bolger said.

In addition to the suspension, which the university never
publicly announced, N.Y.U. is investigating further claims of
retaliation related to the professors’ letter.

John Beckman, a spokesman for the university, wrote in a
statement to The Times that N.Y.U. was “sympathetic” to what Mr.
Reitman has been through.

But, Mr. Beckman added, “given the promptness, seriousness and
thoroughness with which we responded to his charges, we do not
believe that his filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against
the university would be warranted or just.”

Both Professor Ronell and Mr. Reitman feel they have been
miscast in this #MeToo story.

Mr. Reitman said he never intended to become any kind of public
figure in a national conversation about gender, and that he
started the process before the movement took off. “It didn’t
come from #MeToo,” he said.

In March 2018, Professor Ronell pointedly complained that Mr.
Reitman had a penchant for “comparing me to the most egregious
examples of predatory behaviors ascribable to Hollywood moguls
who habitually go after starlets.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/nyregion/sexual-harassment- nyu-female-professor.html
 

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