2 Women Say Stanford Professors Raped Them Years Ago

Alex Welsh, The New York Times

Two former graduate students delved deep into their pasts this month to publicly level rape accusations against two Stanford English professors — one recently retired, one dead.

The retired professor is Franco Moretti, a noted expert on digital humanities and a literary critic. The other professor, who died in 2007, is Jay Fliegelman, an influential scholar of American literature and cultural studies.

Kimberly S. Latta wrote on Facebook on Sunday that Mr. Moretti had raped her in the mid-1980s when he was a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Ms. Latta, who was a graduate student in English there at the time, went on to teach English at the University of Pittsburgh and Saint Louis University before switching careers. Today she is a psychotherapist and yoga instructor.

Her accusations were published days after an essay appeared in an online literary magazine accusing the second professor, Mr. Fliegelman, of rape. The essay in Entropy was written by Seo-Young Chu, now an associate professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York. She said Mr. Fliegelman, who died in 2007 at age 58 of complications from liver disease and cancer, raped her in 2000 while she was a graduate student at Stanford, she said.

In Ms. Latta’s Facebook post, she said her former instructor “sexually stalked, pressured, and raped” her while she was a graduate student at Berkeley in 1984-85.

She said he told her, “You Americans girls say no when you mean yes” and assaulted her in her Oakland apartment. “He also would frequently push me up against the wall in his office, right next to the window that looked out at the library, and push up my shirt and bra and forcibly kiss me, against my will.”

She said that she reported him to Berkeley’s Title IX officer at the time, but was told to give only Mr. Moretti’s initials.

When Ms. Latta told Mr. Moretti about the report, he threatened to sue her, saying that he had powerful friends and would ruin her career, Ms. Latta said.

She said she was inspired to speak out by the #metoo movement, a groundswell of public disclosures of sexual assault and harassment that grew out of the Harvey Weinstein accusations.

In an email on Friday, Mr. Moretti, who lives in Switzerland now, said he met Ms. Latta at Berkeley in 1985 but never assaulted her. “We went out to dinner together one night and back to her apartment where we had fully consensual sex and I spent the night,” he wrote. “I did not rape her, and am horrified by the accusation.”

He said they went on to see each other occasionally, including at her initiative, and remained on good terms until he left Berkeley. And he denied her account of what happened after Ms. Latta spoke to Berkeley’s former Title IX officer.

Mr. Moretti wrote that he had “no powerful attorney friends, and certainly did not threaten to ruin any career. I was a visitor, with no prospect, back then, of ever being part of the American academy. Unfortunately, I fear this accusation will have an enormous impact on colleagues, friends, and family, despite being utterly false.”

Interviewed on Friday, Ms. Latta accused Mr. Moretti of lying.

“It makes me feel really angry and very sad, but I’m not surprised,” she said. As a 25-year-old graduate student at Berkeley, she said, she sought him out because she was interested in his expertise about the Frankfurt School, a movement in social and political philosophy.

“He began demonstrating an interest in me sexually and wanted to date me, which was flattering in the beginning,” Ms. Latta said.

That feeling changed, she said, as she spurned his advances and the attention turned to abuse. She left Berkeley and finished her Ph.D. at Rutgers University. After years of being afraid to speak out, “I’m tired of feeling silenced and I’m inspired by other women who have come out” to name their abusers, Ms. Latta said.

‘Devastatingly Intimate’

Courtesy of Seo-Young Chu

Ms. Chu said she was first inspired to write about her assault by a powerful letter written by the woman who was raped by Brock Turner, a Stanford swimmer who assaulted her near a trash bin outside a campus fraternity party.

The CUNY professor decided to publicly accuse Mr. Fliegelman after the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies named a mentorship award in his honor — a decision it reversed after hearing her story.

The society’s executive board issued a statement saying that it was deeply moved by Ms. Chu’s account and that it “unequivocally condemns all forms of harassment, discrimination, and abuse.”

Linda Cicero, Stanford U.

In an email to The Chronicle, Ms. Chu said she was angered by how Stanford had gone on to celebrate Mr. Fliegelman after suspending him for two years. “Believe me, I didn’t want his name to become part of my phone’s autocorrect vocabulary,” she wrote in the email. “Every time his name autocompletes before my eyes, I am reminded of the sickeningly, hideously, devastatingly intimate nature of sexual violence and injury.”

Her essay, written partly as poetry, says she was a 21-year-old first-year graduate student who had recently attempted suicide when Mr. Fliegelman invited her to dinner. He was a tenured professor, “a big name” in academia.

Ms. Chu said he told her he was going to invite other graduate students, but when she got there, it was just the two of them at a small table in his favorite restaurant.

Feeling uncomfortable by the way the conversation was going, she said, she made it clear that she’d like to work with him but wasn’t interested in anything more. A few minutes later, she wrote, the professor said: “But I’m lonely. I’m needy. I need to feel desirable. I need you to desire me.”

She said he later told her that all men have rape fantasies, including her father, and that Mr. Fliegelman told her he controlled her future. The Chronicle tried without success to reach Mr. Fliegelman’s widow to allow her to comment on the essay.

A Stanford spokeswoman, Lisa Lapin, said state employment and federal privacy laws restrict what she can say about individual personnel cases.

“Even in regard to consensual relationships,” she added, “Stanford has in recent years strengthened policies so as to prohibit sexual or romantic relationships between faculty and all undergraduates, as well as graduate students for whom the faculty member has or may in the future have academic responsibility.”

Every faculty member and supervisor is required to complete sexual-harassment-awareness training every two years, she said.

After an investigation, Mr. Fliegelman was suspended without pay for two years and banned from the department, she confirmed.

Mr. Moretti retired from Stanford and is no longer on campus, she said. Ms. Latta’s allegations against him are new to Stanford, Ms. Lapin said, and its current Title IX officer has reached out to her for more information. “We of course are concerned,” Ms. Lapin wrote, “and will be reviewing the matter and whether there are any actions for Stanford to take.”

Stanford considers every case of sexual violence, she said, “one case too many.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.