Battle Over Alleged Harassment Escalates as Former Graduate Student Sues Professor and NYU

A former graduate student at New York University filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the university and his former adviser, Avital Ronell, alleging that the professor of German and comparative literature had “created a fictitious romantic relationship” between them and had “asserted complete domination and control over his life.”

Nimrod Reitman, who is now a visiting fellow at Harvard University, said that while she was his Ph.D. adviser, Ronell “repeatedly and forcefully” kissed, touched, and groped him. He said that he had been forced to schedule his life around her and that she had punished him when he wasn’t affectionate enough toward her.

“For more than three years while a student at NYU, Reitman was subjected to sexual harassment, sexual assault, and stalking by his Ph.D. academic adviser, Ronell, which devastated him and caused serious damage that he will likely suffer for years to come,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in New York State Supreme Court, a trial-level court.

“Ronell created a false romantic relationship between herself and Reitman, and by threat of, among other things, not allowing him to advance his Ph.D., asserted complete domination and control over his life,” the lawsuit says.

Reitman contends that he told an NYU vice provost about the alleged abuse, but that the university didn’t take action. A university spokesman was not immediately available to comment on Thursday but has said that NYU responded promptly and thoroughly as soon as it became aware of his complaint.

Ronell, 66, was suspended for a year without pay after NYU found her responsible for sexually harassing Reitman, who is now 34. Two years after receiving his doctorate from NYU, he filed a Title IX complaint against his former adviser. After an 11-month investigation, she was found responsible for harassment but cleared of other charges, including sexual assault and stalking.

The case drew intense media coverage in part because it involved a woman accused of sexual harassment and because both Ronell and Reitman identify as gay.

Late Thursday a statement was issued on Ronell’s behalf in which she vigorously denied Reitman’s assertions. The investigation found no evidence of sexual contact, yet “the media has pounced on Reitman’s unsustained and unproven allegations” as if they were fact, it said.

The statement included a number of emails from Reitman that professed his love for her, including one in which he wrote, “My beloved Avital, Just sending you infinite kisses and love.”

Ronell said there was no evidence that she had thwarted his job prospects, as he contended she had done after he allegedly rebuffed her affections. She said he also had never indicated he was offended by her behavior and had never complained to anyone at the university.

The reason Reitman filed the complaint, the statement said, was his inability to find a job, “not any actual or perceived sexual harassment.”

‘Miserable and Needy’

Also on Thursday the German newspaper Die Welt published an account in which Ronell said she had never touched or hurt Reitman, and had just helped him because he was “miserable and needy.” The language she employed in talking with him was a “hyperbolic gay dialect” that she uses with friends in Manhattan’s West Village, according to a translation provided in a Twitter thread.

She also told Die Welt that he was upset with her because he wanted her to rewrite his dissertation “into something publishable” and that he was furious because she didn’t have the time.

Reitman released a statement on Thursday night saying he was encouraged by the support he had received.

“The personal and professional price of filing a complaint against a prominent professor is heavy, but I would like to encourage other students in my position to speak up if they feel safe to do so and know that harassment is never OK, and is a result of an abuse of power,” he wrote.

Much of the outrage over the controversy has focused on a draft letter that dozens of high-profile academics wrote to NYU’s president and provost, urging them to treat Ronell fairly.

The authors said that they had no access to the confidential findings of the Title IX investigation, but that they believed “that malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal nightmare” for a highly regarded scholar. “If she were to be terminated or relieved of her duties, the injustice would be widely recognized and opposed,” the letter stated.

Critics accused the letter’s signatories of creating a double standard for a woman accused of sexual harassment and of unfairly maligning the victim.

On Thursday a petition called for Judith Butler, the first signer of the letter and one of the nation’s most influential gender scholars, to resign her position as president-elect of the Modern Language Association. (Her current position is second vice president of the MLA; she’s scheduled to become president in 2020.) The petition, which had just 73 supporters late Thursday, said that Butler hadn’t consulted with anyone at the MLA before associating it, by virtue of her leadership role there, with a “professionally and ethically inappropriate intervention.”

“Dr. Butler and her co-signatories seemingly require neither facts nor evidence to malign a vulnerable early-career scholar,” the petition, started by James J. Marino, an associate professor of English at Cleveland State University, states.

Butler told The Chronicle this week that she regretted some of the language in the letter, which she said had been written in haste by a group of authors.

“We ought not to have attributed motives to the complainant, even though some signatories had strong views on this matter,” Butler wrote. “And we should not have used language that implied that Ronell’s status and reputation earn her differential treatment of any kind.”

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.

Correction (8/17/2018, 1:22 p.m.): This article originally misstated the source of a statement issued on Thursday on behalf of Avital Ronell. Contrary to what The Chronicle had been told, the statement was not issued by her lawyer. It was written by a friend and fellow scholar who is not associated with the case. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.