Dartmouth Allowed 3 Professors to Sexually Harass and Assault Students, Lawsuit Charges

Courtesy of Sanford Heisler

Updated (11/15/2018, 4:53 p.m.) with a statement from one of the professors.

Seven current and former students sued Dartmouth College on Thursday, saying it had failed to protect them from three psychology and brain-science professors who sexually harassed and assaulted them. In the lawsuit, filed in a federal court in New Hampshire, they say that when they and others reported horrific treatment, the college did nothing, allowing the professors’ behavior to continue until last spring, when one retired and the other two resigned.

The 72-page complaint, which seeks class-action status, describes an academic department where heavy drinking, misogyny, and sexual harassment were normalized. It says that the three professors — Todd F. Heatherton, William M. Kelley, and Paul J. Whalen — “leered at, groped, sexted,” and “intoxicated” students. One former student alleges she was raped by Kelley, and a current student alleges she was raped by Whalen. Dartmouth ended a Title IX investigation after the professors left, and, as far as the complainants could tell, did not attempt to examine how the abuse occurred or how it could be prevented it from happening again, according to the complaint.

In a written statement, a Dartmouth spokesman said that college officials “respectfully but strongly disagree with the characterizations of Dartmouth’s actions in the complaint and will respond through our own court filings.”

After complaints were made about the three professors, the college “took unprecedented steps toward revoking their tenure and terminating their employment. They are no longer at Dartmouth and remain banned from our campus and from attending all Dartmouth-sponsored events, no matter where the events are held,” the statement says. Members of the Board of Trustees, who are the lawsuit’s named defendants, “remain committed to improving our culture as we work to make our community the best it can be.”

News of the allegations against Heatherton, Kelley, and Whalen seeped out after posters mysteriously appeared last year on the campus asking what had happened to them. The student newspaper learned from administrators that the professors were on paid leave due to “ongoing investigations into allegations of serious misconduct.” Later the New Hampshire attorney general’s office announced that it had opened a criminal investigation into allegations of “sexual misconduct.” The complaint filed on Thursday explains the root of those investigations.

A ‘Party Culture’

Kristina M. Rapuano, who earned her Ph.D. this year, and Vassiki Chauhan, a fourth-year graduate student who is still at Dartmouth, both say they were raped by one of the three professors. Several of the plaintiffs describe being groped, pressured to drink, or subjected to comments about their appearance and relationships by one of the professors.

Rapuano was a graduate student working in Kelley’s lab in 2015 when she met him in San Francisco, where they were attending a conference. He took her to a bar and allegedly encouraged her to drink well into the morning, then sexually assaulted her “when he knew she was too incapacitated to consent,” according to the complaint. He continued to pressure her into a sexual relationship, and when she tried to reject him, he would “deprive her of academic guidance and refuse to schedule meetings to discuss her research.”

Chauhan was working as Whalen’s teaching assistant in April 2017 when he allegedly pressured her into drinking with him. He brought her to his house, and though she tried to leave, he prevented her from doing so and “forced her to engage in nonconsensual intercourse with him,” according to the complaint. That encounter happened about two weeks after several graduate students reported Heatherton, Kelley, and Whalen for sexual misconduct.

Another complainant, a former undergraduate named Marissa Evans, alleged that when she met Kelley for a job interview, he “plied her with several glasses of wine before taking her bar-hopping and buying her whiskey,” even though she was 19 years old and so not of legal drinking age. He later sent her more than 10 explicit sexual photographs of himself and “repeatedly threatened to harm Ms. Evans academically after she refused to engage in his sexual banter,” the complaint says.

In all, the plaintiffs describe an environment in which they felt pressured to participate in the department’s “party culture,” and if they didn’t, they would be neglected by their professors. Eventually, in April 2017, several of them brought their complaints to the chair of the department, David J. Bucci, and the director of graduate studies, Thalia Wheatley, and a Title IX investigation was launched.

$70 Million in Damages

At least 27 people participated in investigations of the three professors, according to the complaint. Heatherton, Kelley, and Whalen were put on administrative leave in July 2017. Based on the findings of those investigations, Elizabeth F. Smith, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, recommended that their tenure be revoked. They each left on their own in June or July of this year.

In a statement issued through his lawyer when he retired, Heatherton apologized for his actions.

“I acknowledge that I acted unprofessionally in public at conferences while intoxicated,” he said. “I offer a humble and sincere apology to anyone affected by my actions.”

In a statement issued on Thursday through his lawyer, Heatherton denied “playing any role in creating a toxic environment” and noted that none of the complainants were his graduate students. He said he was “extremely concerned about being grouped with the other professors,” adding that he did not know about the allegations made against them before seeing the complaint. He said he did not regularly socialize, party, or drink with his graduate students.

The statement also responded to the individual allegations made against him. In the complaint, one student, Sasha Brietzke, said Heatherton had met her and other attendees at a conference in 2017 and had “groped her buttocks” and then “grabbed her waist and pulled her into his lap and asked her what she was ‘going to be doing later that night.’” Heatherton said that his actions had been “unprofessional,” and though he regrets touching her, he denied that it was “a sexual touching.”

Heatherton also acknowledged a 2002 incident in which he allegedly “grabbed a female graduate student’s breasts and told her that she was ‘not doing very well,’” according to the complaint. The incident was reported to Dartmouth administrators, the complaint said. Heatherton said that the student involved chose not to file a complaint and that when she was interviewed, she said she viewed the incident as an accident.

Kelley and Whalen appear not to have spoken publicly since they resigned. Efforts to reach them on Thursday were not successful.

In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs seek $70 million in damages from Dartmouth. They also want the college to change its Title IX process and improve how it treats people who report incidents of abuse, they said in an interview.

Some of the plaintiffs are still students at Dartmouth. Brietzke, who has several years left in her Ph.D. program, said she had been scared to participate in the lawsuit because of how it would be perceived in the field, but decided to do so anyway because of the headwinds she knows many women face in the sciences.

“This lawsuit is something to equal the playing field,” Brietzke said. “In doing so, in keeping women in science, it’s a gift to science.”

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.