Unless otherwise stated, phrases in quotations are lifted from our email correspondence.
Several weeks ago, I sent “I Had an Affair with my Hero, a Philosopher Who’s Famous for being ‘Moral’” to Thought Catalogue and to the blog “What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?” One of the editors of the latter contacted me immediately and put me in touch with another victim, who put me in touch with lawyers working on a suit against my hero. I told them that I had also submitted my piece to a pop culture blog, but that the two-week publication timeframe had passed. I was under the impression that it was no longer going to be published. Furthermore, since I have spoken to the lawyers, I pretended to continue my affair to gather more information and emails for the case. He was still very keen to keep me as his secret mistress, and I had a few weeks before he would arrive at the city where I lived. He was suspicious because I’ve repeatedly told him that I found him reprehensible. He even asked “I don’t know why you still care about me — to protect international womanhood?”
Information about which I was previously unaware now renders some of the statements in my original article inaccurate. For example, a few weeks ago I thought that “he will never make a move on these young scholars” and “he will not get involved with someone who is officially his student.” I was unaware of the instances of sexual harassment he’s perpetrated. Come to think of it, he once told me about how he got a blowjob from a student in University C when he was a professor there.
For months, I struggled to reconcile the image I had of my hero with this flawed and insecure man. In the end, I realized that the man I was with was not only flawed but is a disturbed master manipulator. After speaking to the other young women, I started to see my own experience differently.
When we met at a conference, he singled me out amongst a group of students, talking to me directly about how he had in the works several charity projects for the poor people in my country. I don’t know how he knew which country I am from. Like the other PhD students with whom I’ve connected, I fit his physical type—all of us are either Asians (especially Chinese virgins) or Latinas (especially Catholics). He initiated contact with me, looked up my email address on the web, and told me the following in an email: “Let me know when you’re ready, lots of job openings cross my desk, so maybe I can help you find a place where you can be productive in the global justice universe.” This offer was made despite the fact that he was not at my presentation and, as my friend who witnessed our interaction pointed out, I was too starstruck to compose a coherent sentence. I would’ve probably never emailed him first. In my groupie mind, he was on a distant and unreachable pedestal.
I was so smitten with and flattered by the attention from a person whom I considered a living legend that I was blind to all the warning signs. I ignored the pattern in which we would be talking about philosophy and then he would steer the conversation towards sexual topics. He told me very detailed stories about his nymphomaniac mother’s many affairs. I ignored the fact that he invited me to talk about philosophy when he really wanted to talk about his previous lovers and the women that pursued him, repeating several times that he didn’t know why he gets all this attention because he’s distinctively average-looking. I felt so privileged to be the special confidant of this global justice hero. (What a groupie.) He told me stories, which he’d say he hasn’t told anyone before, commented upon how himself and heimelig, I made him feel.
I was sincerely trying to date him, but he did not know how to have a relationship. He did not know how to handle me because he had been far more coercive and manipulative with others. He had to nag me into sending him my paper on his work, which he repeatedly said he would get published. I hope you appreciate how tempting this was. The dream of any grad student who wants an academic career is to publish. I eschewed his offers of bribery, because I was trying to build a relationship. I knew our credentials would make equality impossible, but I was going to strive for it anyway. However, for him, a relationship consisted of tit for tat. He even tried to give me cash once and offered to fly me home to visit my family, to which I jokingly responded, are you trying to be my sugar daddy? When I asked him why he keeps trying to bribe me, why he’s attempting to forge a quid pro quo relationship, he said in email “I never meant to bribe you… I just wanted to show you how much I care for you.” I explained that I have worked too hard for so long on my academic career and political projects and that accepting his help would make our relationship indispensable to me for the wrong reasons. I now realize that this explanation was unnecessary — he knew exactly what he was doing.
I was jealous that he had all these young special close female friends. I accused him of befriending exotic young women in order to pave the path for “love and romance.” I now realize that a better term would be “grooming.” His tactics are not new:
1. Find naïve, innocent, sexually inexperienced young women: He repeatedly told me that I was an aberration from his type, because I was not sexually inexperienced. (Let me beat you to it. Slut.) He proudly told me that the majority of the women he’s been with were either virgins or had had only one boyfriend.
2. Convert the professional relationship into a personal one. Establish trust and a close personal friendship with the person. My hero’s personal favorite non-professional activity seems to be cycling. He regularly takes the young women that he “mentors” cycling with him, and even told me of how one of his PhD supervisees (whom I can name if needed) called him to say that he got an erection when she was sitting in between his legs on his bicycle. He said that out of all his lovers, I was the fastest one to go to bed with him. He said it usually took him many months, even years, before young women went to bed with him.
3. Ask to meet her family to indicate that you are a serious and caring mentor. This would further legitimize the mentoring.
4. Make yourself indispensable to the young woman by dangling career advancement opportunities, make their academic careers reliant on your close special “friendship.” He explicitly told me that his close special friends would have never gotten into prestigious universities without him.
5. In order to elicit pity, spin your tale of your lonely existence and conceal the fact that you’ve been living with a partner for three decades. If you are cornered into admitting that you have a partner, appeal to her pity by claiming that you are being coerced into staying in a loveless relationship with someone you can only talk “banal” things with.
6. Once the close special friendship is established, once their careers are reliant on your personal relationship with them, go to a conference in a foreign country. By this point, you’d have been too close, too good “friends,” you would’ve already met her parents and trust is already established, that it would be too awkward to refuse sharing a hotel room. Point out that the money that would be used for a separate room would be funds better used for your charitable projects.
This was the recipe. Though they are young, impressionable, and looked like — as he often put it — teenagers, the women (that I know of) are over the age of consent. I tried to convince him many times that what he is doing—having affairs behind his de facto wife’s back with young female scholars—is wrong. He insisted, however, that he has done and will continue to do no wrong with his behavior. He said that he needs “love and romance” in his life, that he cannot bear the thought that “his last passionate kiss is behind him.” For him, “love and romance” are constitutive of leveraging and demonstrating the power he has acquired through his campaigns for global justice, to showing off to impressionable young women from the developing world his many charitable projects in their home countries. When I told him he shouldn’t be sleeping with his inexperienced young admirers, he told me that I should tell that to all the young women that want to go to bed with him.
I considered revealing my identity so I can stand by my claims, but all the people, who have my best interest in mind, insist that if I do this, I can forget about having a career in academia. There’s a part of me that almost wants to say that if I would get penalized for exposing a serial sexual predator, then to hell with this profession. If I can’t succeed in this discipline because I did the right thing, then this is not the place I thought it was, and I wouldn’t want to be here anyway.
Let me now make clear my motivation. I was a sexually abused child. The first time I was abused was when I was three years old, and my grandmother saw it. She took me to the bathroom, cleaned me, and told me not to tell anyone about it. As a veteran women’s organizer and as someone who always spoke loudly against sexual abuse, I know far too many sexually abused women. All the sexually abused women that I know received the same message — without fail — whenever they tried to talk about their sexual abuse: Shut up, and do not tell anyone else about it. Despite my many obvious character deficiencies, I am now officially an adult, and I’m done with people telling me not to talk about sexual predators.
The reason why this keeps going on, why sexual discrimination, abuse, and harassment is so pervasive, is precisely because no one wants to talk about it. It makes people uncomfortable; this stuff should remain private. So many people read, shared, judged, and insulted me because of what I wrote. To the strong minority that applauded me for speaking out, thank you.
When I found out that it was known to people that he has had previous sexual harassment cases, I was furious. Why do we not know about this? Why didn’t those tenured academics say anything? Are we seriously accepting this kind of behavior from an esteemed moral philosopher? Is this supposed to be normal? He is an influential public figure and world-renowned academic. He is around impressionable and sexually inexperienced young women all the time. It is in the public’s interest to know about this. One of his victims attempted suicide and is still cutting herself. Another has been in psychiatric treatment for years. He does not restrict himself to graduate students.
I opened a can of worms that was begging to be opened. I brought this topic to a public forum. I got people thinking, debating, arguing, and name-calling. I don’t mind getting called a slut because I want people to think about what this term means, signifies, and represents. Let’s think and talk about our norms. Without forgetting that there are cases where legal lines have been breached, let’s talk about these blurred lines. Let’s talk about whether it’s wrong for powerful men to offer career advancement opportunities, forge special friendships, in the hopes of bedding young women. This isn’t just a one-off thing about my affair with my hero. This is about our profession, culture, practices, and norms. This is about a rampant form of corruption in our discipline that thrives in a culture of silence. This is about all those people who said I am naïve and stupid for being shocked that a man who devoted his life to justice would be capable of this behavior. Let’s ask whether famous moral philosophers have a moral responsibility to live a minimally decent life. Let’s ask who would be the authority on what would count as a minimally decent life.
When I told him that what he’s doing is an abuse of power, he said all’s fair in love and war. I am calling on all feminists and sympathizers to give him war. The main purpose of this second post is to send an open invitation to anyone who has any information that can help our legal case. People know about what he’s been doing. If you know that he was sharing a hotel room with a student, please come forward and testify as a witness. If you know the names of the students he’s invited to his hotel room, we can find out if he wrote them reference letters.
Sexual harassment lawsuits hardly ever succeed. No woman stands a chance against such powerful figures. Moreover, victims have already endured so much damage and turmoil, rendering them unfit for tedious legal proceedings and unwilling to endure – as the comments on this blog proves – the public tendency to blame victims. This particular kind of sexual harassment is aggravated by the fact that the victims are terrified of compromising their intellectual reputation because this esteemed professor, as he himself told me, played a significant part in getting them into their PhD programs. It is the perfect crime; he ensures that it is in the interest of the victims that they stay silent.
This person is a seasoned sexual exploiter. We cannot expect inexperienced young women to realize that they are being played, because they admire him, not because of the strength of his arguments but for his poverty-alleviating projects, for his perceived moral integrity. They will dismiss their suspicions that he is behaving wrongly because it contradicts their expectations from even a minimally decent person. They will doubt their own sanity if they think their hero is doing something wrong.
So, make no mistake about it, these budding female scholars from the developing world are his victims. As such, we in the feminist community will protect and defend them with everything that we have. They can remain anonymous to the public and get witness protection. If many of us come together, if you can convince your friend who was victimized to come forward with us, we will be an indestructible force, with the potential of having reverberating effects on sexual harassment in our profession.
I hope you can see the bigger picture. I am asking you to join me, circulate this as widely as possible, corroborate his tactics, and help the victim who actually suffered sexual violence in her lawsuit against this man. If you come forward with us, you will have an army of dedicated people behind you. Send an email to protectinglisbeth@gmail.com and identify yourself. I will identify myself to you and put you in touch with the influential academics behind us.
By all means, call me naïve and stupid, but I will rage against a world that requires me to expect deceit, manipulation, sexual harassment, and assault from a person celebrated as a champion of the oppressed. Help us bring to justice the man who devoted his life to justice. Please help us launch a legal investigation on this man. Help us find dedicated lawyers that will take this man to court. We have a wealth of information and evidence that we want to submit for a trial. Do it for women, for our discipline, and for the women in our discipline. Ending gender-based discrimination and violence is going to be a long and hard struggle, but this is as good as any other place to start. I am speaking out again because I refuse to give up hope, because I am committed to the view that “what now seems like an eccentric and utopian cause will be an exemplar of what [gender] justice commands.”*
*Pogge, Thomas. 2008. World Poverty and Human Rights. Cambridge: Polity, p. 32.
Pingback: Details About An Alleged “Sexual Exploiter” | Daily Nous
Reality Enthusiast said:
Reblogged this on Reality Enthusiast.
Jennat Faralaise said:
Effects of Feminism On Men
anon said:
“Let me point out that I can get sued for libel if I’m making false statements. In fact, he should publish his own statement to defend himself if I am fabricating all this.”
For what it’s worth, while this may be true, it’s at most of mere formal validity. A libel suit is almost never worth it if the target doesn’t have money, and if the person bringing the suit is plausibly a “public figure” (Pogge may or may not qualify- it’s hard to say) the chances are very low he’d win, even if most of the things claimed were false. Publishing his own statement would not put the cat back in the bag, so to speak, even if he were 100% right. (I rather doubt that, but even if he were, it would not do that much.)
Perhaps it’s still the right thing to do to publish this. I don’t know for sure what I think. (Most of the account is of him being a jerk, but that’s no crime. The other information is much more speculative and may not amount to harassment on a legal or institutional standard.) But, if there are doubts about whether publishing this is the right thing to do or not, the quoted part above should do very little, if anything, to lessen the worries.
anon said:
Why are people still posting on TC and not here?
ANONYMOUS PLEASE said:
I am writing as one of those predecessors, although it makes me want to throw up to utter these words. I can recognize the exact pattern of the perpetrator described in this post, as well as all the private details mentioned in the earlier post.
I don’t wish either to identify myself or to testify as a victim, at least not at this point. The primary reason is that I don’t remember the relation with him as being abusive or as something that would count as sexual assault, even though it was definitely deceitful. (When we first met, he claimed that he just separated from his partner.) It happened many years ago, when I was one of those extremely naïve, above-the-age-of-consent but vulnerable virgins swept off her feet by his attention, friendliness and calculated flatter of her intelligence. I left him after finding out that he lied about his partner, that she (an intelligent Taiwanese woman) had been very loyal to him and assisted him in his life and work for over 20 years, and that his hypocritical character revealed itself again and again in small things. (For example, judging from his behaviors when I was with him, he didn’t care a bit about the poor people living under his eyes.) My life moved on. I never thought about him again or the nature of the relation—until I came across the blogger’s first post on her affair with him. While I am still trying to sort out the mixed bag of feelings boiling inside me (shock, disgust, humiliation, anger, guilt, etc.), I want to say to PROTECTINGLISBETH: thank you for your courage! I’ll contact you if/when I am ready.
poliscirumors.com said:
Pretending to be a new “victim” on the comments on your own blog is just pathetic.
ANONYMOUS PLEASE said:
Though I don’t want to bring myself to your low, I want to say that your comment makes my blood boil and my hands shake while typing this. I am NOT numerically identical to the original blogger. And I am not claiming to be yet another victim. (Because I never felt like being one, even though the recent revelation is causing me to rethink my past relation with that man.) I have come forward only to give some support, no matter how feeble this may be, to the original blogger.
Rus said:
Your comment would only be warranted if you could be nearly certain that “ANONYMOUS PLEASE” is the blogger. It seems to me that you could not know this. I can’t even think of why you would think this.
Furthermore, if “ANONYMOUS PLEASE” is not the same person as the original blogger, the your comment can only be hurtful. You must know this.
I thus think you’re trying to hurt people whom you already suspect have been hurt. This makes me think you either thrive on causing pain to others or you’re having some sort of angry self-image-preserving or Freudian reaction to the blogger and “ANONYMOUS PLEASE”.
Rus said:
I meant “I don’t know how you could rationally conclude this”, not ” I can’t even think of why you would think this”.
Eric said:
I feel like I have a responsibility to reply since I was one of the people who objected to your original post at Thought Catalog. But before I do that, let me briefly explain the substance of my original objection. My concern then (and now) is that anyone with the ability to type can find a forum online on which they can put forward these sorts of accusations. The person doing so may–as in your case–be telling the truth or may be lying. As I said in my original response on Thought Catalog, the vast majority of online readers generally have no way of knowing that the person who types “I am an Asian woman who was seduced by professor X” is not, in fact, a white man engaged in a kind of subterfuge and retaliating against professor X for quite different reasons. This is not a case of extreme skepticism run amok; it is, I believe, a cautious and necessary incredulity towards internet postings.
Having said that, I am inclined to believe what you say, although I hope you’ll understand and perhaps even accept that nothing has really changed in terms of the available data by which I reached this conclusion. Still, I believe you and hope somehow that you can obtain some justice for what has been done to you.
I still worry, however, about this “online information generation[al]” approach to getting justice, for the reasons that I already gave and also because, if you review the comments to your original post, more than one name was floated in the rush to identify the perpetrator. Do these people deserve to have suspicion directed at them when they are not the perpetrator you had in mind? If other, entirely innocent, 60ish philosophers at Ivy League universities were to experience harm to their reputations based on your teasing details that your sexually predatory hero was a 60ish philosopher at an Ivy, wouldn’t you bear some responsibility for that harm?
I am deeply familiar with and sympathetic to feminist causes, as well as with the issues of the considerable power asymmetries that exist between tenured professors and graduate (or undergraduate students), whether at the same university or not. Recognizing these asymmetries, one might be tempted to give your online exposure of a reputed sexual predator a pass. It might be considered a kind of acceptable guerrilla warfare tactic. But even in situations of warfare where one side has vastly more power and resources than the other, we don’t excuse any and every act by the admittedly weaker side, do we? Aren’t there some kinds of conduct by the outgunned that we would like to identify as ethically blameworthy?
I will admit that I vacillate on whether or not I think your behavior crosses into that territory. It is made harder by my belief that you are telling the truth.
Personally, I think that the APA and the other professional societies need to address this issue head on. A notable aspect of the analytic philosophical tradition is the progress it claims to have made on certain philosophical issues. Given those achievements, is it utterly utopian to think that the various professional societies might be able to come to some agreements about the kind of conduct they expect of their members? At minimum, they should be able to provide reasonable answers to the following questions:
1. Is there any form of amorous/sexual relationship between a professor and graduate/undergraduate student that can avoid moral/ethical blameworthiness? If so, what does it look like?
2. When instances of morally blameworthy relations between professor and student become known to members of the profession, what, if any, action should the society take? Are there kinds of conduct by either accuser or accused that it expects them to adhere to in such circumstances (e.g. an agreement not to engage in online or backchannel mudslinging)?
The behavior you describe is serious and objectionable. It affects the way in which the field as a whole is regarded and can have a deleterious effect on the willingness of aspiring philosophers to enter the field. For that reason alone, the various professional societies should not assume that it is sufficient for universities and departments to handle these situations internally and only after misconduct has arisen. They should be leading the vaunt by making clear the kinds of behavior they expect of their members.
protectinglisbeth said:
The main reason why I submitted my first piece to thought catalogue is because I had nowhere else to go. I do not have a legal case against him and have explicit pronouncements from him that he highly prefers sexually inexperienced young women and that he sees no wrong in what he’s done with me and my predecessors. I thought it was a moral issue, an abuse of power, and there have been many who have been exploited. So I put it out there for the public to know. As you can tell from my second post, he is not just an old man with a penchant for virgins.
Pingback: Yet more about that prominent moral philosopher | Feminist Philosophers
anon said:
Thank you for your whistleblowing. You’re helping to change the profession for the better. Many of us have now heard through other channels that the allegations towards the accused prof. really are very serious, above and beyond what you wrote about.
However there has been an undesirable side effect to your revelations: lots of young female scholars who worked with this prof. are now under suspicion of having received career advancement in exchange for sexual favors or flirtation. If at all possible, you need to clear their names. That’s why it would be good to see your data. Admittedly that won’t clear everyone’s name, but it will give us a factual basis to put an end to the raging speculations.
protectinglisbeth said:
I have submitted the names to the authorities. As of now, the priority is to protect the victims.
Anon said:
If I may ask, what authorities? I understand that there is a legal case, but the issue is far wider. It is an issue of academic integrity. As someone pointed out in the other thread, the proper authorities are impossible to trace. Should you write to a committee that gave someone a job on the basis of a reference obtained through sexual favors? Could one even prove that the reference was decisive? Can we expect a journal to retract a paper published in the same way? And so on. These things can’t be put right. The best we can do is continue the naming and shaming campaign you courageously started.
protectinglisbeth said:
So, initially, I thought it was just a moral issue. But I now realize that it’s actually a serious legal issue because of multiple counts on sexual harassment and even assault, not with me but from other women.
Pingback: More on the Recent Anonymous Sexual Harassment and Assault Accusations | Daily Nous
protectinglisbeth said:
See Case 2 http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2011/09/30/harassment-victims-speak/
protectinglisbeth said:
From fundrazr
From fundrazr: I wish I could give more. I not only mean I wish I could give more money; I also wish I could give my name, and I can’t because I fear for my own uncertain career (I am a grad student in the relevant field in which a professor undeserving of that title continues to thrive, and a promising young mind has been shut out). I’m ashamed that self-interest prevents me from supporting this campaign the way I want to. But this fear should also be illuminating for a discipline that also ought to be ashamed. It has endorsed, empowered and enabled one of its most visible representatives – holding one of its most coveted professorships – to continually betray the trust of his students in the most deplorable ways. Moreover, this is only a symptom of a more deeply rooted misogyny in the discipline. The very fact that a female grad student fears for her own career as she gives ten dollars to this campaign – is reason enough for the discipline to be terribly, terribly ashamed.
Rus said:
Thank-you so much for everything you’ve done. I would relate my own experiences in your defense, but I (understandably!) have to log in with my email address to post this, and – though only you and those defending you would see likely it – that’s too much non-anonymity for me.
s. wallerstein said:
What strikes me in this and in other similar cases which I’ve followed online is that the
faculty harasser never apologizes or recognizes that he has done wrong or is capable of self-criticism. If I had hurt people who were close to me as well as young people who were under my responsibility (students), I would ask their pardon, promise to not to continue with the same behavior and if necessary, offer to undergo therapy which could help me change. It’s as simple as that. Especially if I were a moral philosopher…..
By the way, I wonder about moral philosophy. To understand morality is a question of experience as well as therapy. One learns to be moral by practicing it. That is, if one wants to be honest, one has to learn, through experience, when to tell the truth and when not to. One learns through trial and error: there’s no other way. However, if, as in the case of this moral philosopher, one does not practice morality in one’s personal life, one will not master the subtleties of being moral or ethical, since they can only be mastered by practice.
Tenured Radical said:
“One learns to be moral by practicing it. ”
What!? Back to your Aristotle, heretic. There are no such vapors in the rarified air of analytic ethics.
protectinglisbeth said:
He has no remorse. When I or his other conquests asked him to make good on his promises, he dismissed such demands on the grounds that they’re just mere bourgeoisie conventions. He does not feel obligated to fulfill whatever promises he makes during the seduction process. I have email evidence for this claim.
s. wallerstein said:
There’s a line from an old Bob Dylan song (which your aged professor might recall):
“If you live outside the law, you must be honest”.
That is, if one rejects bourgeois conventions, fine, but then one should replace them with more decent, creative, life-affirming values, not with lumpen-bourgeois values and dirty tricks that make this character into the Ricard Nixon of sexual harassment.
Kathleen Lowrey said:
From what I have read thus far it would seem to me a lawyer could be found to take on your cases with the prospect of earning his or her fees out of a settlement from Yale. Particularly with respect to “case # 2” reported in the Yale Daily Mail (for which the fundrazr campaign is underway) there seem to me grounds to sue the living bejeezus out of Yale for its absence of responsible oversight and the consequent out of control behaviour of one of its profs. It looks potentially (in light of case #1) like a pattern of institutional irresponsibility, and Yale is a fat target.
protectinglisbeth said:
I agree. Yale needs to seriously look into how they handle these cases. We would be grateful for any further recommendations on this and how we can connect with all the others.
s. wallerstein said:
There’s a typo in my second paragraph. “Experience as well as therapy” should read “experience as well as theory”.
Anon said:
Any updates on the data? The other thread is dying down. Please don’t let them get away with it.
poliscirumors.com said:
She made $400 off of you gullible fools on fundrazr, so she’s probably done with this.
s. wallerstein said:
What is amazing in this situation is the level of fear. No one dares to use their name. Are we talking about Yale University or about the Soviet Union under Stalin?
Something is very wrong when philosophy students in a great university in a democratic society are so afraid to identify themselves. What is the climate inside that university?
protectinglisbeth said:
People are now using their names in their witness statements. Ever since the publication of the first blog post, non-anonymous people started talking. Main thing is that I can substantiate my claims through our email correspondence. I have evidence that he wrote a reference letter for one of his student/lover despite not having any “intellectual contact” with her.
s. wallerstein said:
I’m so happy to hear that the truth is coming out. You were very courageous to get the ball rolling.
poliscirumors.com said:
You gullible idiots just got conned out of $400.
Yehud said:
Why are you so angry at the world?
protectinglisbeth said:
Because of this kind of thing http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/23/yale-sexual-assault-punishment_n_3786885.html
Yehud said:
I didn’t mean the author of the blog. I meant “poliscirumors.com” writing that people have been “conned.” That blog is a real pit of sexism and racism, and full of angry white men.
protectinglisbeth said:
Yes, I realized this afterwards. But I decided to keep the reply because, like this irate commentator, I am also angry at the world because of how unfair it is to sexually abused people. Given that Yale treats their sexually predatory student with such lenience, I can only dread how lenient they would be to one of their star professors, who brings a lot of prestige and money to their institution.
anupamaranawana25 said:
Reblogged this on polmess and commented:
#breakthesilence
protectinglisbeth said:
Thank you for sharing the article.
Yehud said:
Should put a banner describing the new post announcing this campaign
https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/5lQo9/ab/43Mpcf
poliscirumors.com said:
Is there any evidence that the person conducting this fundraiser is actually connected to the case? Did it occur to any of you that this might be a scam?
Patrick Perez said:
It seems highly unlikely that a fund raising campaign this personal in nature would acquire $7K+ worth of funds from fools. Publicly distributed updates, context, from the professional psych eval of the claimant will also dispel the scam possibility.
Is the psych eval the only hard evidence in this case? I know little about it.
Just Passing on by said:
Really? Two words: Bernie Madoff.
protectinglisbeth said:
Follow the Protecting Lisbeth facebook campaign if you want more info on why the psych evaluation is 7k. It is of course not the only evidence. There are many witness statements.
An open letter to the accused professor said:
Dear Professor,
Legalities aside, I’m afraid you’re going down, professionally speaking. Lying low for a few years won’t be enough. At best you’ll retreat to a provincial university and go back to your Kant scholarship. But why go quietly? You aren’t a lone bad apple. Take those hypocrites down with you. People who owe you favors are gleefully watching their debts disappear. They can’t wait to fill the power vacuum you’re leaving on the global justice stage. Expose them. Denounce other senior academics who indulge in bedding the junior and powerless. Denounce even those who like to surround themselves with pretty girls and boys but are too repressed to make a move on them. Reveal the names of women you slept or flirted with and then helped professionally. Now they’re all ganging up on you. Divide them, scatter their targets. Show them all that you are just a shiny, grand mirror in front of a corrupt profession. This is your best and last chance.
Yours,
Samson Phronimos
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Pingback: Solidarity to the victims of the ‘moral philosopher’ | Strategic Misogyny
Common Reader said:
Inside Higher Ed has the whole story now
Feminist Doc said:
I respect you so much for coming forward and bringing this to the public forum. The fact is that this type of sexual predator is present in every department, in every college and university around the world. How strange that higher education should be a safer place for these predators to hide than the Catholic Church or US military.
Any professor who abuses his or her power to manipulate students into having sex with him or her should be immediately unemployed and unemployable. Just as child molesters shouldn’t be schoolteachers. Full stop.
The real culprits here are the colleges and universities which are happy to write policies and not enforce them, and in so doing enable these sexual predators to continue perpetrating students. And why shouldn’t they when tenure is apparently a carte blanche for legalized rape?
Until the universities themselves are held accountable for the cultures they create in which sexual harassment is normative, and administrators are writing the checks to victims– nothing will change. And frankly, cultural change this large comes slow or not at all. Until then, academia isn’t worth working for.
This problem is much, much bigger than one sick, disgusting old narcissist. Keep fighting!!! Keep talking. Keep publicizing. You all are doing a great public service and maybe one day our daughters and sons will have access to an harassment-free education.
protectinglisbeth said:
Thank you. We are working behind the scenes at the moment. The online campaign brought in a lot of new information and witnesses. For now, we are prioritizing the legal case. But after we win this, we will publicizing the overwhelming evidence we’ve accumulated.
Anon UK Philosopher said:
I just came across this blog-site. I know another case about this person, though my take on it may be different from that of others. Incidentally I have always suspected and distrusted moralizing/political philosophers who wave their political righteousness around, but that is a more general matter. Academics can be terribly morally vain, which one sees in the gender wars as much as elsewhere. Anyway, … this Professor was visiting Oxford and a PhD (in political theory) from another university, who I knew a little, went up and talked with him after his talk. I saw it. She flirted with him unashamedly, outrageously, simpering, and showing cleavage, etc. I thought she was a somewhat crass but I didn’t want to moralize about it. I thought, ‘whatever’, if that is what she wants to do, ok. And he may enjoy the attention, so what? I was liberal. But what DID piss me off was that I found out that soon after that she was somehow on some visiting thing, spending time at his fancy university in the USA. My reaction to this, and here I may differ from others on your blog, was NOT so much a concern about possible sexual goings on. I try to stay liberal about that. But my objection was this was a prize academic opportunity bestowed unfairly on this person, when it could have go to someone more deserving. (I knew that she was of ‘modest’ abilities, shall we say politely). That seemed an injustice. This opportunity was not dispensed on merit. What about the hardworking and talented male students, or talented female students who were either less attractive or less disposed to flirt?
protectinglisbeth said:
Actually, I know for a fact that Thomas Pogge does not like flirtatious women who show their cleavage. He has a very strong, almost exclusive preference, for innocent, timid, shy, and sexually inexperienced young women. I strongly doubt that a woman coming on to him this strongly whilst showcasing her cleavage would get much from him. He enjoys chasing, seducing, and corrupting the young and sexually inexperienced. He invests a lot of time and effort in converting the professional relationship into a personal one. The escalation of physical contact is gradual, taking years even. Maybe he did this one off thing with this woman, but that would be an exception to his usual type and pattern. I was an exception to his sexually inexperienced type. I was an outlier to his pattern. He likes to take his time to establish trust and friendship because these — trust and friendship — are the foundations for his harvest. He is not the buffoon-type sexual predator who just wants to get his rocks off. He enjoys taking his time and exerting his power by slowly making his targets dependent on him. He wants control, dependency, and power over his targets. Sex is just the cherry on top.
Anon US psychologist said:
freud initially wrote about sexual abuse but eventually recanted under pressure (cf peter swales, janet malcom, jeff masson). freud’s cohorts didn’t want to hear about sexual abuse. they didn’t believe it could possibly be true. decades later the public has matured, so to speak. judith herman’s book ‘father-daugher incest’ revealed what was happening behind closed doors in american families. now that we know what’s been happening in american families and, more recently, the catholic church, let’s find out what’s happening in taxpayer-subsidized institutions of higher learning. you might not need a day job as a philosophy teacher if you manage to bring down this goliath.
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Change Stigma said:
http://changestigma.wordpress.com/2014/06/01/bullied-into-silence-the-stigma-of-speaking-about-sexual-harassment-in-academia/
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Nils said:
Having read both of your blog posts, from what I can gather, it is beyond doubt that his behavior is morally reprehensible. It goes without saying that it is not worthy of a moral role model. I was wondering, however, what exactly makes this a “professional misconduct”? Apparently, he used his fame and influence to trick young woman into a relationship which was different from what they believed (or hoped) it would be. But what if he would have been using his fame and influence to get a young philosopher into an honest relationship? Would that still be professional misconduct? In other words, was using his fame and influence what made it a professional misconduct – no matter whether his intentions were honest or not – or was his dishonest intention the reason making it a professional misconduct?
protectinglisbeth said:
Thanks for your question. Briefly, what makes it a case of “professional misconduct” is that, among other things, Pogge writes reference letters for women with whom he has not had, as he put it, “any intellectual contact” with. Without getting into the specifics, he advances the careers of his lovers and special friends with publications and professional appointments. However, whilst *my* issue with him (based on my experience) could be branded as a contentious allegation of “professional misconduct,” others have much more serious allegations, which are undoubtedly immoral and illegal. See here https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/5lQo9/sh/43Mpcf