James Levine - it's about time

[+ WilliamM]

I think there are plenty of entire male sports teams where all the guys have grabbed each others penis at one time or another and they don't even think of it as sexual, just something they do for comic effect and everybody laughs about it

 

Really. I spent two years in the Army in the late 1960s often with one large shower room close to the beds. My only interesting experience was sharing soap a few times. And yes everyone showered together at night.

 

You have a vivid imagination though.

[+ sniper]

Have you ever played rugby? There's rampant nudity and horseplay in the sport. Less so today in the age of ubiquitous cameras bu it's there nonetheless.

[+ WilliamM]

Have you ever played rugby? There's rampant nudity and horseplay in the sport. Less so today in the age of ubiquitous cameras bu it's there nonetheless.

 

The draft was still in place when I was in the army in the late 1960s. Why would you possibly think rugby and U.S. military then were so different? My best friend for the last four months was a nice guy. But I never knew what side he was on in a race riot at the camp before my assigment there.

Edited December 10, 2017 by WilliamM

[+ WilliamM]

Some good news for James Levine New York Times

 

Law enforcement officials in Illinois said Friday that they would not bring criminal charges against the famed Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine, noting that the man accusing Mr. Levine of sexual abuse there three decades ago had been 16 at the time — which was then the age of consent.

 

“As such, even if it were possible to establish the alleged acts took place, they do not constitute a criminal offense under the applicable law,” the Lake Forest Police Department said in a statement.

 

The police had been investigating a complaint made last year by Ashok Pai, 48, who grew up in Illinois and said that he was sexually abused there as a teenager by Mr. Levine, who was then the music director of the Ravinia Festival, near Lake Forest. Mr. Pai accused Mr. Levine of lying naked with him in bed and touching his penis while at a hotel near the festival in 1986, when Mr. Pai was 16, beginning years of sexual contact.

 

Mr. Levine, 74, was suspended on Sunday from the Metropolitan Opera, his artistic home of more than 40 years, after three men — including Mr. Pai — came forward with accusations that he sexually abused them decades ago, when the men were teenagers or students of his. (A fourth man came forward on Monday with a similar accusation.) Friends and relatives of the accusers said in interviews that the men had either complained of Mr. Levine’s abuse near the time it happened or in the years since.

[Moondance]

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, March 12, 2018 ... It's Official ...

Metropolitan Opera fires James Levine after sexual abuse claims

 

Three months after multiple men accused James Levine of sexual assault, the Metropolitan Opera officially fired the conductor.

 

“The investigation uncovered credible evidence that Mr. Levine had engaged in sexually abusive and harassing conduct both before and during the period when he worked at the Met,” the opera said in a statement Monday.

 

“The investigation also uncovered credible evidence that Mr. Levine engaged in sexually abusive and harassing conduct towards vulnerable artists in the early stages of their careers, over whom Mr. Levine had authority.”

Four men accused Levine of assault, including Ashok Pai, who told the Daily News that the conductor “basically sexually assaulted me hundreds of times.”

 

Albin Ifsich told the New York Times that Levine, now 74, began abusing him in 1968 when he was 20 years old and continued for several years.

 

Levine had routinely denied the allegations.

 

“As understandably troubling as the accusations noted in recent press accounts are, they are unfounded,” he said in a statement to the Times. “As anyone who truly knows me will attest, I have not lived my life as an oppressor or an aggressor.”

 

The opera suspended Levine in December after the men began coming forward. An internal investigation included interviews with more than 70 people.

 

“In light of these findings, the Met concludes that it would be inappropriate and impossible for Mr. Levine to continue to work at the Met,” the company said.

[+ quoththeraven]

Finally. But the denial that the Met or its board knew anything about it or covered it up rings hollow given the long history of rumors.

 

What Levine did is disgusting and should never have been allowed to happen.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/03/13/the-metropolitan-operas-james-levine-once-on-the-cover-of-time-has-been-fired-for-alleged-sexual-abuse/?utm_term=.0207a32d9711

[+ sync]

I had such regard for him. I feel violated.

[Zapped]

I work in classical music. I studied at Juilliard in the 1970s--there were tons of rumors about him then.

 

Back in the aftermath of the sexual revolution, there was nothing like today's clarity regarding power imbalances. Sexual relationships between teachers and students were not the norm, but certainly a widespread phenomenon that was pretty much accepted. Blair Tindall's book "Mozart in the Jungle," the inspiration for the Amazon series, describes how pervasive this was at the North Carolina School of the Arts, where she attended high school, as well as in New York conservatories. (In NC, there were plenty of affairs between faculty and high school students, no rules against it, and a very, very low age of consent.)

 

So we just rolled our eyes, I think, and of course most of us only heard gossip. And we'd hear gossip about all sorts of people, some of which we knew wasn't true.

 

Those 60s/70s ideas of sexual freedom blinded a lot of people to damage we now recognize as a culture. I remember that in the late 70s, anyway, NAMBLA (the "North American Man/Boy Love Association," I think) was an accepted part of some gay pride parades and part of the movement. Some people thought that minors should have the freedom to have sexual relationships with older men.

 

I doubt I could name all the big-name musicians who taught at major conservatories who had sexual relations with their students, and at the time everyone more or less accepted it as just the way it was. There was a famous virtuoso at one big midwestern university whose female students were, one of them later told me, like a kind of harem for him. And the young women, or some of them, competed to be the one he slept with.

 

Our standards have changed so much!

 

Meanwhile, Levine's chickens have come home to roost. And the idea that people at the Met didn't know anything, and didn't somehow enable all this, just seems absurd to me. Everyone in the classical music/opera profession was sure all sorts of stuff was going on.

[+ Charlie]

When I lived in NYC in the 1970s and 80s, I knew a number of people with connections at Lincoln Center, and heard lots of stories about the administration of the Met repeatedly having to bail Levine out from sexual escapades, including arrests in public men's rooms. I find the declarations of the current administration that they knew nothing until recently completely unbelievable.

[+ WilliamM]

Back in the aftermath of the sexual revolution, there was nothing like today's clarity regarding power imbalances. Sexual relationships between teachers and students were not the norm, but certainly a widespread phenomenon that was pretty much accepted. Blair Tindall's book "Mozart in the Jungle," the inspiration for the Amazon series, describes how pervasive this was at the North Carolina School of the Arts, where she attended high school, as well as in New York conservatories. (In NC, there were plenty of affairs between faculty and high school students, no rules against it, and a very, very low age of consent.)

 

It's a lot more complicated if you studying for an advance degree, and the sexual relationship is with someone who will be questioning you on your thesis.

[+ quoththeraven]

When I lived in NYC in the 1970s and 80s, I knew a number of people with connections at Lincoln Center, and heard lots of stories about the administration of the Met repeatedly having to bail Levine out from sexual escapades, including arrests in public men's rooms. I find the declarations of the current administration that they knew nothing until recently completely unbelievable.

It's not just that. It's the supposedly independent law firm they hired to investigate saying that.

 

I grew up in the 60s and 70s (1974 high school grad) and I understood power dynamics. When someone (not you, I'm now responding to another comment) say girls competed to be part of a harem, be aware that it happened because they were conditioned to think this was the only way to get ahead - something that was a self-fulfilling prophecy that benefited the adults exploiting them, not the girls. Or in this case the the students of both genders whom Levine preyed upon.

 

Moreover, while I am sure there were scandals and situations I wasn't aware of, the only professor I was aware of in the undergraduate liberal arts program I graduated from who dated students was single and to the best of my knowledge didn't date current students. I knew an undergraduate student who didn't start dating a former TA until he was a former TA because of the obvious conflict of interest. People knew better but they pretended they didn't so they could turn a blind eye to it.

 

To excuse this on the basis of musical or artistic license is skeevy.

[+ WilliamM]

I grew up in the 60s and 70s (1974 high school grad) and I understood power dynamics. When someone (not you, I'm now responding to another comment) say girls competed to be part of a harem, be aware that it happened because they were conditioned to think this was the only way to get ahead - something that was a self-fulfilling prophecy that benefited the adults exploiting them, not the girls. Or in this case the the students of both genders whom Levine preyed upon

 

Thanks. I was a political science students in the 1960s, not a major noted for the number of women. Just to have one female professor was unusual, let alone two female students.

 

The gossip about the sex lives of the professor (age-mid-40s) and the students was stupid and unrelenting.

[Zapped]

I grew up in the 60s and 70s (1974 high school grad) and I understood power dynamics. When someone (not you, I'm now responding to another comment) say girls competed to be part of a harem, be aware that it happened because they were conditioned to think this was the only way to get ahead - something that was a self-fulfilling prophecy that benefited the adults exploiting them, not the girls.

 

Oh, right, clearly the now 60-something woman who told me this was disgusted by it at the time. It was, much like with Levine, a cult-like following with a very famous virtuoso with a forceful personality and pride in his sexual prowess. The combination of that hero-worship and the ethos of the sexual revolution was toxic.

 

In music conservatories, student/teacher sexual relationships were not something the majority of faculty participated in, but there certainly were plenty. Most were with graduate students, and most of the faculty were men getting or already divorced.

 

And then there were the stories about students running into faculty and staff at the baths back in the pre-AIDS days, which is kind of like, I suppose, what happens now on Grindr (faculty/staff and students encountering each other).

[+ WilliamM]

When I lived in NYC in the 1970s and 80s, I knew a number of people with connections at Lincoln Center, and heard lots of stories about the administration of the Met repeatedly having to bail Levine out from sexual escapades, including arrests in public men's rooms. I find the declarations of the current administration that they knew nothing until recently completely unbelievable.

 

No surprise. James Levine is taking legal action against the Met.