Draft Four: Your prof shouldn’t call at midnight
On an investigation into harassment at my J-School.
I’m back.
As I wrote in my last letter of 2023, I took a few weeks off from sending Draft Four. I haven’t yet had time to think about its longer term goals or sort through some of its tensions (such as writing in English vs. Romanian). But I’m back because I have this story to share.
It’s about the journalism school I graduated from, and that I occasionally teach in, as a contributor. For more than six months, alongside my former DoR colleague Carla Lunguți, we investigated years’ worth of rumors of sexual harassment and abuse of power by a faculty member, Horea-Mihai Bădău.
Unfortunately, many of those rumors proved true – for almost 20 years he engaged in behavior that crossed proper teacher-student boundaries, but also turned into emotional and psychological abuse. We printed the testimonies of 15 students, but there are more out there; more than 50 have confirmed hearing about his behavior over the years.
From their stories, a pattern of behavior emerged: the professor picked students whom he contacted privately and, if they responded to his messages or didn’t cut him off, he took the conversation in a direction where he repeatedly suggested they needed a man like him in their lives.
Because most were afraid to tell him to stop, he went further: he called them at night, kept them on the phone for an hour or more sometimes, invited them out to his home, to the beach in Vama Veche. He hired them to work for his websites, which were low quality click-bait journalism, was their internship coordinator, sent them poems, told them what he considered “feminine”, showed up with flowers outside their dorm, told them he missed them, loved them, and came onto them. He turned into a bully when he became romantically involved with some of his female students, emotionally and psychologically abusing them, as several experts confirmed for us.
He denies ever abusing anyone. The leadership of the school denies ever hearing about it, although almost every journalism student who has passed through that school in 20 years has at least heard the stories. A few professors acknowledged hearing stories, some even met victims, but since formal complaints were never filed, nothing was done.
Now there is a story that is making everyone aware of at least part of his transgressions.
I’m telling you this because this story has occupied much of my thinking over the past few months. It has also run my life since the start of the year – I haven’t had one day off, and I’ve been in the office from morning to night for the past 20 days.
In the meantime, Carla and I also published an updated version of an explanatory piece I previewed in this newsletter, looking at why universities don’t pay enough attention to sexual harassment. Cătălina Albeanu and Alina Cristea then wrote about what foreign universities are doing that we could copy and implement. (Simina Popescu is the amazing artist who has worked on all these stories – Leap, her graphic novel, on growing up queer in Romania comes out later this year in the US).
All these pieces, the investigation included, taught me a few lessons that I believe apply outside of journalism schools, and outside of universities.
1. Harassment is about impact, not intention. This requires humility to admit and accept. Here’s how experts framed it: “Sexual harassment (or harassment in general) depends on the impact the behavior has on a victim, not on the intention of the harasser.”
That means our behavior can be perceived as hurtful or harmful, even if we didn’t intend it that way. A bad joke. Our foul mood that spills onto colleagues, friends, partners. A rash gesture. A few slip-ups don’t make you a harasser or an abuser, but they also don’t let you off the hook. I punched a wall at work many years ago out of frustration, slapped a table, raised my voice at home and at work occasionally – those behaviors have hurt others, even if I didn’t mean to.
So let’s work toward managing ourselves better and owning our slip-ups. In time, we’ll be more humble about our limits, but also better at spotting serial harassers, such as Horea Bădău or the drama school teachers RISE has also written about, people who have a pattern, a method, and years of abusive behaviors behind them.
2. Men are not in danger. It’s interesting how much we men protect ourselves from charges of being assholes. Have you recently talked to the women in your life – at home, at work, among your friends about the things they do daily because we make them feels unsafe? Grabbing keys as they walk home alone, carrying pepper spray, pretending to talk on the phone, crossing the street when running into a man on the street at night etc.
One pushback to bringing more clarity to what harassment consists of – especially in schools or social settings – is that men will be in danger of a barrage of complaints, punishment, they will be unsafe. That is utter nonsense. None of the women we interviewed filed a complaint, because they didn’t think the school would care. Other types of gender violence are also seriously underreported. Domestic violence, too. Adding more clarity to procedures – for public conduct, in schools or in workplaces – doesn’t make men unsafe and won’t make harassment complaints skyrocket. When in doubt, go back to number one: it’s not about us. Let’s get over it.
3. Power wants to preserve itself. The main defense of the journalism school – and other institutions – is that there weren’t any formal complains. Or that “we didn’t know”. They hide behind paperwork, as if the behaviors never existed. Then they all try to tell the same story. But usually, some know. Sometimes, as I wrote before, everybody knows. In this piece (in Romanian), two philosophy professors argue that “a mature organization discusses its problems. It doesn’t sweep them under the rug”.
4. The main stakeholders are the ignored. Many have told us that universities ignored their main stakeholder: the student. From my experience, this is true. I am a contributing professor and I heard countless stories from them over the years. Tenured colleagues, with decades on the job, say they heard nothing. If that is true, then are you really there for those you are serving? Why aren’t they telling you things? This is true for the healthcare system, it’s true for the justice system. Romania – and other democracies – are in a serious crisis of trust in institutions. And that’s because they don’t seem to be working for us. (In this part of Europe it actually seems they often work against us, looking for ways to fine us or punish us as citizens, instead of co-opting us to build a better future, together).
5. There is little empathy. The acting dean of the journalism school had little to say about the behavior of the professor we wrote about: he kept coming back to having never received a complaint during his tenure. For possible past complaints, he recommended we talk to other deans in the school’s 30-year history. He offered an “I’m sorry” only when presented with details of the professor’s behavior. Same with other institutions (at least in Romania): have you seen one admitting responsibility or at least saying they are sorry, reaching out to those affected, and being transparent about the problems, and the way they will work to fix them?
6. We don’t listen. J-school leaders say the students come first. If they did come first, the school would go out of their way to listen to them. Same with other institutions, public or private. Do we listen in our communities, our buildings, our organizations?
7. Silence is complicit. I know this is a tall order. I also know we can’t speak up about everything and shouldn’t. But what about where we live, where we work, where our kids go to school, when our local politicians make rash or unfair decisions? Of course, not everyone has the privilege to speak up, file complaints, do something, or act. But I also believe that if that’s the intention, there are ways, solidarity can be built, allies can be brought on board.
8. Solutions exist. We knew there was no way we could tell this story if we didn’t do two things: establish a pattern of abuse, then tell the story of that pattern through the voices of multiple women. (She Said was a great guide to doing this right). That way it’s hard to deny a pattern than a single or a couple of experiences. (Or you can, but your credibility will be on the line, as those around you have seen all the evidence, too). And the second is to offer a safe space and anonymity to tell the story. Yes, anonymity takes away some of the power and credibility, but it puts the story out there.
Then, there are tons of solutions out there about how something can be fixed – we reported on those, too. That’s valid for almost any social issues, and yes, journalism should focus on those as well (and more than it does). We just need to remember that there are ways to do better.
*
I’m not an investigative journalist, I’m weary of opining on the world, I’m scared of many things every day – I was terrified most of the time working on this story. I’m also plenty flawed, and often disappointed with many of the things I did or said. It also took me years to decide to check if the stories the students were telling me were true – when we began, neither Carla nor I had met one victim. But getting to them, unfortunately, turned out to be easier than we thought.
The only reason I’m writing this letter is to say that doubts and fears don’t have to stop us from acting.
One of the best pieces of advice I heard about doing creative work, despite being scared as hell, is to ask yourself: do you want to do something more than you dread it? If yes, there are ways, there are communities, there is support. It won’t make it easy, and it might be immensely frustrating.
So thank you if you are out there fighting these good fights, doing what needs to be done because you want to do it more than you fear it.
We could only tell this story because so many graduates of the journalism school trusted us, talked to us, gave us access to their lives and their private chats, messages and conversations. Part of that trust was earned from our years of doing journalism in a certain way at DoR, but most of it was earned conversation by conversation.
I am so grateful for their courage; here’s their story once more.
As we were about to publish, I thought of the tagline we used for a 2019 storytelling conference we put together in Bucharest: “Stories heal”. Then I remembered what one of the speakers said in the closing of his talk about writing a tough story about his family’s past: “Stories do heal, but sometimes they will hurt like hell at first.”
SIDE DISHES:
Either/Or by Elif Batuman is a breathtaking, poignant, and funny coming of age novel of a woman finding her way and her voice, in a world of men.
The Old Man & The Pool, Mike Birbiglia’s latest Netflix stand-up special is a story about growing up, growing old, and trying not to die too soon.
It just happened that as we were closing our story, Mumford & Sons released their first new song in years. It’s called Good People, and the lyrics fit the theme of the letter: “Good people been down for so long / And now it’s like the sun is rising.”
I have a couple decades' experience with a situation just like this one, and have both written about it and gone on the record with journalists about it. I have one correction to your post -- men are in danger, but not in the way that's so often talked about. What I mean is: the kind of person who abuses women in this way often abuses men too, sometimes in a sexualized way, sometimes in other ways. They tend to see young male students as competition, and so try to bring them down. We just don't have a vocabulary to talk about it later, but the psychological effects can be just as strong. And beyond that: entire communities are in danger, because the shame and the collusion tend to tear them apart.
I write this not because I want to shift attention from the very real harms this kind of behaviour does to women, but because I'd like it to be recognized as a general problem, one that affects everyone in an academic community. As long as it's seen as something that only affects women, it's going to be marginalized, because women's pain is, fundamentally, not taken seriously.