Leonardo Dominguez, Ric Curtis and Anthony Marcus.
Veteran professors at the Manhattan school renowned for training future crime-fighters ran a lawless den of depravity called “the swamp,” where they allegedly used and sold drugs, and “pimped” out and sexually preyed on students, according to two women at the center of a widening scandal at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
The shocking allegations are now under criminal probe by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the state Inspector General, The Post has learned.
After the paper first revealed two weeks ago that formal sex-harassment complaints against four professors were being probed by the taxpayer-funded CUNY school, the two alleged victims decided to go public.
In exclusive, hours-long interviews with The Post, the accusers shared their formal complaints and described how the charismatic CUNY profs targeted them as vulnerable undergraduates and lured them into their pot-smoking circle of acolytes, only to sexually assault them and attempt to have them sexually service professors at other colleges — and worse.
Naomi Haber, 24, alleges Anthony Marcus, the former chair of the anthropology department, violently raped her when she was a 21-year-old sophomore after a boozy night out at an academic conference in Washington, D.C. in 2015.
“He put his hands around my throat, choked me with both hands and forced himself inside me without warning,” she wrote in a document outlining her allegations that she gave to investigators hired by the public college. “The only thing I could do was to go numb and detach myself from my body.”
Haber, who graduated from John Jay in January with a degree in Language and Culture/Critical Media Studies, said she tried to forget about the rape, and never reported it to police.
Marcus refused to comment. “I’m not talking to the press,” he said.
Both Haber and fellow graduate Claudia Cojocaru, 39, who is now a John Jay adjunct professor teaching a Sex and Culture course, filed complaints with the school’s Title IX office in May.
When Haber arrived on the West 59th Street campus in 2013 she says she was soon introduced to a sinister world she never imagined while growing up in a Hasidic family in Rockland County.
Ric Curtis, 64, a respected anthropology professor who’s been at the school 30 years, and was former chair of the sociology, anthropology, and law and police science departments, was the ring leader.
Curtis, who has worked at John Jay since the 1990s, held court in “the swamp,” a secluded seventh-floor area of an annex building on 54th Street, according to Haber’s complaint.
“Ric was magnetic and introduced me to a world of deviance that I had no idea existed,” wrote Haber, who has cut ties with her religious community. “Ric was an expert at sniffing out those vulnerabilities, so he was aware of how impressionable I was.”
Haber said her introduction to Curtis in 2014 was eye opening — he played a YouTube video of a woman demonstrating how to put a condom on a penis, and one of himself bouncing bare-chested on an exercise ball. Curtis’ lawyer contended the condom video was part of an educational program.
She alleged the married Curtis encouraged her to have sex with his academic colleagues, including a professor who was being recruited as a department head.
“Ric had to come up with a new plan to entice the man to move out here and stay for good, so his solution was to make a mini trip to PA and to bring me . . . to ‘convince him’ to come to John Jay,” Haber wrote. “When I pushed back on this idea, he immediately retracted his offer and said ‘Good call. I don’t think Jane [Bowers, the provost at the time], would like it if I took an undergrad with me anyway.’”
Another time Haber claimed that Curtis told her about a visitor from Harvard and how he told him he had a “Jewish hottie to set him up with.”
Haber contended in her complaint that Leonardo Dominguez, 27, an adjunct professor, tried to have sex with her and “continuously” harassed her “even though I asked him to stop on many occasions.
“We’d be sitting on Ric’s couch, and [Dominguez] would try and put his hands on my legs and on my butt,” she wrote. “He would also stick his hands down my pants to see what underwear I was wearing and to feel my ‘warm vagina.’”
Dominguez did not return a request for comment.
It was Curtis who introduced Haber to Marcus, a 55-year-old married father of two, inviting her to attend a party in the sociology department in December 2014.
She contended in her complaints that Marcus told her “You are so sexy . . . I am just so attracted to you” and cornered her, grabbed her face and brazenly tried to kiss her in front of his colleagues.
A former John Jay professor, Mike Rowan, who was at the party, said he heard about the encounter from a high-ranking professor who witnessed it.
“He saw it: Anthony Marcus drunk and lunging toward Naomi saying he wanted to f- -k her . . . he told me he heard him say that,” Rowan said.
Rowan was fired in August, and he thinks it was because he knew too much about the scandal. “They said my publications weren’t sufficient . . . that’s what they always say,” Rowan said.
Haber said she rebuffed Marcus’ advance at the party, but she reintroduced herself to the prof a few days later. He confessed he felt “awkward” about their initial meeting. They later developed a relationship where Marcus fancied himself as her academic mentor.
Months later, he hit on her again at lunch, she claimed. He acknowledged his behavior in an email message viewed by The Post: “I wonder if you are making too much drama from 1 hour when an old guy hit on you and you politely turned him down.”
She told The Post that she and Marcus had a sexual encounter a few months before the alleged rape. During the first incident, she said Marcus poured her straight whiskey during a meeting in his office, locked the door and performed oral sex on her.
She said he also took advantage of her after the rape — again plying her with whiskey in his office, then ordering her to the floor.
“He slapped my face — not nearly as hard as during the rape,” and pulled down her pants, she said. Then he had sex with her, she claimed.
“I don’t even know what happened,” she said. “I walked out really confused.”
Haber said she continued to hang around the profs after the alleged rape in an effort to “convince myself it wasn’t that bad.
“I didn’t understand my behavior afterwards,” she told The Post.
Cojocaru said Curtis groped her while at another professor’s party in Brooklyn.
Rowan said he saw Curtis “dive” onto Cojocaru’s lap on multiple occasions on campus.
“Basically like you’re in a mosh pit, except there’s not a mosh pit . . . It was almost like he was falling, sitting on her lap,” he said. “It was unsuspecting. She seemed annoyed.”
Cojocaru also filed a complaint against Barry Spunt, 70, an associate sociology professor and former chair of that department, contending that he “placed his hand on my buttocks without my consent, groping me. He made inappropriate comments about my unwillingness to sit on Ric’s lap to show ‘gratitude’ about being ‘helped’ by Dr. Curtis.”
She also claims in her complaint that he “constantly boasted about having sex with students in exchange for grades, and suggested to my partner and I to have sex in his office, on the couch.”
Cojocaru said on one occasion Spunt lifted up his shirt to show her a scar on his abdomen at the same time he was rubbing his crotch. Haber said he also showed her the scar.
A lawyer for Spunt, Carmen Jack Giordano, called Cojocaru’s accusations “vicious and defamatory” and claimed she had “a hell bent agenda to bring down the faculty members at John Jay who refused to guarantee her admission to the John Jay PhD program.”
Cojocaru admitted she applied to the program, didn’t get in, but claimed she “didn’t really want to get in.” Responding to Giordano’s claims, she said: “That’s something I would expect from someone representing criminals.”
The two women also filed claims that alleged Curtis — who is well known for his research on drug use in New York City, particularly heroin — frequently sold and used drugs in his John Jay office. Rowan and Cojocaru’s boyfriend, Sebastian Hoyos-Torres, a Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center, corroborated the accusers’ eyewitness accounts.
Haber and Rowan admitted they smoked pot with Curtis, and Haber, Rowan and Hoyos-Torres said they saw drug paraphernalia in his office, including a pipe, a grinder and needles.
“He sold drugs, yeah — pot,” Rowan said. “It was really, really out in the open.”
Cojocaru said she once noticed a brown substance in a glassine bag in Curtis’ office that she mistook for sugar. She was about to put it in her coffee when the prof quickly told her “No!”
Hoyos-Torres said he saw Curtis providing plastic bags of weed to faculty, and money changing hands.
“Ric supplied weed to his devotees, several times a day, which made it even harder for [“swamp” devotees] to leave once they had become dependent on the drugs and by extension — him,” Haber wrote in her complaint.
She alleged Curtis convinced her to stop taking medication, including anti depressants, for her bipolar disorder and “introduced weed into my life, instead.”
Curtis was so accustomed to the alcohol and drugs that flowed through his clique, that he brushed off a warning email from Provost Bowers about nine empty beer bottles found in an office used by Cojocaru and Dominguez in which she wrote “They should not be drinking on campus.”
“LOL,” he wrote in an email to Cojocaru in which he forwarded her Bowers’ complaint.
Cojocaru denies the bottles were hers and claims she was studying at Rutgers University at the time.
CUNY policy forbids any illegal drug or alcohol use in its buildings. It also prohibits sexual relationships between professors and any students they have professional responsibility over.
Haber said she the “toxic environment” at John Jay led her to become suicidal.
“I was dead inside,” she said. “They killed me spiritually in a way.”
She said she was helped by Cojocaru, with whom she had become close friends.
The Romanian native had her own troubled past. She says she was the victim of sex trafficking and later worked in Japan to help free women who were victims themselves.
She came to the US in 2008 and she said became a permanent resident in 2011 through the Violence Against Women Act.
“I was vulnerable and alone without family, or a solid network of friends,” she said in her complaint to the college. “Much like other women in their entourage, I believe that I was chosen because of the belief that my history of trauma would make me malleable and submissive, and if I ever ‘turned’ on these people, it would make it easier to discredit my complaints of being preyed upon and assaulted as a byproduct of mental illness, or medication side-effects.”
Robert Herbst, a lawyer assisting Curtis, ripped Cojocaru’s credibility and character. He also accused her of concocting her complaints because she was rejected from the Ph.D. program.
Curtis “has never before been the subject of complaints of misconduct of any kind at John Jay. Because he works with, studies, and teaches about people involved in the sex and drug trade, he is more vulnerable than most to false allegations of the kind that Ms. Cojocaru and Ms. Haber have hatched here,” Herbst said.
Herbst did not address allegations of drug use and sale by Curtis.
Marcus, Curtis, Spunt and Dominguez did not return to school for the fall semester after being placed on paid administrative leave.
The college hired the law firm Riley Safer Holmes & Cancila to conduct the investigation.
The state Inspector General Catherine Leahy Scott is investigating the complaints along with Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, a spokesman for the IG’s office said.
John Jay not only educates future cops, but also provides in-service training and degree programs for current officers and members of the FDNY and Department of Correction.
A John Jay spokesman would only say that the school takes “any allegations of misconduct seriously, and we are cooperating with law enforcement authorities.
“The safety of all members of the John Jay community is of utmost importance to us, and we expect every member of our community to live up to our standards of conduct,” Richard Relkin said.
Just weeks after Haber and Cojocaru filed their complaints, the CUNY board named Bowers, the longtime John Jay provost who retired in August 2017, as interim executive vice chancellor and interim university provost — the No. 3 position in the city university system.
No comments:
Post a Comment