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Sexual Assault

Yale failed to stop professor who sexually assaulted students over decades, report says

“I state again in the strongest possible terms that sexual misconduct and sexual assault have no place in this university," Yale's president, Peter Salovey, said in a statement.

A Yale professor sexually assaulted five students over decades, according to a report commissioned by the university, which had investigated the professor’s behavior in 1994 but failed to stop him.

D. Eugene Redmond was a professor of medicine before he retired from the university in 2018 while facing disciplinary action. He has been banned from the campus, according to a Yale news release. 

The university launched an investigation early this year and hired former U.S. Attorney Deirdre Daly to lead it. 

“Redmond’s actions, reported by the survivors who came forward, are reprehensible and antithetical to the educational mission of our university,” said Peter Salovey, Yale’s president. “I state again in the strongest possible terms that sexual misconduct and sexual assault have no place in this university. ... On behalf of Yale, I am deeply sorry Redmond’s behavior was not stopped once and for all when it was first reported."

Redmond denied the allegations and refused to participate in the investigation, according to the report.

The Yale report comes as the public has increasingly demanded that men be held accountable when they commit sexual assault and misconduct, in part via the #MeToo movement. Blame is also directed at the powerful institutions where many men have continued their predatory behavior unchecked. 

Harvard, another highly selective Ivy League university, came under fire in 2018 for its handling of a case of sexual harassment in the 1980s. In that case, the professor was allowed to stay on and allegedly continued to harass people.  

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In a 54-page report summarizing six months of investigations and 110 witness interviews, Daly said Redmond assaulted at least five students in a bedroom he required students to share with him at a research facility on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. The students were forced to drink alcohol with him, the report says.  

Redmond allegedly assaulted two of the students in the early 1990s, and the other incidents happened after 2005, according to the report. 

The report notes a "striking similarity" in the students' accounts, "despite the fact that the incidents occurred years, and, in some cases, decades apart, and the students do not know one another or the nature of their individual accounts."  

Redmond, the report says, targeted his victims by isolating them from their friends and supporting them financially. In some cases, the students didn’t report their allegations to the university.

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“Some noted Redmond’s old age and the important research contributions he has made,” the report says, “and others recognized that Redmond helped them professionally by providing recommendation letters and other guidance.”

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Yale received allegations in the 1990s of assaults by Redmond. In 1994, the university conducted an investigation after a group of students raised complaints. Among their concerns: Redmond “sexually molested two male interns,” Daly said. The investigation was "wholly inadequate," she wrote. 

The committee for that investigation found insufficient evidence that Redmond “behaved in a sexually manipulative way” and didn’t come to a finding on the molestation charges. It did find Redmond “fail[ed] to maintain professional and appropriate boundaries between himself and his students.”

The committee recommended Redmond be reprimanded. It suggested the program that sent students to the island be suspended, then monitored to make sure “the well-being of the students is given highest priority.” 

Redmond claimed the program was shuttered before that report was issued, though individual researchers could still be accompanied by students to the facility. A dean said a member of the committee periodically should check with Redmond about student activity on the island.

“No one at [Yale School of Medicine] took any ongoing responsibility for ensuring that the program had in fact permanently closed or that Redmond’s misconduct had stopped,” Daly wrote.  

Redmond went on to harass and assault students, according to the report. Only two copies of the report on the investigation in the '90s were kept, one of them in a sealed file. The others were destroyed.  

“Redmond knew the records would likely never see the light of day and took full advantage of it,” Daly's report says.  

Other alleged incidents of assault and harassment included unnecessary medical exams of people’s genitals, unwanted touching and sexually explicit remarks.  

In response to the report, Yale said it would change how it tracks professors’ disciplinary records. The university plans to conduct more scrutiny of internships and overnight programs. Professors will be required to register such programs. Police in St. Kitts were notified of the allegations about Redmond. 

If you are a survivor of sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800.656.HOPE (4673) or visit hotline.rainn.org/online and receive confidential support.

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