Dream school rejection faked by ex-girlriend
Clarinetist awarded $350,000 in damages due to betrayal of trust
Eric Abramovitz was 7 years old when he first learned to play the clarinet.
By the time he was 20, the Montreal native had become an award-winning clarinetist, studying with some of Canada’s most elite teachers and performing a solo with Quebec’s finest symphony orchestra.
During his second year studying at McGill University, he decided to apply to the worldclass Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles, which offers every student a scholarship covering tuition, room and board, and living expenses. He hoped to study under Yehuda Gilad, an internationally renowned clarinet professor who accepts only two new students per year at Colburn.
After his audition in Los Angeles in February 2014, he was confident that he would be accepted. Weeks later, he opened an email signed by Gilad, letting him know he had not been selected for the program. He was crushed. But two years later, Abramovitz would find out that he was, in fact, accepted to the program. The rejection letter was sent not by Gilad but by Abramovitz’s girlfriend, Jennifer Lee, a flute student at McGill.
In 2016, Abramovitz applied once more to study with the renowned professor. Gilad remembered Abramovitz.
Gilad asked him a perplexing question: “What are you doing here? You rejected me.”
“Clearly something must have gone wrong,” Abramovitz thought to himself.
By this point, he and Lee had already been broken up for more than a year. Even so, it did not occur to him that she could be responsible for impersonating him.
In May 2016, Abramovitz and his friend tried logging on to the email account that sent the fake rejection letter, giladyehuda09@gmail.com. Abramovitz remembered an old password the ex-girlfriend used for Facebook, “and sure enough, we got right in.”
The ex-girlfriend’s contact information appeared clearly in the email account. The only exchange in the inbox was the rejection letter sent to Abramovitz.
“It was not only a stab in the back but in the heart,” Abramovitz said.
He hired a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against the former girlfriend.
She never responded to the lawsuit he filed against her, and lost by default.
The Washington Post could not locate her for comment.