Conductor faces sex abuse claim
UNITED STATES: The Metropolitan Opera company in New York has opened an investigation into allegations that James Levine, one of the world’s most celebrated conductors, sexually abused a teenage boy.
Levine retired as the Met’s musical director after 40 years earlier this year but was named its director emeritus and has conducted in several productions this season.
The Met said it first learnt of the allegations against him last October when police in Illinois opened an investigation. The Lake Forest police department had been contacted by a man who alleged he was sexually abused by Levine as a teenager and as a young man from the mid-1980s until 1993.
Though the allegations fell outside the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse charges in the state, a detective was said to have spent seven months investigating before forwarding her report to a prosecutor.
‘‘At the time, Mr Levine said that the charges were completely false,’’ the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, said. ‘‘We relied upon the further investigation of the police.’’
No charges have yet been brought. However, Levine’s accuser was said to have contacted several reporters and over the weekend extracts from the detective’s report were published by two New York newspapers.
According to the New York Post the man told police: ‘‘I began seeing a 41-year-old man when I was 15, without really understanding I was really ‘seeing’ him. It nearly destroyed my family and almost led me to suicide. I felt alone and afraid. He was trying to seduce me.’’
Levine served as music director of an outdoor festival on the northern edge of Chicago, near Lake Forest, for two decades until 1993 and the man said he first met the conductor as a 4-year-old when his family attended the event in 1973. The man said he dreamt of becoming a conductor and met Levine again, backstage at the festival, when he was 14.
The following year he said Levine had driven him home, stopped the car in the driveway of his family’s house and held his hand ‘‘in a prolonged and incredibly sensual way’’.
The following year, the man said, the conductor began inviting him to dinner at the Deer Path Inn, in Lake Forest. ‘‘I would get there and the lights are off, and he would say to me after I came in and after a hug, ‘take your clothes off’,’’ he told police.
The newspaper said the police report included a letter of recommendation written by Levine on Met stationery in 1987, when the man was applying for college, and a claim that the conductor had made payments to him over the years that added up to $50,000 (NZ$73,000).
The man said he continued to see Levine until 1993, when he told his mother of the abuse.
The conductor himself told a reporter in 1987 that he was sometimes the subject of rumours but ‘‘they’re 100 per cent fabrication’’. He added: ‘‘Look, I’m not a doctor married with three children living in suburbia. I live my life openly, I don’t make pretences of this or that.’’ –