Horrifying child-molest claim against conductor Levine

he started going backstage at Ravinia on his own, according to the report.

In 1985, when the accuser was 15, he told police that Levine drove him home and stopped the car in the back section of his family’s driveway.

“He started holding my hand in a prolonged and incredibly sensual way,” the accuser writes. “I was not aroused as I never was during my relationship with him as I am a heterosexual individual. But there were some feelings of affection and mostly confusion . . . I was very uncomfortable with the hand holding.”

During that encounter, Levine allegedly told the young man, “I want to see if you can be raised special like me.” He also asked him to “come to New York so I can audition you as a conductor.”

The accuser said he later asked fellow students at a summer program, “Am I gay because he held my hand?” according to the report.

The alleged victim said he was 16 when Levine first fondled his penis. He alleged that the encounter happened at the Deer Path Inn in Lake Forest, 10 miles from the Ravinia Festival.

The luxury hotel, styled as an English inn, was the scene of “hundreds of incidents” over the years, according to the report.

The accuser claimed Levine would invite him to dinner, keep him waiting until the appointed time, and then ask to meet him immediately at the Deer Path Inn, the report says.

The teen thought he was talking to his mentor about how to achieve his ambitions in classical music, according to the report.

“I would get there and the lights were off and he would say to me, after I came in, and after a hug, ‘Take off your clothes. I am working very hard and need to rest,’ ” the report says.

Levine would masturbate in the bed or in the bathroom, the alleged victim told police.

The maestro told the young man that “only with him . . . could I safely explore my feelings,” the report says.

In 1987, he said the alleged abuse escalated and Levine “put his finger in my anus,” according to the report.

That year, Levine wrote the man a college-recommendation letter on Met stationery, which is included in the police report, praising the young man and saying, “Over the years I have always found him to be exceptionally responsive and concentrated, curious and eager to learn.”

The man said his encounters with Levine continued until 1993, sometimes in New York City where they dined at Cafe des Artistes and Shun Lee on the Upper West Side near the Met Opera’s home at Lincoln Center.

In one instance in New York City, Levine “kissed my penis,” the man said. He also told police “he would fondle my penis many times,” the report says.

“Levine was not a person you ever said no to,” he told police.

The accuser said the abuse continued after he was 18 because he had so much trust in Levine.

“He inflicted shame and guilt on me. Making [it] hard for me to see the wrong. Emotionally, I have been hurt by this and confused and paralyzed,” he says in his statement to the police.

He said he finally told his mother about the abuse in 1993.

In 2016, after contemplating going public, the alleged victim said he called a former board member at the Met who advised him to contact the police.

The board member, Beth Glynn, later told Lake Forest Police Detective Wendy Dumont that she spoke to the general manager of the Met Opera about the man’s phone call.

Glynn told Dumont there were “always rumors” about Levine “because he was socially awkward, but he never had any issues at the Metropolitan Opera House for 40 years.”

Contacted by The Post, Glynn confirmed she urged the man “to call the police.”

Dumont also reached out to classical-music blogger Greg Sandow, who told her he had been contacted by three men in past years purporting to have been abused by Levine, one of them being the alleged victim.

“The rumors of [Levine’s] alleged abuse have been widespread for decades, and in my experience, they seemed to be widely believed inside the classical-music field, though I’ve never heard anyone cite anything specific,” Sandow told the police.

Sandow declined to comment to The Post.

Levine himself acknowledged existence of these rumors in a 1987 New York Times article about management changes at the Met but seemed to dismiss them.

He said that 10 years earlier, the Met’s general manager “called me about reports of a morals charge in Pittsburgh or Hawaii or Dallas. Both my friends and my enemies checked it out, and to this day, I don’t have the faintest idea where those rumors came from or what purpose they served. Ron Wilford says it’s because people can’t believe the real story, that I’m too good to be true.” Wilford was Levine’s manager. Levine went on to say he was “not a doctor married with three children living in suburbia. I live my life openly; I don’t make pretenses of this or that. What there is is completely apparent, so if people want to damage me, they have to invent things that are lurid and vicious.”

Levine has been hobbled in recent years by back problems and Parkinson’s disease. He lives at the famed San Remo apartment building on Central Park West, where former oboist and Levine pal Sue Thompson was long his roommate.

Neither Levine nor his New York agent returned multiple requests for comment. A spokesman for the Met did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Its general manager, Peter Gelb, did not return a message.