Met director suspended amid sex allegations

The Metropolitan Opera in New York announced Sunday that it was suspending its relationship with James Levine, its music director emeritus and a monumental figure in the world of classical music, because of multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.

The New York Times reported Sunday that three more men said they had been sexually abused by Mr. Levine in a time period that encompassed the 1960s through the 1980s. “While we await the results of the investigation, based on these new news reports, the Met has made the decision to act now,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in a statement.

The decision to suspend followed an announcement Saturday that the Met would start an investigation into allegations, which came in the wake of an article detailing sexual abuse allegations made by a man, now 48, to the police department in Lake Forest, Ill. The abuse, the man told police, began in 1985 when he was 16.

The Met has known about those allegations for at least a year.

“This first came to the Met’s attention when the Illinois police investigation was opened in October, 2016,” Mr. Gelb said in a statement. “At the time, Mr. Levine said that the charges were completely false, and we relied upon the further investigation of the police.”

Mr. Levine, 74, was the music director of the Metropolitan Opera for 40 years before stepping down in 2016. He is also the former music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic and the Ravinia Festival. Mr. Levine was a Kennedy Center Honorsrecipient in 2003.

Mr. Levine is a beloved figure in the industry but has faced rumors of these sorts in the past — so much so that he addressed them in 1987. “I don’t have the faintest idea where those rumors came from or what purpose they served,” Mr. Levine told The NewYork Times.

Thealleged victim in the Illinois probe, whose name has been withheld because The Washington Post does not identify alleged victims of sex abuse, has approached reporters from multiple publications over the years and postedpublicly on Facebook.

But the New York Post was the first to report his allegations, followed shortly by The New York Times and others over the weekend.

Mr. Levine’s management did not respond to requests for comment.