Harvard’s Capitulation
Exclusive: Ron Sullivan on defending Harvey Weinstein and the campus culture that cost him his job
The Newsweek Interview with Ronald Sullivan
Harvard College did not renew ronald S. Sullivan Jr., and his wife’s contracts as faculty deans of Winthrop House, one of the school’s 12 residential communities—the culmination of a series of campus protests. The turmoil was unleashed after the New York Post reported in January that Sullivan—a clinical professor at Harvard Law School, the head of its Criminal Justice Institute and a nationally prominent criminal defense attorney—would be joining film producer Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team against a five-count indictment in New York State Supreme Court alleging rape and predatory sexual abuse.
Some students protested that his role on Weinstein’s team was inconsistent with Sullivan’s duties as faculty dean, and even that they felt unsafe with a dean who was aiding such a person.
In a Newsweek exclusive, Sullivan gave his first interview since his ouster to contributor Roger Parloff; he defended taking the case and accused Rakesh Khurana, Dean of Harvard College, of “cower[ing]” and “capitulating” to the “loudest voices in the room.”
Sullivan, 52, grew up in Gary, Indiana, where he attended public schools that were “100 percent” African American, he says. He graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1989 and Harvard Law School in 1994. Sullivan met his wife, Stephanie Robinson, when they were both students at Harvard Law School. She is also now an instructor there. She was formerly chief counsel to Senator Ted Kennedy; CEO of the Jamestown Project, a democracy-related think tank; and a national radio show host.
While serving as Winthrop House’s faculty dean, Ron Sullivan handled many high-profile cases, though most were the kind that were apt to be seen as popular causes on a college campus. He represented the family of Michael Brown, who was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. (The family won a $1.5 million wrongful death settlement in 2017.) In 2014, Sullivan designed and implemented the conviction review unit at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, which has since won release for more than 20 wrongfully convicted inmates, some of whom had served decades in prison.
In 2009, Sullivan and Robinson were named House Masters at Winthrop House. (Harvard changed the “House Master” title to “Faculty Dean” in 2016, after complaints about the term’s associations with slavery.)
On May 13, a few days after Sullivan was told that his faculty dean contract would not be renewed, Sullivan withdrew from the Weinstein representation. He cited a judge’s decision to postpone the start of the Weinstein trial from June until September, when it would conflict with Sullivan’s teaching schedule.
NEWSWEEK: How did you come to join the criminal defense team representing Harvey Weinstein?
SULLIVAN: A colleague at the law school emailed me and asked whether I’d have any moral objection to representing Harvey Weinstein. When I got the email, I actually thought this was an ethics question—something she was posing to her class. I wrote back: Of course not. Every citizen has a right to a defense no matter how heinous the crime is or how unpopular the client. Then a few minutes later she wrote back and said, “He’d like to talk to you.”
So quickly I figured out this was not a law professor hypothetical. This was an on-the-ground reality. So I told my colleague that it was fine, and to give him my cellphone number, and we talked, and here we are.
What was your thought process as far as your position at Winthrop House and the potential reaction of the students?
I must say that I certainly did not anticipate the reaction to the representation. And I should say “the reaction at the college to the representation.” The law school was fine. [Fifty-two current and former members of the Harvard Law School faculty signed a petition supporting Sullivan.]
But I did not anticipate the reaction of the college, largely because of my history of these types of representations. Just the semester before, I was the lead prosecutor in the case against Eric Greitens, the then-governor of Missouri. And that case was all about an alleged sexual assault in the context of an invasion of privacy. So it’s not as though I hadn’t done a high-profile sexual assault case. But this one [the Weinstein case], appears to have been on the “wrong side” of the issue.
You had also done some potentially unpopular cases while at Winthrop House?
Oh, absolutely. I represented [former New England Patriot] Aaron Hernandez in a double murder case. In which I won an acquittal. He was an extraordinarily unpopular figure in Boston at that time. He had already been convicted of one murder when I represented him in the double murder… There was no backlash or pushback for that representation at all. Indeed, students came to court to watch it. And, an interesting aside—later on, after I started representing Weinstein, a group of students asked if Winthrop House could rent a bus and take them to watch the Weinstein trial. Just making the point that there were still wide swaths of the student population that reacted the same way they had with the Hernandez case—or the terrorism case I tried. They wanted to see how the court system worked in action.
What was the terrorism case?
I represented the family of Usaamah Rahim. He was an alleged terrorist who was shot by Boston police and the FBI as they were attempting to execute an arrest warrant. And I represented his family on a claim of wrongful death.
If students feel they’ve been the victim of sexual harassment or misconduct, they would take that up with you or your wife as faculty deans?
In theory, they certainly could. The norm in all of the houses is that students would talk to either their tutor— the tutor is a residential graduate student who lives in the house—or to the CARE tutor [for Consent Advocates and Relationship Educators], which is the sexual assault tutor. They could also report to the resident dean, who functionally is the assistant dean.
In 10 years there’s never been a whisper that I’ve been anything but attentive to their needs… Even during this controversy there was a Winthrop student, a young woman, who I was representing in a Title IX proceeding, who accused someone of sexual assault. Now obviously I couldn’t talk about it, because it was confidential. But the notion that I could not do both was demonstrably false.
Did she express any discomfort to you?
Not at all.
Was the Weinstein case a pretty lucrative assignment?
I don’t discuss fees with respect to any of my clients. But Weinstein was not a pro bono case.
Are there people you would not represent?
Yes. In theory, I am sure, we could come to a scenario where I would say, no, I would not represent this person. But I do not have categories of individuals that I say I would refuse to represent.
How can it be noble to represent guilty people?
It is noble to represent the guilty because that keeps our system honest. Representing the guilty ensures that the due process rights that you and I
“Students absolutely have the right to protest...but the response from the adults in the room was extraordinarily disheartening.”
enjoy are actualized and realized. One very brief example: from all historical accounts, Ernesto Miranda was not a particularly nice individual. [Miranda had been convicted of kidnapping and rape before his convictions were overturned by the Supreme Court for not having been warned of his rights before interrogation while in custody.] But because of lawyers representing him pro bono, we now have one of the most central protections in our constitutional criminal law: the Miranda warnings. This is why we do this work.
What were the first negative reactions by college students that you became aware of?
People began to send me posts from social media from Harvard College students—mainly outside Winthrop House. That’s when I became aware that people objected to it.
I convened a meeting of the house tutors, because I wanted to get a sense of what the mood at the house was. And I instructed the tutors to have what we call entryway meetings...and to report back whether people had concerns. And the third thing that I did was have open office hours—two of them—where I invited students to come in and talk about it.
One [House] tutor created a category of responsibility for the faculty dean that she called “pastoral,” and said there were concerns about my “pastoral duties” as faculty dean. To which I responded that that’s the beauty of a university setting—that we can use this as a teaching moment. To talk about competing values and how we resolve tensions.
To the degree that there’s a pastoral role, I served it well for 10 years and could have served it well for the next 10 years. With a more thoughtful response from the Harvard Dean’s office, we as a community could have and would have worked through this.
Then there’s a demonstration; a sit-in at the Winthrop House dining hall; graffiti is spray painted on house walls; and some students said they felt “unsafe.”
The paper reported 50 people. There were about 30 students at the protest. The rest were reporters and administrators and so forth. The sit-in—once again, small number of students. And a small group of students committed the vandalism at Winthrop House. So the notion that this was widespread, and there were hundreds of students protesting, is factually incorrect. There was a small but vocal minority of students.
There was a petition for your removal that gathered more than 300 signatures.
Right, there was a petition. And then a group organized itself as Students for Sullivan and did a petition that had 1,100 signatures.
Now, the student newspaper also had editors on it who led the protests. So they would print that there’s a petition with 300 students on there, but it was not newsworthy to point out that there was a competing one with 1,100 names on it. [The president of the Harvard Crimson, Kristine Guillaume, referred Newsweek to a statement she had published: “Our reporters and edi
tors have done their due diligence in reporting and providing balanced coverage on this subject and all others.”]
What about the students who said they felt unsafe and didn’t want to receive diplomas from you?
So, the feeling of being unsafe: I certainly cannot dispute how some people feel. But I strongly believe that it’s the duty of an educator to ensure policy is not made as a function merely of subjective feeling. Rather, the job of the educator is to help students determine whether their feelings are rational. For example, a Christian student may feel unsafe with a Muslim head of house. I would argue that a good educator would explore those feelings and help educate the student in a way where the student can exist in a diverse, heterogeneous environment, and not run the Muslim head of house out. One can think of all sorts of examples. Does a Christian student feel unsafe with an atheist head of house? Does a right-to-life student feel unsafe with a head of house who’s a physician who has done abortions? You can think of a lot of examples where a student may subjectively feel unsafe. But that in and of itself is simply not a good criterion to make university policy.
What was the first you heard from Dean Khurana after your Weinstein representation was disclosed?
I don’t recall. Within a week or so. Our initial conversations were quite positive. He told me he wanted to work with me to ensure that we can work through whatever was going on at Winthrop House. He shared with me that socialist students had told him that they felt unsafe with
him because of his business school connections. He’s a professor at the Harvard Business School. So this phenomenon of students feeling unsafe is not simply limited to the matter I was going through, but, rather, it’s a broader phenomenon.
When did things seem to change with him?
As the student newspaper began writing successive, negative articles, Dean Khurana capitulated to that mood and became quite adversarial. [The change] first manifested itself in an article I read in the Crimson where they quoted Dean Khurana who shockingly mischaracterized the friendly meetings that we had about the issue. He was quoted as saying that he had reminded me of my duties as faculty dean, which was just demonstrably a lie. So that’s when I knew that Dean Khurana was beginning to cower to the loudest voices in the room.
On February 25, Dean Khurana commences a “survey of the climate.” And then on May 10, there’s a lengthy Crimson article that says 11 current and former tutors had signed a statement saying they felt a “climate of hostility and suspicion” at Winthrop House.
That article was a laughable hit piece. It regarded something that happened in 2016. And the administration knows this, because they know what sparked it, and we had several meetings regarding the issue, and it was resolved in due course. So if I had done something wrong in 2016, the university would have taken action in 2016… [or] in 2017. Or, surely, they would not have reappointed me in 2018… This is brought up as an after-the-fact justification.
Students absolutely have a right to protest, and I will support it to my dying day. That’s what students do. And they should do, and they should keep doing it. But the response from the adults in the room was extraordinarily disheartening.
The day after that article, Dean Khurana notifies Winthrop affiliates that your contract will not be renewed. He says in the email: “Over the last few weeks, students and staff have continued to communicate concerns about the climate in Winthrop House .... The concerns expressed have been serious and numerous... I have concluded that the situation in the house is untenable.”
That letter was pure make-believe. It’s interesting that Harvard never released the climate survey. They never released [it], I submit, because it did not fit their narrative. I am confident that a majority of Winthrop students said they are just fine in Winthrop house.
Did you give the students their diplomas?
I did.
Were there protests?
We allowed students to opt-out. I had a colleague from the law school hand out diplomas to students who opted out. We had 150-plus students graduate Winthrop. There were 30 on the opt-out list who received their diplomas from a different person.
What was really, though, hurtful to me about that, is that the organizers of the opt-out list put people on the list without their knowledge or consent. People came to me right after the graduation ceremony to say: “Will you take a picture with me handing me the diploma? I don’t know how my name got on that list. I didn’t put it on there.”
Do you think race played a role in Harvard’s treatment of you?
I have no idea. What I do know is that to my knowledge no master or faculty dean in the history of the institution has been treated as callously as I was. Whether it’s because of race, my height, my profession—I don’t know. And to be honest, I don’t care. I care about the result. And to the degree that I can do anything, I’m going to spend some time to ensure that the university behaves better in the future.
I’m hoping that what comes out of this is a better Harvard. I love Harvard. I’m a faculty member there. I’m an alum. And I’m a strong supporter of the students at Harvard for over a decade now. So I want to help make a better Harvard. A place where people dialog rather than engage in projects of demonization. A place where competing ideas can get sorted out in the marketplace of ideas rather than angry protests dictating policy.
The president of Harvard during the same period responded to protests about fossil fuels by saying that he responds to debate, not demands. I think that is the right sort of attitude. And the college would have done well to have listened to him on that and applied that principle to my situation.
In the end, I have moved past what happened to me. I have an appointment at the Harvard Law School and will continue doing my work again, and I’ll be just fine. But I will use this to ensure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen to others.
“It is noble to represent the guilty, because that keeps our system honest.”