San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
S.A. ballet star faces sex charges
Two local women say dancer assaulted them as they slept
Hugo Ihosvany Rodriguez, once a rising star at Ballet San Antonio, now is in Bexar County Jail facing sexual assault charges after two fellow dancers accused him of rape, court documents show.
Rodriguez was scheduled to stand trial for one of the felony charges Monday — about a week after the troubled ballet company lost its artistic director, Willy Shives.
The trial has been pushed back two months during a turbulent time for San Antonio’s premier ballet company that performs at the Tobin Center.
Prior to Shives’ departure, the ballet launched an internal investigation after a group of former dancers sent letters to the Ballet San Antonio board complaining about Shives’ alleged “abusive” behavior, explosive outbursts and a “culture of fear” that has paralyzed most dancers from previously speaking out.
Rodriguez no longer works for Ballet San Antonio, and the letters don’t mention him by name. But several of the former dancers who wrote letters to the board said they were concerned about Shives’ treatment toward one of the women who had accused Rodriguez of raping her.
They said the dancer, who had starred in previous productions, was cut from leading roles and penalized for trivial or nonexistent infractions. She eventually resigned.
The San Antonio Express-News doesn’t print the names of victims in alleged cases of sexual assault.
Rodriguez’s lawyer, James Vincent Tocci, and
Shives did not return multiple messages. Board members of Ballet San Antonio declined interview requests, but ballet officials released a statement saying the organization was only aware of one of the rape allegations against Rodriguez, but it acted swiftly to remove him.
“Once Ballet San Antonio learned of this incident, Mr. Rodriguez’s employment was immediately placed on suspension and banned from all Ballet San Antonio properties of operation,” the ballet said. “His employment was then terminated within the week.”
In its statement, the ballet disputed any claims that one of Rodriguez’s accusers was pushed aside.
“Mr. Shives, who is no longer the artistic director of Ballet San Antonio, did not demote the dancer to the Corps de Ballet,” the organization stated. “She was provided a different schedule so that she could, in fact, deal with the aftermath of the case after returning from her leave of absence.”
When Ballet San Antonio announced Shives’ departure, the organization did not say whether he resigned or left the company involuntarily.
Ballet San Antonio is a nonprofit organization and the resident ballet company at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts in downtown San Antonio. The turmoil is occurring after the ballet suffered losses of $140,000 during its 2016 fiscal year, according to its most recent publicly available tax records.
That year, Ballet San Antonio made $1.58 million in revenue but paid $1.72 million in total expenses. The tax records show Ballet San Antonio’s current chairwoman, Lisa Galo Westmoreland, loaned the ballet $177,000 for operating costs that year.
“The ballet is very important,” said Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, a leader in the effort to build the Tobin Center.
Ballet San Antonio is one of the center’s primary performing arts organizations, along with the San Antonio Symphony and Opera San Antonio.
While the criminal cases against Rodriguez surprised the county judge, the ballet’s recent financial shortfall didn’t.
“Our community doesn’t support them like they should,” said Wolff, who hopes Ballet
San Antonio is able to deal with its internal problems.
The rape accusations against Rodriguez follow a similar pattern, court records show: Both women were unconscious at the time of the alleged assaults.
In the case going to trial in July, a group of co-workers got together for drinks at the Brooklynite bar downtown on March 11, 2017, according to court records and interviews with more than a half dozen dancers.
The woman and her roommate went home shortly after midnight while the rest of the group, including Rodriguez, went on to dance at the Bonham Exchange. The roommate, who also was a dancer with the company and knew Rodriguez, let him into the apartment after he showed up around 4:30 a.m. and asked to sleep on the couch.
After the roommate went back to bed, Rodriguez crept into the victim’s bedroom where she was asleep, court records allege. The woman said she “woke up suddenly with Hugo inside me,” told him to stop and yelled at him to leave, according to a sworn affidavit she later filed seeking a protective order against Rodriguez.
Rodriguez left the apartment and the woman called two friends, hysterical and crying. Three dancers and one of their mothers, who was visiting from out of town, took the victim to the hospital and helped her file charges against Rodriguez the next morning, people with knowledge of the events said.
The woman’s mother flew to San Antonio that same day and the two of them met that evening with Shives and his wife, who volunteered with the company helping train the dancers, according to people with knowledge of the meeting.
Shives called a second meeting at 9:30 p.m. on March 12 to brief Christine Mayer, the board chairwoman at the time, they said. Shives announced the next morning to the entire ballet company that Rodriguez was no longer with Ballet San Antonio, declining to say why, several dancers said.
A grand jury indicted Rodriguez on April 26, 2017.
After knowledge of the alleged rape started circulating in the tightly knit group, another female dancer came forward, privately disclosing that Rodriguez allegedly had done the same thing to her, several dancers said.
That woman pressed charges against him on July 18 for an incident she said happened in December 2016. The charges in the second indictment on Sept. 20 are identical to the first: “the complainant had not consented and the defendant knew the complainant was unconscious and physically unable to resist.”
The victim of that incident never disclosed her alleged rape to Ballet San Antonio managers, fearing she would lose her job if it became public, she told colleagues.
Rodriguez, who was released on a $20,000 bond for the first sexual assault charge and began making money driving for Uber, became violent after one of Ballet San Antonio’s dancers reported to the ride-hailing company that he was bothering them, and Rodriguez lost that job, police and court records show.
Assistant Criminal District Attorney Anna B. Scott asked the court to raise Rodriguez’s bond, arguing in a Sept. 14 court filing: “He was alleged to have threatened and broken the car windows of two other co-workers, at least one of whom is a potential witness in the sexual assault cases.”
Rodriguez also was involved in a hit-and-run accident the same night his colleagues’ car windows were broken, police records show. All three complaints were made Sept. 3.
The court raised his bond to $75,000 and he was arrested in connection with the second alleged assault on Sept. 22, police and court records show.
Rodriguez’s first accuser abruptly left San Antonio in October without any explanation as to why.
Since then, Rodriguez has been sitting in jail awaiting his trial, which was delayed from March. The alleged victim moved home with her parents and still is looking for work.
She also hired a lawyer who notified Ballet San Antonio in April that she intends to sue. Ballet officials denied any responsibility for the chain of events in their statement.
“The incident involving Mr. Rodriguez occurred after hours on the dancer’s personal time,” the statement said. “It did not occur at a Ballet San Antonio event, in a Ballet San Antonio facility, or on Ballet San Antonio time.”