The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Suspended Yale Law professor denies harassment claims
Jed Rubenfeld won’t teach at Yale Law School for 2 years
NEW HAVEN — Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld has been suspended for two years for alleged sexual harassment, according to a report in New York Magazine.
The magazine, in its Intelligencer column, reported that “three people familiar with the investigation” said the suspension was for “a pattern of sexual harassment of several students.” The Register could not confirm this report.
Rubenfeld told the New Haven Register on Wednesday, “I absolutely, unequivocally deny ever having sexually harassed anyone, verbally or otherwise. I’m considering my options.” He said he was “outraged by the outcome” but that he could not confirm any specific allegation against him.
He confirmed that he had been suspended.
“The allegations are supposed to be confidential,” he said, adding that he could be subject to discipline if he were to make them public.
“I think it is proper and fair and right for women to be able to come forward” if they have been sexually harassed, Rubenfeld said. “Over 30 years of teaching I have told some stories or told some jokes that I regret. I wouldn’t say them today.”
New York Magazine quoted “a terse message” from Provost Scott Strobel, which stated Rubenfeld “will leave his position as a member of the YLS faculty for a two-year period, effective immediately.” At the end of his suspension, Rubenfeld will not be allowed to teach “small group or required courses. He will be restricted in social gatherings with students,” the magazine quoted Strobel as saying.
Rubenfeld is no longer listed on the law school’s faculty web page.
Yale spokeswoman Karen Peart said the university would not comment.
Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken issued a statement that did not name Rubenfeld but said she wanted “to address the press reports today regarding faculty misconduct.”
“While we cannot comment on the existence of investigations or complaints, the Law School and the University thoroughly investigate all complaints regarding violations of University rules and the University adjudicates them whenever it is appropriate to do so,” Gerken wrote.
“The Law School has a responsibility to provide a safe environment in which all of our students can live and learn in a community of mutual respect. As Dean, I take this responsibility extraordinarily seriously.” she wrote. She encouraged anyone “affected by misconduct” to report the incident and receive support.
Rubenfeld said a column he wrote in the New York Times in 2014, titled “Mishandling Rape,” “provoked a huge amount of controversy. It criticized the Title IX procedures that were happening across the country and I became a target of protests and false allegations after that.”
In the column, Rubenfeld wrote, “Our strategy for dealing with rape on college campuses has failed abysmally. Female students are raped in appalling numbers, and their rapists almost invariably go free. Forced by the federal government, colleges have now gotten into the business of conducting rape trials, but they are not competent to handle this job. They are simultaneously failing to punish rapists adequately and branding students sexual assailants when no sexual assault occurred.”
Rubenfeld wrote that a Department of Justice study found that as many as 10 percent of undergraduate women had been raped at college but that only 5 percent report their assault to police. He alleged a small number of men are responsible for up to 90 percent of the rapes on campus, but that they frequently go unpunished.
In the column, Rubenfeld criticized the “unambiguous consent standard” that he said allows anyone who did not explicitly consent to sex to claim they were raped.
Rubenfeld said the procedures at that time were unfair to those accused of sexual misconduct. “At the time I published, most people were not even being given hearings,” he said. Those accused were not allowed to confront their accusers or see the evidence against them. He said he believes Title IX cases are handled better today.
Rubenfeld and his wife, fellow Yale law professor Amy Chua, were accused by students in 2018 of having told potential law clerks of then-federal appeals court judge Brett Kavanaugh of how to look in their interviews with him and that many of his interns look “like models.”
“Those allegations are outrageous and ridiculous,” Rubenfeld said Wednesday. “They were never substantiated. My wife is an incredibly valued professor of the law school. She was nominated for the teaching award last year. She has been found to help get clerkships for more minority and women students and first-generation students that any other professor at the law school.”
He said first-generation students are those who are the first in their families to enter a profession.
Kavanaugh, a Yale Law School alumnus, was then a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. He was confirmed after hearings in which a former high school classmate, Christine Blasey Ford, accused him of sexually assaulting her.
Amy Chua is author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” which was criticized for her description of a strict upbringing of their daughters. One of their daughters, Sophia ChuaRubenfeld, clerked for Kavanaugh; she graduated from Yale Law School in 2018. Their younger daughter, Louisa “Lulu” Chua-Rosenfeld, is now a student at Harvard Law School.
edward.stannard @hearstmediact.com; 203-680-9382