Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Met Suspends Conductor James Levine After 3 Men Accuse Him Of Sexual Harassment

Another powerful man in an iconic position at the top of his field has lost his job after being accused of sexual harassment, with one small difference — this time, the people making the allegations are also men.

The Metropolitan Opera suspended its beloved conductor James Levine, 74, on Sunday, reported the New York Times, after three men made public accounts that he had sexually abused them when they were teenagers. The accusations go back to 1968, when according to Chris Brown, a bass player in the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Levine molested him at the Meadow Brook School of Music in Michigan. Brown was 17 at the time; Levine was 25.

Met general manager Peter Gelb announced that the company was suspending its relationship with Levine, canceled his pending engagements and asked an outside law firm to investigate.

Accusations of sexual harassment between people of the same gender have been relatively rare in the flood unleashed by the New York Times’ reporting on movie maker Harvey Weinstein in October. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s running list is current up to December 1.

Contact Helen Chernikoff at [email protected] or on Twitter @thesimplechild

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.