BDSM has hit the news again about a week ago, soap opera style…
Professor Sharon Warner, director of an creative writing program at a University of New Mexico, claims she was asked by her head of the English department, David Jones, to conduct a informal investigation towards another Professor Lisa D. Chavez. The reason for the investigation was to find out whether the allegations, that Chavez were exposing herself on various sex sites. Warner says she accepted the request and started to investigate different websites with BDSM-related material.
Warner says her informal investigation managed to verify that Chavez and two graduate students were phone-sex workers for various sadomasochistic and bondage website, one of them being peplove.com. The websites had pictures of Chavez and the graduate students portraying various S&M sexual activities.
Warner says she confirmed to Jones, the head of the department about Chavez’s participation on the Web sites and placed her students in potentially compromising relationships with Chavez. Other graduate students apparently told Warner that Chavez threw parties at her house, regularly belittled other faculty members, and urged students to accompany her to live-sex shows.
Jones’ reported reaction was a bit peculiar when Warner told him about her findings; Jones was literally hitting his desk, while he informed Warner not to take this any further as she told him that she was going to file a complaint with the university’s Office of Equal Opportunity.
The university’s President David Schmidly got involved in the matter and brought in an outside attorney to investigate the situation. The lawyer interviewed 16 students, faculty and staff, and Warner, who says she was surprised to learn that the investigation had flipped on her.
“The investigation focused on Professor Chavez’s allegations against Plaintiff and whether Plaintiff discriminated against Professor Chavez on the basis of her ethnicity and sexual orientation”
According to Warner, who handed in a lawsuit to Santa Fe County Court, she was pressured into resigning as a director of the creative writing program after conducting the informal investigation. Chavez, in return falsely insisted that Warner had fabricated the photos of Chavez and the students as part of a retaliation scheme.
However, Warner kept pressing for an investigation of the complaints against Chavez, but the university allegedly failed to act.
Warner claims that she was subjected to several forms of retaliation, including being denied the chance to chair the English department, having to resign her directorship of the writing program and having the university audit the summer writing conference she founded.
She wants the university to pay damages for breach of contract, bad faith and violation of the New Mexico Human Rights Amendment.
I would say that it is always hard to find out the real truth in court during these circumstances. The reputation of the university is at stake and agreements behind locked doors are always hard to prove; it’s word against word.
IF Warner’s allegations are factual , the victim here isn’t Chavez who is in the lifestyle, in my personal opinion. The victim in this case is Warner, who was asked to investigate – She, according to the lawsuit, presented the facts to the head of the department as she was asked to do.
Chavez, on the other hand, as the situation is described by Warner, seems to have mixed work ethics and lifestyle behaviour beyond what could be seen acceptable, even within the BDSM community. My opinion is that you are definitely on thin ice when you involve your graduate students in your lifestyle behaviour – Not moral reasons, but because certain dependencies issues are created, as the lines between work and lifestyle are blurred.
It will be interesting to see how this unfolds and I will eat my popcorn while waiting for the grand finale in this courtroom drama – Movie rights anyone?
Oh thank god someone understands that this is a violation of professional ethics, not about kink. I am so fucking tired of people commenting about this situation who don’t understand that there’s division between kinky, exploitative and unprofessional. The point is not Chavez’ orientation, the point is that you can’t sexually exploit your current students to make money without creating a exploitative dynamic in your workplace. Chavez was posing as the dominant, as the sexual ‘owner’ of one of her students. And she was posing as a professor, who was dominating her current student. Moreover, because she was talking openly about it to students at her house parties, even students she didn’t pose with knew about the pictures.
I am a student in that dept, and one of the students in the lawsuit. The point is not kink, the point is that Chavez was making money off her student. She was also belittling her students, threatening and slandering people who disagreed with her, inviting her students to attend sex shows, falsely reporting Virginia Tech style school attacks, etc.
She’s the bad dom. The one you don’t play with because they don’t respect your limits. She’s the dom that will hurt you without meaning to because she has no self-control. The dom who is vain and makes you constantly kiss their ass, even though no flattery is ever enough. She’s the dom who sics people on one another for fun and cannot imagine what’s wrong with that as long as she likes watching the fallout. And she brought it with her to classes she was teaching. People who are dependent on you for career advice or who are dependent on you for their working or academic lives have a diminished ability to consent because of the consequences. If you are told, as a graduate student who has just gotten into a program, that a professor can ruin your professional life if they want to, it’s real damn hard to say no.
Thank you for your comment – I totally agree with you. With more than 10 years of experience from teaching within academics I am well familiar with this type of problem. This case isn’t mainly about kink – It is, as you say, about work ethics.
The problem in this case is that it is really hard to find out what the actually truth is, as everyone puts some prestige into the matter and lifestyle matters and discrimination gets mixed into it. The line between work ethics and lifestyle might have been blurred for tactical reasons.
Even tho it is adult people attending the courses she has, going into that sort of relationships with students undoubtedly create strings of dependencies. In Sweden we have policies for this at the universities, but they are hard to follow up on due to the work laws here – And relationships are formed anyway by the students and faculty member, but at least the involved parties know the danger.
Keep posting here if you want as you have the “inside view”.
Thank you. It’s so nice to talk to someone who understands any of the philosophical or intellectual parts of kink.
I’m pissed that she keeps making it about kink, as if kinky = total lack of self control or awareness of professional ethics. I find it frustrating that so many people seem to conflate kink with unprofessional behavior, as if it is impossible to have and exercise self control if you are kinky. The lines have been blurred here, as you suggest, for tactical reasons. I resent the fact that Chavez is using sex worker lobbies and people who are interested in freedom of sexual expression to cover up seriously unprofessional behavior, some of which is not actually even about kink.
I worked for the same service as a dom before Chavez came on and quit, partially because the service makes you screen your own calls, gives you no support for dealing with bad callers (and in one memorable case, forced me to take a call with a client who had been trying to get my home address out of me and whom I had refused to talk to again) and puts pressure on you to do things I was unwilling to do. I quit and didn’t look back; that was a bad, bad working environment.
As far as the college goes, I worry about what happens to consent when someone holds a position of authority over you. I am kinky, and I realize that often in-session play gives the appearance of going over consent boundaries, but it ought to be negotiated, with the informed consent of both parties, and ought to not put your career or your normal life at risk, especially without warning. Adult does not mean unaffected by power dynamics at work, in academia, etc. Adult also does not mean able to anticipate all the ways something can go wrong. Life and people are occasionally kind of random. Adult also does not mean not naive. There are plenty of people in the program I am in who are naive. Freshmen are usually naive, kids who went straight from a good home to college are generally naive. Even adults sometimes miscalculate. And if those adults do not have previous experience with the kind of working environment they’re entering or are not adequately informed, they end up in situations where they are taken advantage of.
All this is to say that informed consent is really important, and is part of the problem with this case. Personally, I can tell you that a lot of what happened to me happened because I did not know what to expect and took my advisor’s advice (Chavez.) No one told me she was untrustworthy ahead of time. Moreover, I’ve never been in a graduate environment and know no one who had, so I walked in utterly blind of what kind of gossipy, predatory, incestuous dynamics tend to show up in graduate departments.
Who knows, maybe there are good departments out there? This is my only experience with a graduate school. And so far? It’s terrible.
All of this cost me. It continues to cost me and the other 7 students who ended up writing letters to the investigators about Chavez’ behavior. One left (lucky bastard) and the rest of us couldn’t afford to leave and have had to weather all the crazy shit Chavez has been telling people about us. We can’t afford lawyers (most of us are not rich), and the school refused to dismiss me at Chavez’ request, so we’ve had to stay and try to finish out our program with our professors fighting openly with one another and Chavez saying horrible things about us, the administration telling us we have to not talk about it, and our fellow students repeating the rumors Chavez has spread about us.
I can’t wait to get out. It’s not a matter of being unable to do the work, I just am fucking sick of dealing with the fact that Chavez knows she can get away with most anything she wants. And continues to behave poorly as a result of it, while the new director tells us to feel sorry for her because Chavez is so ‘devastated’ by what happened.
Student C, try to hang in there and get your degree, if it’s in reach; you’d paid too much.
In my experience, graduate departments are incestuous, gossipy and often sexually predatory battlegrounds in which the student are cannon fodder for the intra- and inter-departmental struggles for dominance. Anyone who asks, did you enjoy graduate school, has either never been to one or is being ironic. There ARE ethical professionals in academia but the impact of the nasty fuckers is huge and basically tolerated; what’s a student compared to a peer and the schhol’s reputation and liability, after all? Student go away in time – and sometimes earlier than scheduled.
You WILL get out of there. Take care of yourself and if that includes getting your degree – do it.
As to mixing lifestyle and workplace dependencies, let me add to my Beloved Master’s statement: mixing sexual dynamics in to any situation in which you have real workplace power over someone is IMHO just stupid. If you are a vanilla professor and have a sexual relationship with a current student who is in your classes or department, if you have a sexual relationship with someone you supervise or review, or if you are kinky and do it, you cross an ethical line and usually some agreed upon workplace standards of behavior. I really enjoyed _The Secretary_ as a movie.
But it’s bad risk and bad ethics. There’s nothing puritanical about saying, just don’t do it. It’s inextricably predatory and creepy.
Meanwhile – it sounds like you endure witness intimidation and harrassment, violations of privacy, and that a bad work environment is being created and tolerated. If you email us directly at BDSMquestion@gmail.com and would like us to connect you with a kink aware and friendly lawyer – let us know, we’ll talk.
This is so important! Thank you for writing about this, and thanks to Student C as well who gives testimony on what happens when ethical practices are not considered what so ever.
As a student myself I find this highly relevant on many, many levels.
Thank you!
[…] site that is a bit better on keeping up to date is Island of Pain. They report on the Sharon Warner Case, which is one of those brilliant, fucked up things that makes me sad, mad and frustrated. […]
“She wants the university to pay damages for breach of contract, bad faith and violation of the New Mexico Human Rights Amendment.”
So, she’s upset they violated *her* human rights, but it was OK for her to do that to someone else?