A college president, who wants his campus to become the business school “of choice for women,” once exchanged hundreds of sexually suggestive messages with a student he taught at the prestigious Coast Guard Academy, prompting prosecutors to recommend charges against him in military court, according to confidential records obtained by CNN.
Attorneys at the Coast Guard were so troubled by Capt. Glenn Sulmasy’s actions — and by the fact that he continued to work with students — that they recommended in early 2016 that he be charged with conduct unbecoming an officer even though he had retired from the service the prior year.
“Prosecution appears to be the only proper course of action,” an attorney wrote in a February 2016 memo laying out the prosecution recommendation. Failing to act, the attorney added, could attract “significant negative publicity by the media, Congress and internal staff for the appearance of sweeping the case under the rug.”
In the separate investigation into Sulmasy, Coast Guard investigators uncovered more than 1,600 texts between him and a young female student, the majority of which were of a “sexual or flirtatious nature,” demonstrating that “at best, he offered to give high grades and show favoritism in class in exchange for sexual banter, and at worst, he actually did so,” according to the internal Coast Guard prosecution memo.
I’m glad that swift actions were taken to remove this man from any positions of power.
No idea why this article is pretending there’s only one (alleged consensual) allegation. It’s a pattern of behaviour with all the consequences you’d expect to follow from that pattern:
CNN in June uncovered a secret investigation of rapes and sexual assaults at the agency’s academy, which found that dozens of assaults had been mishandled, allowing some alleged sexual predators to ascend to high-level roles in the US military. The findings of that investigation, dubbed Operation Fouled Anchor, had been withheld from Congress until CNN reporters started making inquiries. And, CNN found that the agency’s top leaders had been behind the cover-up.
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During the Fouled Anchor investigation, Sulmasy was mentioned by at least one woman who said he discouraged her from pursuing a rape complaint against another cadet while he was working at the school in the late 1990s, court records show. Fouled Anchor investigators found a statement she had made about her alleged attack years later in a box labeled with Sulmasy’s name.
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Melissa McCafferty, a 2011 academy graduate, says it wasn’t long after arriving on campus that she began hearing a whisper network of warnings from upperclassmen about Sulmasy.
According to McCafferty, Sulmasy verbally harassed her, telling her she looked good in her pencil skirt and making sexual comments. As the harassment continued, she says she told a female professor at the academy, who was herself a Coast Guard sexual assault survivor, what had happened, but the woman warned that she should stay silent, saying Sulmasy was “untouchable” and that saying something could “jeopardize (her) career.”
After she graduated from the academy, McCafferty said she reached out to Sulmasy to see if he would write her a letter of recommendation for law school based on her academic performance at the academy. But in response, she remembers him texting back that he would only write her a letter if she sent him pictures of herself, telling her he had always loved her foot tattoo. “I stopped the conversation and found a letter elsewhere… It made me feel very dirty and disrespected and very dehumanized,” she said.
Bury him.