Verbal abuse can be extremely psychologically humiliating, especially when it comes from your "highly regarded" work supervisor and maestro. Verbal comments that aren't even abusive count as sexual harassment when they are of a sexual nature, and that's serious too. In this case, the abuse included initiating the process that would have led to the players' dismissal, only aborted by Dutoit's resignation. I do not believe that physical assault is always worse than verbal harassment.
In mitigation of the older charges, you write that "Dutoit was highly regarded and that 50% of the orchestra still supported him." By "highly regarded," I presume you mean artistically, but the singers who were sexually harassed said the same thing. Some continued to work with him, just taking precautions. One said, “There is nothing wrong with him as a musician, but he has been allowed to operate as a predator off the stage.” As for the "50% support," nobody took a poll at the time of the sexual assault incidents, but one of the major observations regarding sexual harassment is how acceptable it seemed to be until quite recently. I suspect if a poll had been taken at the time of the assaults the results would have been quite dismaying.
Getting conductors to stop acting like all-powerful martinets was the major mission of orchestral personnel policies in the post-WW2 years, and by 2002 Dutoit's behavior in Montreal was as anachronistic as his sexual behavior seems today.
I'm willing to allow for an argument that they're not entirely of the same magnitude, but the treatment of the two types of incident by the SFS were as different as they could possibly be. I do not believe the facts justify such an extreme variation, and attempts to excuse the Montreal behavior ("Dutoit was highly regarded and that 50% of the orchestra still supported him") are a studied dismissal of the genuine abuse suffered by these players, of a kind that would be considered intolerable if applied to sexual harassment, however purely verbal it might have been.
no subject
In mitigation of the older charges, you write that "Dutoit was highly regarded and that 50% of the orchestra still supported him." By "highly regarded," I presume you mean artistically, but the singers who were sexually harassed said the same thing. Some continued to work with him, just taking precautions. One said, “There is nothing wrong with him as a musician, but he has been allowed to operate as a predator off the stage.” As for the "50% support," nobody took a poll at the time of the sexual assault incidents, but one of the major observations regarding sexual harassment is how acceptable it seemed to be until quite recently. I suspect if a poll had been taken at the time of the assaults the results would have been quite dismaying.
Getting conductors to stop acting like all-powerful martinets was the major mission of orchestral personnel policies in the post-WW2 years, and by 2002 Dutoit's behavior in Montreal was as anachronistic as his sexual behavior seems today.
I'm willing to allow for an argument that they're not entirely of the same magnitude, but the treatment of the two types of incident by the SFS were as different as they could possibly be. I do not believe the facts justify such an extreme variation, and attempts to excuse the Montreal behavior ("Dutoit was highly regarded and that 50% of the orchestra still supported him") are a studied dismissal of the genuine abuse suffered by these players, of a kind that would be considered intolerable if applied to sexual harassment, however purely verbal it might have been.