First of all, thank you to everyone who attended the 1-year anniversary party for Spitfire News last week! Stay tuned for a year in review coming later this week, along with some other fun updates.

Also, if you’re in New York City, I’m giving a presentation on Supernatural fanfiction tomorrow night at Club Internet. Get your tickets here!

The following piece is part one of a two-part edition investigating an online smear campaign against a woman who was expelled from her music school after reporting a professor for sexual harassment and sharing her experience publicly. This story took months of reporting and follows a growing trend of digital character assassination that imperils victims, especially women, who seek justice for sexual violence. I’m able to share this kind of work unpaywalled thanks to the support of Spitfire News members.

When I search conductor Rebecca Bryant Novak’s name on Google, the first result is about her getting expelled from the Eastman School of Music, one of the top-ranked music institutions in the world. But the Google result doesn’t mention her Title IX complaint against her former professor. It doesn’t explain that she was ousted without due process after speaking up. It doesn’t indicate that she has since filed a complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights. It doesn’t portray her as someone fighting for justice at all. Instead, in bold font, it says “Rebecca Novak was a nightmare.” 

The source? An anonymous Reddit comment, posted in the subreddit r/classicalmusic, supposedly by a former classmate of Bryant Novak’s. It’s responding to a lengthy investigative article in a reputable music outlet about how she got sucked into a “bureaucratic nightmare” after reporting an Eastman conducting professor for, among other things, repeatedly describing Bryant Novak being “impregnated” by a former teacher at a different conservatory. (This was apparently supposed to be a metaphor for a male teacher influencing a female student.) Eventually, Eastman’s own investigation would find that Bryant Novak’s professor violated its harassment policy and that the school mishandled her complaint. But he’s still there, and she is not. 

Despite Eastman’s own findings, this Reddit comment flips the script on Bryant Novak, accusing her of “multiple instances of unprofessional conduct in orchestra rehearsals and concerts.” There’s no evidence for this claim, and Bryant Novak says it never happened. But, she said she did have a hard time with students being disrespectful to her. She shared text messages with me between her and a different Eastman faculty member who wrote in early 2025 that her rehearsals were “Good” with “No notes” and discussed reigning in students who were “just not respectful.” But in these Reddit comments, the roles are reversed.  

“Many there would tell you the same,” the anonymous Reddit commenter continued. “I highly doubt the story is as simple as she makes it out to be.” 

Bryant Novak’s story, as she explained it to me, is anything but simple. Over multiple interviews, dozens of pages of documents, and detailed blog posts, she shared a long, drawn-out road of institutional betrayal and retaliation. As one of few women pursuing a career as a conductor in general, let alone at Eastman, Bryant Novak already knew she was facing an entrenched culture of sexism. But she didn’t expect to end up in legal limbo for years while excommunicated from her academic community. She also didn’t expect a slew of Reddit comments calling her an “unhinged” liar and an abusive figure in her own right. 

A leading free speech organization is backing Bryant Novak, and she has a veritable mountain of evidence to support her case. But for anyone doing a quick Google search, the narrative against her is calcified in bolded words at the top of the page. A spokesperson for Google said, “Search results are dynamic and show content from the open web. For this query, it’s easy to find a range of content from various sources in top search results.” It’s true that if you look at the following results, you’ll see articles in Bryant Novak’s favor. But the top-ranking result will try to discredit them first. (Reddit declined to comment on-the-record.)

Bryant Novak reached out to me because of my past work reporting on celebrities targeted with social media smear campaigns, like actress Blake Lively, who similarly accused her male boss of sexual harassment and retaliation. Increasingly, this seems to be happening to any woman who speaks out against a man in her community: her military ex-husband, her DoorDash customer, or in this case, her conducting professor. Disparaging, discrediting comments have become inevitable stains on a victim’s digital footprint. 

“One of the things that’s slightly terrifying about being in this situation is you watch the other side complicate the story to the point that no one understands it,” Bryant Novak told me over the phone. Cases like hers, involving labyrinthian academic and legal processes, can be hard to digest. It’s easier to convince people that a woman overreacted and tried to blame everyone but herself, because that’s the story we’re told over and over again about women who report sexual harassment. But what if we listened to her perspective?

When most people imagine an orchestra conductor, they probably picture someone wearing a black-and-white suit, gesticulating wildly with a slim baton to rows of horn players and violinists. Since women only make up slightly more than 1 in 10 conductors, whoever comes to mind is likely a man—or Cate Blanchett in the 2022 film Tár. Blanchett plays a fictional lesbian conductor who abuses her power over younger women. In reality, Bryant Novak found that male conductors were more likely to gatekeep their power by traumatizing younger women who entered the field. 

As Bryant Novak explains, conductors aren’t just making impressive hand gestures to keep time. The conductor is at the top of the orchestra’s hierarchy and is responsible for leading both rehearsals and performances. They are often ascribed musical genius, a somewhat “mystical quality” combined with the unflinching discipline of a leader—especially in eras past, before musicians unionized, when a maestro could fire them on the spot. It’s a role that has historically rewarded toxic men who have pushed women like Bryant Novak aside. 

Bryant Novak first gravitated toward classical music as a child. She can’t remember exactly how she decided she wanted to become a conductor, but the aspiration lodged in her mind early on. She received a bachelor’s in music in Kansas City, a master’s in conducting in Cincinnati, and finally pursued a musical arts doctorate at Eastman, which is part of the University of Rochester in New York. At each music school, Bryant Novak said she saw the “full-blown misogyny” embedded in the conducting field, where narcissistic men were “literally put on a pedestal.”

After experiencing that misogyny firsthand and first doing “what everybody does” and trying to ignore it, Bryant Novak took a break from higher education after receiving her master’s degree. In the meantime, she taught at “underserved schools.” Then, in August 2023, she started her first semester at Eastman. But what awaited her in Rochester would end up derailing everything she had spent more than a decade working toward. 

At Eastman, Bryant Novak studied under Neil Varon, a tenured conducting professor since 2005 and the director of the school’s three performing orchestras. Just two days into her first semester, while proctoring auditions with Varon, she said she watched him belittle auditioning students until some cried. She said he regularly made demeaning comments about students, complaining about the school’s diversity program in private and yelling profanities at them in public. And she said his behavior inspired her male classmates, who soon began following his lead and joking about Bryant Novak being “impregnated,” even putting it as the name of a group chat with her in it. She hit her breaking point. Unlike previous times she had been harassed in academia, she decided to report Varon to Eastman’s Title IX office. (Varon and Eastman didn’t respond to requests for comment. Bryant Novak’s Title IX report is documented in a letter the university shared with her, which she shared with me. At one point during the Title IX proceedings, Varon apologized for the “impregnated” remark over email.)

What Bryant Novak didn’t know, and what most people actually don’t know, is that much in the same way HR exists to protect the company, Title IX offices function as a way to protect the accused, especially when faculty members are the accused. That’s how sociologist Nicole Bedera found that the Title IX system worked 100 percent of the time in her groundbreaking field research. 

Bedera told me that faculty-perpetrated sexual harassment is the most common type of sexual harassment at universities, according to internal surveys she’s reviewed, but that faculty members are very rarely disciplined for it. She also said research shows that “hierarchical, male-dominated, and competitive” fields, like classical music conducting, “predict high rates of sexual violence and hostility toward whistleblowers and survivors.” 

“Most of the students are men, most of the faculty are men, and that allows for a normalization of hostility toward everyone else,” Bedera said in a phone interview. “There’s sort of a presumption that the reason why there aren’t more women in the space is because women don’t deserve to be in the space, when in reality, the way these spaces remain so male-dominated is through systemic discrimination.”

When Bryant Novak went to Eastman’s Title IX office seeking a resolution, she recalls first being told to transfer out of the program. The following year, in spring 2024, she wrote about this in a Substack post, after which the school’s Title IX officer threatened her with a defamation lawsuit unless she retracted her claims. Bryant Novak didn’t think he had a case, but the threat upset her wife to the point of tears, so she took her posts down. (In a letter sent by the university’s counsel to the New York Division of Human Rights later, which Bryant Novak shared with me, the school acknowledged that the Title IX coordinator “communicated his willingness to assist if Complainant decided to transfer,” but denied that he pushed Bryant Novak to do so. She has since resumed posting on Substack about this and the rest of her case.) 

Bedera’s research has found that Title IX offices routinely ask victims to give up academic opportunities and risk their safety to accommodate their perpetrators, when it’s supposed to be the other way around. After Eastman initially allowed Bryant Novak to leave some of Varon’s classes, she said they abruptly reversed course after Varon wanted her to come back. 

At the same time, the University of Rochester was conducting its own internal review of Varon and the Title IX office’s handling of Bryant Novak’s complaint. In fall 2024, according to a letter Bryant Novak shared with me, the school determined that Varon’s conduct around the “impregnated” comment and calling another female student a “sweetheart” had violated its discrimination and harassment policy and that he needed training and oversight. While the school did not find that the Title IX coordinator who threatened her with a lawsuit had violated policy, it also recommended additional training for him. Eastman then confirmed it had mishandled her report, writing “the Panel felt that the transparency, process, procedures, and resources deployed to address your complaints in this matter were inconsistent with University policy and practice and warrant improvement.” But nothing got better. 

Without her desired intervention from Eastman, Bryant Novak said she began struggling with her mental health, requiring intensive therapy and antidepressants prescribed by a psychiatrist working at the university. Male students began siding with Varon in front of her. She said Varon assigned her a notoriously complex piece to conduct and offered her less rehearsal time. She sometimes woke up in the middle of the night screaming. 

Bryant Novak isn’t the only woman to experience something like this at Eastman. VAN, the online magazine that published the deep dive into her case, also interviewed women who had been students there starting in the 1990s and who said Eastman retaliated against them decades ago for reporting sexual harassment. One woman who said she was stalked by an ex-boyfriend while attending Eastman in the early ‘90s told VAN the school threatened her with expulsion at one point in connection with her reporting for the school paper. 

Thirty years later, Bryant Novak published her own pieces about Eastman’s inaction and betrayal. She kept posting on Substack, handing out flyers to fellow students, emailing the faculty, and requesting accommodations and documentation from the Title IX office. When she didn’t get responses, she promised to escalate through higher channels, including the state division of human rights. Instead, in February 2025, Eastman expelled Bryant Novak without warning, effective immediately. In the letter of notice, Eastman’s Associate Dean of Graduate Studies wrote that she had an “inability to maintain satisfactory academic progress,” due to being unable to work with faculty members. 

Bryant Novak kept fighting. In addition to filing a complaint with the state, she has also been supported by a nationally recognized free speech organization, The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, better known as FIRE. (More recently, FIRE has pivoted from cancel culture to the free speech emergencies happening under Donald Trump’s second administration. Trump has also manipulated Title IX to become even worse for victims and survivors.)

In letters to the University of Rochester’s president, FIRE argues that Bryant Novak’s expulsion was a stunning departure from the school’s own policy, which requires warnings, a formal process, opportunities for the student to change course, and the ability to appeal. Bryant Novak had no chance to defend herself, a stark juxtaposition with the fact that students and faculty members who are accused of sexual violence through Title IX are typically given every opportunity to defend themselves and are rarely ever expelled or fired. 

“Eastman’s failure to follow its own policy in any respect, the temporal proximity of Bryant Novak’s dismissal to her public disclosure of Rochester’s investigation, and Eastman’s contentious history with Bryant Novak [...] all strongly suggest that Bryant Novak’s dismissal was retaliation for speech explicitly protected by Rochester policies,” wrote Jessie Appleby, FIRE’s program counsel for campus rights advocacy, in her first letter to the school’s president. The president never responded to Appleby.

Bryant Novak’s story is all too familiar. It’s the same one that tends to play out for any woman who pushes back against the status quo of what abusive male behavior is considered normal and tolerable. But increasingly, these stories involve a new dimension of harm and retaliation in the form of anonymous online comments. They didn’t just pose a threat to Bryant Novak for reporting Varon—Eastman cited them in its response to her New York Division of Human Rights complaint. 

In part two, I’ll break down how Eastman has leveraged online smears, the DARVO narratives inherent to all of this, and how this weaponization of comment sections further punishes survivors for demanding justice in the era of MeToo backlash.