STANFORD UNIVERSITY — Palo Alto Councilmember and New York Times best-selling author Julie Lythcott-Haims admitted Friday to having an inappropriate relationship with a student more than a decade ago when she was a dean at Stanford University.
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The scandal came to light Wednesday when the student, Olivia Swanson Haas, published a lengthy essay titled “I Had an Affair with My College Dean” on the website Autostraddle, as first reported by the Palo Alto Weekly. Haas did not name Lythcott-Haims in the essay, instead referring to her as a “school celebrity.”
“Recently, Olivia Haas published a piece describing her relationship with her college dean,” Lythcott-Haims wrote in a post on her website Friday. “I was that dean.”
The essay details Haas’ secret year-long affair with the dean and its lasting impact on her.
“For years, I thrashed between the simplicity of right and wrong, lost in paradox, needing to cast a villain,” Haas wrote. “How do you reconcile a story that exists in the gray space between love and abuse? She has done much good for many people. She did something inappropriate with me. I eagerly sought her affection. I was very young.”
Haas’ memories and feelings about the relationship are valid, Lythcott-Haims said.
“We’d been writing and recording music together and got to a point where we expressed love for each other,” Lythcott-Haims wrote in the post. “That is where it should have ended. I should not have taken it further.”
Lythcott-Haims was not in a “position of authority” over Haas’ grades or academic status, but “being in a relationship with a student was inappropriate when it happened 13 years ago, and it would be inappropriate now,” she wrote in the post.
In the essay, Haas recounts ending the affair, moving back home and bringing her parents into the fold.
“They were horrified,” she wrote. “Suddenly words like manipulated and abuse of power were being used and shame started to calcify in the parts of me that had desired her — tremendous embarrassment — as I began to see my great love story through a very different lens.”
“What happened was shocking; I had been groomed,” she wrote.
Haas’ mother filed an anonymous report with the university, and a month later, Lythcott-Haims announced plans to step down and pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree.
Since her resignation in 2012, Lythcott-Haims has written books, including New York Times best-seller “How to Raise an Adult,” and now serves on the Palo Alto City Council. She recently ran to replace U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, but finished at the back of the pack.
Lythcott-Haims said she apologized privately to Haas years ago.
“Now I want to publicly apologize to her for my actions and their impact on her,” she wrote in the post.
“I also apologize to my former colleagues and students who had the right to expect better of me,” she added. “And to members of my extended family for whom the public airing of this matter may be difficult.”
Check back for updates.