UNM's handling of sex photo complaint sparks lawsuit
Suit says professor pushed to resign after seeking probe into other instructor's racy pictures
10/10/2009
Lisa D. Chavez, a poet who teaches creative writing at UNM, touched off a brief scandal last year after she was identified as "Mistress Jade" on a phone sex-for-pay operation. One blog called her a "tenured perv."
Chavez's former supervisor, English professor Sharon Oard Warner, became concerned two years ago after she saw an online picture of Chavez posing as a "dominatrix professor" disciplining "misbehaving students," she says in a lawsuit.
Warner's complaint was filed Sept. 26 in state District Court in Santa Fe.
Associate professor Chavez said in an e-mail that she did not know about Warner's lawsuit. "This was very thoroughly investigated by UNM and I believe this all should have been laid to rest long ago," she wrote.
In an online interview last year, Chavez said she began moonlighting as a phone-sex worker for People Exchanging Power because she needed the $40 per hour to supplement her salary at UNM and that she hoped to write about her experiences.
"I'm 46 and not in particularly good shape — hardly the stereotype of the hot young sex worker," she said. "Many callers wanted an older woman. Most callers wanted a dominant woman. I found this incredibly empowering — first in that older women were valued for their sexuality, and that I was able to explore my own dominance."
Warner, who was then director of UNM's Creative Writing Division and Chavez's direct supervisor, said in her recent complaint that she first learned of Chavez's activities on July 26, 2007, when English Department chairman David Jones showed her an anonymous letter signed "appalled parents."
After looking at the Web site on her home computer and discussing the situation with Chavez and other faculty, Warner says, Chavez agreed to remove her photos from the Web site. But later, one of Chavez's students said that after she quit her job as a phone-sex worker on the peplove.com site, Chavez picked on her in class and ridiculed her in front of other students, according to the complaint.
The complaint also says that another student expressed concerns about parties allegedly thrown by Chavez at her home where she encouraged students to "accompany her to live-sex shows."
Warner asked UNM's Office of Equal Opportunity to investigate Chavez for sexual harassment, creating a hostile learning environment and violating "appropriate student-professor roles," according to the complaint. But it says Jones, the department chairman, refused to join her in the request, Associate Dean Felipe Gonzales reprimanded her and UNM President David Schmidly ordered the OEO to stop its investigation and hired a private lawyer who turned the investigation against Warner.
A UNM spokeswoman declined comment, saying UNM has yet to be served. But Nancy Ava Miller, who has run the People Exchanging Power phone-sex organization out of her home in Edgewood for more than 20 years, said she believes UNM "went out of its way to find out what really happened and to discuss whether Lisa Chavez should be fired."
Liz Derrington, a student who posed with Chavez on the peplove.com Web site, wrote in an article responding to Chavez's comments on another Web site, sexinthepublicsquare.org, saying that she was 27 when she began working as a phone-sex worker at Miller's organization and it improved her self-image as a "powerful and talented woman."
Yet, Miller said, Warner's complaint and media reports makes it sound as if, "this is like an older woman of 50 forcing a 17-year-old kid to have sex with her, when in reality they were approximately the same age ... and they were dear friends ... and the photographs were just simulated," Miller said.
Derrington, who now teaches at another university, said she and Chavez worked independently from their own homes and she sees no impropriety in their promotional photos because they did not use their names or their affiliations with UNM. "We never discussed our phone sex work in class, nor did we discuss class during the two or three photo shoots we were engaged in," she wrote.
In her interview on sexinthepublicsquare.org, Chavez described herself as bisexual and said she believes the controversy occurred because she posed with another woman, whereas UNM tolerates heterosexual relationships between students and teachers. "As an unmarried woman in a department of married people with families, I often find I have more in common with the graduate students than I do my colleagues," she said.
Although she has never had a sexual relationship with a student, she believes in close friendships between teachers and students. "Creating writing is often a sort of soul-baring, and I believe that to work well together, we need to build up a mutual trust, which is something that goes beyond a formal student/teacher distance," she said.
Although some faculty members "see a certain 'luridness' in what some in my department called the 'sex trade,' " Chavez said, the "situation has radicalized me; I am firmly in support of other sex workers, and of sexual minorities. And I intend to speak out about that, and to write about it."
Warner's lawsuit seeks damages for breaches of implied contract, covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and retaliation. Warner said she has suffered lost wages, lost promotional opportunity and emotional distress. She resigned in March 2008 as director of the Creative Writing Program after its Taos Summer Writers' Conference was singled out for an audit, the complaint says. Jones resigned his position as chairman of the English Department in September 2008.
"We're arguing here that (Warner's) resignation as the creative writing director was sort of a constructive resignation because she was basically stripped of all power and control as a result of her advocacy to have this whole thing investigated," said Warner's lawyer, Diane Garrity of Santa Fe. "They'll investigate the athletic department, but they won't investigate this."
Garrity, who declined to say why she chose to file the complaint in Santa Fe, said she will also file a spousal affiliation lawsuit, alleging that Warner's husband, Teddy Warner, a professor at UNM Health Sciences Center, also has suffered damages.
Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.