Part 2: The Fraternity

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0:52In August 1986, the so-called Preppy murder made national headlines. Robert Chambers, a teenage private school student, strangled 18-year-old Jennifer Levin to death. Chambers pled not guilty and said that he was defending himself from Levin because she was pressuring him for sex. But people weren't buying it. So he changed his plea to guilty and was charged with manslaughter. This story caused a lot of waves. It raised questions about teenage drug and alcohol use. It shined a light on victims' rights. And it challenged people's notions of consent and violence. But Peter Martens, the soon-to-be sole ballet master at the New York City Ballet, well, he had a different reaction.

1:41Two years later, in 1988, Martens choreographed a ballet called Tannspiel, which roughly translates to dance game in German. It featured two dancers, a man and a woman. The man enters the stage first, and the woman approaches him from behind. She tries to grab his hand, and he pulls away. But she doesn't stop. She continually grabs him, and he recoils. She even hangs on him, but she falls. Then, to put an end to her nuisance, he seemingly strangles her to death and dances around her lifeless body. At this point, people were still feeling the weight of Jennifer Levin's murder. And when ballet goers witnessed the premiere of Tonspiel, they were, well, shocked.

2:27But other than that, the troubling choreography didn't cause major problems. Moving forward, Martin's toned it down in his ballets, and it was business as usual. Until 20 years later, when the New York City Ballet investigated harassment and abuse allegations against Martin's. Then people looked back at Tonspiel with renewed alarm. It was becoming clear that Martin's dark ideas weren't just reserved for his creative work. Most likely, he actually felt disdain, even hatred, towards women and any other dancer he didn't approve of. The investigation caused a stir. It wasn't just bad PR, it was a shake-up in leadership.

3:09And under the cover of all that chaos at the top, three principal dancers were following in Martin's toxic footsteps.

3:25This is The Opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin. This is our second of two episodes on the New York City Ballet. Today, we're looking at the fallout of Peter Martin's resignation and how younger men in the company took deep-seated misogyny to a whole new level.

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5:05When Peter Martins was still in charge of the New York City Ballet, a young dancer named Chase Finley joined the School of American Ballet. One year later, Finley joined the company. He was young, fresh-faced, and he was born to dance. Here's Finley, along with his mom, talking about the beginning of his ballet career. Chase was four and a half years old. We decided to venture to the first Nutcracker in Stamford, Connecticut. He was so small, he was sitting in my lap. And the curtain went up, and I felt his little ribcage go, and he didn't move through the entire thing. and when the curtain went down he turned around and said mommy can i learn how to do that she would pick me up from ballet and i would say mom i learned to tendu i learned to plie i learned to degage i learned ronde jambs today i learned how to do a tour like oh i was so excited i think it's because of the athleticism of dance he played a lot of sports he was on a soccer team and a lacrosse team and his ballet teacher said i caution you that running will change the shape of your muscles and you could get hurt.

6:15And Chase said, I'll quit tomorrow. The ballet god smiled on this boy. But Fenley was also humble. Sort of. The hardest dance move for me, since I'm not a natural turner, I think is turns in second, also going turns. I think he's turning, really. Get dizzy. I got a lot of body to put over my center of gravity. To be fair, he had every right to be a little full of himself. Finley was extremely talented. In 2014, when he was 24, he was one of the youngest male principal dancers at City Ballet. By 2016, his stardom was on the rise. Here he is talking to GQ that year. Ballet is becoming so much more mainstream these days with help from movies and reality shows.

7:09It's starting to attract a younger crowd, which is really, really helpful. being a younger dancer myself. Finley was part of the reason younger audiences were coming to the ballet. He and dancers like him not only possessed natural good looks, but on stage, they wore their hearts on their sleeves. One of Finley's good friends was another principal dancer named Amar Ramazar. This is Ramazar speaking about one of his solo pieces from 2017.

7:39My solo is very intense. I like to call it the sorcerer solo. There's movements in it that kind of describe the power that I have, that I'm conjugating, you know, like I'm really trying to create this power that I'm sending around and capturing women. Other members of their friend group were Zachary Catazzaro, another principal dancer, and Jared Longitano, who wasn't a dancer, but a frequent donor to the company. In 2017, these young men were at the top of their games. 27-year-old Finley, 36-year-old Ramazar, and 28-year-old Catazzaro were three out of just 14 male principal dancers at the company.

8:22They were handsome, in great physical shape, and they were landing prestigious roles like Romeo and Apollo. Longitano, the benefactor, evidently had tens of thousands of dollars to spare to the company. The four of them were friends outside of the company, too. They talked and hung out a lot in their free time. On September 3rd of that year, Finley texted a photo to the guys. It was a picture of his girlfriend, 20-year-old Alexandra Waterbury, a model and former dancer at the School of American Ballet. After he sent it, he got a flurry of responses. Because Alexandra was nude in the photo, and anyone who saw it would recognize that Finley had taken it covertly.

9:11But that's not what riled up the other guys. They weren't shocked or indignant. They were excited. But they had come to expect this, because some of these men shared photos like this all the time. Photos of various women associated with City Ballet and other companies, nude or engaged in sexual behavior. Sometimes they shared videos. And sometimes the images literally just showed women's genitalia. The guys also bragged about women at the company they'd slept with. That same month, Finley told his friends he'd recently had a threesome with, quote, a 20-year-old ballerina and her sister. As far as we know, none of those women knew these images were being shared.

9:56A lot of them didn't know they were taken in the first place, which probably also means they didn't know what Longitano was planning for them. During one exchange, he suggested the guys invite a bunch of women to a hotel party, get half a kilo of cocaine, pour it all over the women, and quote, violate them. One of his texts said, word for word, I bet we could tie some of them up and abuse them like farm animals. Finley responded enthusiastically. A party like this might not have been out of the ordinary for them. Apparently, they'd once invited multiple underage girls to a party at a hotel in Washington, D.C.

10:37They passed out drugs and booze. Things got rowdy and over the course of the night, the men racked up$150 ,000 in unspecified damages. They had to pay that fee, but other than that, they were off the hook. City ballet leadership supposedly told the men that from now on, they should limit such behavior. To New York. Because it was easier to do damage control in their home city. Here's Alice Robb, author of Don't Think Dear on Loving and Leaving Ballet. You'll remember her from last week's episode. This is what she had to say about how ballet companies often treat their male dancers. Boys have a whole set of different things that they deal with, but it certainly felt as a girl like they were not held to the same standards because there were just fewer of them.

11:29And so as far as I could tell, they were seen as more valuable. Liza Eintima, president and founder of Dance Data Project, added to this. Somewhere between 73 and 87 percent of the industry is female. But there are still very few upper level leadership opportunities or major choreographic opportunities for women. We don't know exactly when that DC hotel party went down, but it was most likely sometime before September 2018. And if that's the case, Peter Martins was still in charge of City Ballet and his influence was at its peak. If you remember from last week in December 2017, a handful of former City Ballet dancers spoke out about Martins' alleged verbal, physical, and sexual abuse.

12:22It's also not clear whether the men paid for the damages themselves or if the company did. But even the biggest ballet stars don't make that much money, so I have to assume it was the latter. That would either mean Peter Martins was okay with the decision to let the guys off the hook, or the company was okay with it because the same thing was being done for Peter Martins.

12:51in january 2018 four months after finley sent that photo to his friends martins left the company the internal investigation into the harassment and abuse allegations against him found no corroborating evidence probably because each of the accusers described different incidents and no one else backed them up plus these kinds of things are hard to prove without any other physical evidence or documentation. But then Martin's got a DUI, which certainly didn't help his image. Some believe that he chose to retire instead of sliding faster and faster downhill. But City Ballet continued to invest a lot in keeping Martin's happy.

13:34Here's Robin Pogobren, culture reporter for the New York Times. There was some board members who felt he shouldn't have had to go. There were some who still felt quite loyal and there were some dancers that felt that way too. I think there was also a sense of kind of giving him his due as someone who did a number of years of service and kind of honoring that. Liza Eintema's organization, the Dance Data Project, combed through financial documents and found some rather interesting information about Peter Martin's pay after he'd left the company. Eintema's team sent us the figures. Let's start in 2017, the year the allegations were made against Martins.

14:18City Ballet paid him$900 ,000 as an employee, as well as an additional$16 ,000 business transaction for choreographic royalties and fees. The School of American Ballet also paid him an additional$128 ,000. In 2018, the year Martin stepped down, City Ballet didn't report any compensation to him as an employee. However, they did record a$986 ,000 payment to Peter Martin's Productions, Inc. as an independent contractor for, quote, services performed as ballet master-in-chief. This time, he was paid$15 ,000 for choreographic royalties and fees, and the School of American Ballet paid him another$128 ,000.

15:11This is a lot of money, but for all intents and purposes, there's nothing wrong with Martins earning it. He did serve as ballet master through the end of 2018. But the thing is, Martin's kept getting paid all the way through 2023. In 2019, City Ballet paid him over$900 ,000. Between 2020 and 2022, he earned over$600 ,000 each year. And in 2023, he got about$130 ,000. Sometimes these payments went directly to Martin's. Other times, they went to his shell company. Liza Aitema sheds some light on how ballet companies are often structured and why these kinds of transactions are possible. The dance world is really opaque.

16:06I have run into more than one very large ballet company where the development director was not allowed to see the entire budget. How you're going to raise money when you don't know what the targets are and you don't know what the overall budget is, I have no idea. Very often the artistic director is not shown the budget. I find this insane, but it's emblematic of a culture which is very hierarchical. It keeps people in the dark at every single level. And in some cases, that's true of even the board members who are just discouraged from asking probing questions. And had they done so, not only would they have avoided some really bad cultural scandals, but also ongoing deficits, etc.

16:55It's not just financial training that's lacking either. This is a personal observation, not coming from DDP, but having been around ballet and having been around dancers. A couple of things. First of all, like any professional athlete, they're all they're athlete artists. They have very beautiful bodies, but particularly the women, because they're so small, it's easy to objectify and fetishize them. But it's really important to recognize that these are people and that they are doing a job that they've trained hundreds of hours to do. There also needs to be training from staff to donors. Staff are so terrified of potentially offending donors or staff that, you know, civility and propriety sort of goes out the door and they send these young dancers out.

17:51at galas, etc. to make donors happy. It's sort of like sending cheerleaders out into a parking lot at halftime. City Ballet was no exception. There was a culture of parading very young women and girls around, but it's not just donors ogling them. Here's Alexandra Waterbury, Chase Finley's ex-girlfriend whose photo he shared, speaking with Amanda Knox for Vice. The last year I was there, a donor from the company, he brought me to City Ballet's gala in the fall, and I ran into Chase there, and then he ended up writing me on Facebook, like, four days later, asking me to go on a date. So we started dating, and we dated for, like, two years.

18:41I mean, in the beginning, everything was, like, great and fine, and he was telling me, like, I love you and I care about you, And there were times when, like, I genuinely felt that he did. I don't know when it got so bad. But it was kind of like an abusive relationship in a way, like emotionally and, like, psychologically. Their relationship had always been rocky. But Alexandra didn't think her boyfriend would betray her so viciously. But on May 15, 2018, she made a shocking discovery.

19:23By May of 2018, Peter Martins had retired as ballet master of the New York City Ballet, but the company was still paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. At the same time, a group of male dancers at the company and one male donor were frequently exchanging explicit photos of female dancers. One of those men was Chase Finley, who often shared photos and videos of his then-girlfriend, Alexandra Waterbury. The two had a somewhat volatile relationship. Alexandra told Vice that Finley's excessive drinking fueled many of their arguments. But there was an even darker side to him that she had yet to uncover.

20:05Early on the morning of May 15th, Finley left the apartment to catch a flight. night. Alexandra had stayed the night and she woke up a little while later. She was a full-time model with different contracts and shoots to keep track of. First thing in the morning, she wanted to check her email. Finley had given her his laptop password. You know how sometimes when you log into a Mac, an iMessage notification pops up? Well, that's what happened when Alexandra logged into Finley's laptop. And what she saw immediately horrified her. It was the photos and videos that he had been sending his friends, every single one of them, including a video of the two of them having sex that he secretly recorded.

20:48All of the text messages were also there. Alexandra saw the ones about violating girls and tying them up like farm animals. Plus another one where Finley said he wanted to quote, get a sex tape with Alexandra because he knew it would sell. It was bad enough that her boyfriend had been doing this, but the other guys were also supposed to be her friends. The discovery turned her world upside down. The conversations were disgusting, but also some of them were just really heartbreaking. And then I found like all the photos... No, I didn't think that he hated me that much. I didn't think that any of the guys involved in this hated me that much.

21:35He was my first real boyfriend, you know, I was 18, turning 19. I think I walked around for three or four days just in complete shock. He wasn't in the city, he was gone for work. And I was just alone. As the shock wore off, one thing stuck with her. No, there were tons of girls. And it's clear in the conversations that, like, none of us knew. Like, the guys literally talk about how we could be pissed off if we found out. It began to dawn on Alexandra that what the men were doing wasn't just disgusting, but unfair. Before Finley returned to the city, she logged onto his laptop again and saved the images and text messages.

22:26Later, she gave him back the key to his apartment and they broke up. But she wasn't just going to walk away from the situation either. She hired an attorney named Jordan K. Merson. Merson has defended people in cases against Larry Nassar, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, and Bill Cosby. Lawyer Jordan Merson filed a lawsuit on behalf of Waterbury against the NYCB and former principal dancer Chase Finlay. The suit claimed that Finley caused harm to Alexandra by taking and sharing sexually explicit photos and videos of her without her consent. It cited the pain and humiliation inflicted on her, as well as damage to her reputation, which hindered job prospects.

23:08The suit included Amar Ramazar and Zachary Catizzaro, the two other male dancers, and Jared Longitano, the donor. Alexandra also filed a claim against City Ballet for negligent hiring and retention. You might recognize that term because at least one defendant filed the same claim against Disney and Miramax in regards to Harvey Weinstein. Basically, it means that Alexandra believes City Ballet knew these male dancers were behaving like this, but the company turned a blind eye. The hotel party in D.C. was an example of this. Much like the Weinstein lawsuits, Alexandra's case started to gain media attention, especially since she had such a well-known lawyer on her side.

23:53But unlike the Weinstein suits, there was something missing from hers. Other women. As far as we can tell, all of the photos and videos depicted professional dancers. Most of them were employed at City Ballet, but some may have worked at other companies. Alexandra was likely the only one not currently working as a professional ballet dancer. This may have been why she was the only one who took action. We spoke with McCall Janis, a former dancer and current dance photographer, about all the emotions that can come with ending a dance career. You get a contract from New York City Ballet, you're not going to do anything to jeopardize that.

24:35I never got to dance professionally, but I did train as if I was going to become a professional. I ended up tearing my groin and my hamstring so badly that the doctor was like, you will not be able to dance again. It was very, very painful in every aspect. I spent like my whole life in a ballet studio. that was where a lot of my friendships were formed you know everyone's going to like high school football games and dances and I think I went to one high school football game when I had my injury and I had to stop it's been about 10 years and just this past year I started feeling like oh I'm okay again you kind of become this like shell of a person because your whole life has been based around this one thing that is beautiful and so fulfilling, but then without it, you're like, who am I if I'm not a ballerina?

25:38Even without an injury, finding work is not guaranteed. The other thing that people don't realize about dance in general is that you can have been called into the artistic director's office and told that your contract won't be renewed for the next year. But you still have to perform all the way maybe through the end of May. And there have been several situations where the artistic director has failed to let a trainee know they're not going to be kept on or second company or whatever, or somebody's contract is not going to be renewed. And they don't have time to look for another job at the lowest tier.

26:14You have to pay to audition. You're paying$200,$300. You have to pay for a hotel, airfare etc it's a cattle call do you know how many dancers are fighting so hard and doing everything they can to even get looked at by New York City Ballet so you get that contract it's everything you've worked for so you're willing to put up with a lot to keep that because it means so much to you and the dance world is small and everyone's connected Everyone knows everyone and all the directors have known each other for decades. And so when a ton of allegations are being thrown out there, you're kind of put in a position of, do I want to keep my job and do I want to have a long career in this profession?

27:09profession or do I want to stand up and kind of be flagged as like a problematic person here? So you don't get the contracts, you don't get the work, and then you're devastated because that's been your whole life. In fact, during our research for these episodes, we briefly corresponded with one of Peter Martin's accusers who said they didn't want to talk about it anymore. They were in a good headspace and had moved on. And I love that for them. Don't get me wrong, but I can't help but think of how their reluctance to discuss the past, while completely understandable, is also a glaring example of how Martin's damage isn't just lingering.

27:51It's still raw, and the topic could reopen wounds or re-traumatize someone. Robin Pogobrin told us about the sheer pain she saw in the dancers she spoke with while reporting on the Martin story. It is kind of amazing to me also how fresh these experiences are for victims, no matter how far in the past they occurred. I mean, they are immediately sort of crying on the phone in a way that it's hard to question. It's incredibly deep and searing and lasting. What was also striking to me is that it can even be verbal abuse and not physical, and the damage is just as strong. And what's really kind of tragic about these accounts is that not only was it obviously upsetting when it happened, but they blame themselves.

28:40There is just a lot of shame associated with it. You hear about a lot of lives and careers being derailed by it, like they were never the same. What's also interesting and what complicates this, it's important to say that there are dancers who defended Martins to the end, who said he was good to them, who said they had positive experiences. And I think what that kind of speaks to also is that there is sort of a tier of the favored who don't experience some of the harsher treatment. So let's say these like the star dancers who were his favorites did not experience this kind of thing. So I think we're still as a culture not necessarily taking someone to task for behavior they do to others even if it didn't necessarily happen to you.