Georgetown Law School Named in Suit over Professor’s Alleged Voyeurism

By Kimberly Scharfenberger
Cardinal Newman Society
December 4, 2014

http://www.cardinalnewmansociety.org/CatholicEducationDaily/DetailsPage/tabid/102/ArticleID/3765/Georgetown-Law-School-Named-in-Suit-over-Professor%E2%80%99s-Alleged-Voyeurism.aspx


Georgetown University Law School is facing a lawsuit filed by a third-year law student alleging that the law school “turned a blind eye” to the actions of an instructor charged with six counts of voyeurism, according to The Washington Post.

The instructor in question, Rabbi Barry Freundel, is a tenured professor at Towson University in Baltimore, Md., and taught a seminar in Jewish studies last spring at Georgetown. He was arrested in October and is scheduled for a hearing in D.C. Superior Court on Jan. 16.

Police found evidence that Freundel had been using hidden cameras to record women using a mikvah, a ritual bath used primarily by observant Jewish women for purification.

The student accused Freundel “of luring her to the bath as part of her studies at the school,” The Washington Post reported. Freundel encouraged the student “to write her research paper on the mikvah ritual and told her to research it by participating in the immersion,” according to NBC Washington.

As reported by the Post, the law student’s attorney, Steven Silverman, stated in the lawsuit:

This case involves an unfathomable breach of trust by a Georgetown professor and religious leader and defendants’ utter failure to prevent and/or stop it… Defendants turned a blind eye to obvious signs of Freundel’s increasingly bizarre behavior, ignoring the bright red flags that Freundel was acting inappropriately with women subjected to his authority.

Georgetown University director of media relations Rachel Pugh reportedly stated that the University is “horrified” by the alleged behavior of Freundel and is “cooperating fully with law enforcement authorities on their investigation, as well as conducting our own investigation of Rabbi Freundel’s conduct,” according to NBC Washington.

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