In December of 2017, a #metoo scandal rocked the ballet world. Peter Martins, the artistic director of New York City Ballet, stepped down from his position amid allegations of sexual harassment and physical abuse from within the company. The accusations included incidents that dated back to early in his tenure as director in the 1990s: Martins was alleged to have physically assaulted one dancer onstage in front of the whole company, exposed himself to another in his dressing room, and misused his position of power to receive sexual favors. After a two-month investigation, New York City Ballet and its affiliated institution, the School of American Ballet, issued a statement that their findings “did not corroborate the allegations of harassment or violence” against him. By then, Martins had quietly exited the scene after announcing his retirement early in the new year.
Within months, the reverberations were being felt across the dance world. In March 2018, Kenneth Greve, the director of the Finnish National Ballet, was removed from his managerial position over accusations of inappropriate conduct. The following month, in an anonymous internal survey at the Paris Opera Ballet, 77 percent of its dancers said they’d been the object of verbal harassment or had witnessed a colleague being verbally harassed, and 26 percent reported either being the victim of or a witness to sexual harassment at work. In the fall of 2018, Alexandra Waterbury, a former student at the School of American Ballet, filed a suit against New York City Ballet and Chase Finlay, one of the company’s principal dancers and her former boyfriend. Waterbury accused Finlay of sharing sexually explicit photos of her with other male dancers, and she accused the company of not only encouraging a “fraternity-like atmosphere” that “permeates the Ballet and its dancers” but failing to protect her and other women. In 2020, her claims against the company and the school were dropped, though in April 2022 a New York appellate court reinstated New York City Ballet as a defendant in the case.
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