Journalists Attest to Experiences of Sexual Misconduct with Wesley Lowery

Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.

Disclaimer: This story includes graphic depictions of sexual assault that some may find disturbing. If you need support, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673 or access its online chat at online.rainn.org.

Wesley Lowery—the winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award, and whose work in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, chronicled the organizing power of Black Lives Matter—is, at thirty-four, one of the most recognized journalists in America. He has reported for the Washington Post and CBS News. He is the author of two books: They Can’t Kill Us All (2016), about unarmed Black men killed by police, and American Whitelash (2023), a history of violent white resistance to people of color. Among young reporters, he is perhaps best known for questioning traditional journalistic objectivity, noting its failures to reckon with racism. 

But for some women in journalism, his standing is more complicated. Imani Moise, a Wall Street Journal reporter, remembers that when she met up with him at a bar, in December of 2018, for what she thought would be a professional conversation, he’d ordered her a cocktail before she arrived. Olivia Messer—a journalist who is now the editor in chief of the Barbed Wire, an independent outlet focused on Texas—recalled that, in January of 2020, at a happy hour with Lowery, he was ready with more alcohol every time she returned to the table. In the spring of 2022, after two drinks, a journalist with whom Lowery matched on Bumble said that she had reached her limit, and he entreated her to get a third. (This journalist spoke on the condition of anonymity, because even a first name would make her easily identifiable, and she feared how her family would react.) A writer and researcher noticed that, in February of 2024, when she and Lowery went to a bar, he had a drink waiting for her whenever she got up to use the bathroom. (This woman, too, did not want to be named, because of the toll she said the experience has taken on her mental health.) In each case, these women wound up leaving with Lowery, who they said then sexually assaulted them.

Messer recalled that she tried to educate Lowery about consent. On another occasion, she said, she woke up unsure of what had happened, and he told her that he remembered they’d had sex. The woman from Bumble also blacked out; Moise felt powerless to stop him. The fourth—the writer-researcher—remained conscious; she felt pressure from Lowery to let him up to her apartment, where he tried to pull off her clothes, she said, until she pretended to fall asleep, and eventually, he left.

At the time of these encounters—which spanned from 2018 to 2024, when he had reached the height of his media stardom—each of these women viewed Lowery as a professional contact, someone they knew socially and looked up to, not as a romantic partner with whom they were engaging in consensual sex. Until now, some had feared making noise about Lowery, beyond telling a few confidants. “He was the golden boy, held up on this pedestal,” Moise said. She deeply felt his importance to journalism, to American culture, to so much. “He was Mr. BLM.” When these women confronted Lowery about his actions, he would be nice, and apologetic.

These four people spoke with me along with several others, including colleagues and students, who attest to a pattern of predatory behavior toward young women in journalism, going back years. I also reviewed emails, text messages, and chat threads and examined documents relating to Lowery’s time at American University in Washington, DC, where he served as an associate professor and the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop. On March 11, Lowery left those positions; in the days afterward, CJR and the Washington Post reported that his departure followed a series of encounters detailed to American’s Title IX office concerning sexual harassment and other misconduct. (Title IX is a federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination, including sexual harrassment and sexual violence, at educational institutions; a school’s Title IX office is responsible for compliance.) Two student journalists—Sophia Lehrbaum, who was a senior at the University of Michigan and a fellow at IRW, and Maya Cederlund, who was a fellow and a senior at American—said then that Lowery had used sexually inappropriate language while discussing reporting practices with them. 

In the time since, more women have spoken with me about their experiences with Lowery—all of them current or former journalists—and he has stepped away from other posts, including as the board chair of the Center for Public Integrity, which is dissolving. “I know from our decade of friendship that when he interacts with women, he pushes sexuality and romance into the conversation, even when they make it clear that they aren’t interested in more than friendship,” Messer said. “Even when they put up a boundary. Even when they say no. His perspective may truly be that every woman in his life has a romantic or sexual interest in him, but that doesn’t make it true. His inability to see the damage he’s caused—much less change his behavior—makes me gravely concerned for all young women around him.”

Lately, Lowery has been focused on writing. I was in touch with him while reporting this story, and made repeated requests for an interview. “I have far more at stake and to lose than any other source in this piece,” he told me in an email. He declined to speak with me, and instead sent a statement. “CJR’s portrayal of these periods in my personal life is incomplete and includes false insinuations about complicated dynamics,” he said. “Still, I respect the women who have shared their experiences and take their perspectives seriously. As a young professional, I did not always recognize the power imbalances that surfaced as personal relationships evolved into professional ones, and vice versa. I should have better upheld boundaries that would have protected myself and others, particularly during interactions impaired by mutual intoxication. I have committed to sobriety, now approaching one year, and continue to work with professionals on my understanding of the power dynamics that accompany race, gender, and my professional success.”

Lowery grew up in Shaker Heights, a Cleveland suburb. His journalism career began in middle school, and he became the top editor of his high school newspaper, The Shakerite. He held the same position at Ohio University’s independent student paper, The Post. After graduating, he became a reporting fellow at the Los Angeles Times and then went on to the Boston Globe, where he covered, among other stories, the 2013 marathon bombing. In 2014, he was hired by the Washington Post and named the National Association of Black Journalists’ emerging journalist of the year.

That summer, in Ferguson, after Michael Brown, a Black eighteen-year-old, was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, protesters flooded the streets. Reporters covering the scene convened at a McDonald’s, for the power outlets and Wi-Fi. Lowery was among the regulars. Several days into the demonstrations, officers entered and detained Lowery and another journalist. (Lowery was later formally charged with trespassing and with interference with police, but the charges were dropped.) Lowery went on to report extensively not only on the rise of Black Lives Matter but also about racist police violence across the United States, culminating in a comprehensive database of killings called “Fatal Force,” for which he served as a lead journalist on a Post team. In 2016, “Fatal Force” won a Pulitzer. They Can’t Kill Us All was published the same year, featuring stories of Black and brown people who lost their lives to police brutality.

Imani Moise, who graduated from Duke in 2016, was a follower of Lowery’s work. She attended a book event at The Strand, where she got her copy signed. She landed a job as a breaking news reporter, and was a member of NABJ, where she and Lowery were part of the same small circle. “I revered him,” she said. Moise, a lifelong New Yorker, didn’t see him all that often, since he lived in Washington, DC. But she had friends there. “He would comment on my Instagram,” she recalled—say, responding to a story of a meal she was about to eat with a message like “‘Damn, what did you make for dinner, you’re going to have to deliver to me in person.’” In December of 2018, when she was heading down for a friend’s birthday brunch, she decided to reach out.

The idea was that they would meet for coffee at Union Station once her bus pulled in. “He ghosted me,” she said. She texted him—she shared a screenshot with me—waited for about an hour, then gave up and headed to meet her friend. She had a good time; drinks flowed. That evening, Lowery sent her a message, suggesting they get together for a drink. 

She agreed to meet him at a bar called Reliable Tavern in the neighborhood of Petworth. She arrived with a plan: two drinks, and then she would link up with friends so they could all head to Bethesda, where they were staying. “When I got there, he had already ordered me a drink,” she said. That struck her as a bit presumptuous, but she sat down and took a sip. She was loaded with questions about navigating the industry, pitching editors, cultivating sources. “I remember two drinks turned into four drinks,” she said. He paid, she recalled. “I remember being so drunk that my head physically hurt, and I was embarrassed by it.” They kept talking, including about the #MeToo movement.

Finally, she told him, she had to get going. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll pay for your cab,’” she recalled. He made a point, she said, of ordering an Uber Black. “He puts me in the car. At this point I was sloppy drunk. Then he gets in. I was pretty drunk, but I was perceptive enough to know what was happening. I said, ‘Where are we going?’ He said, ‘My apartment.’” Moise suddenly had the sense that she had lost control of the situation. “I felt really powerless,” she remembered. That night, what she experienced “was a full-blown assault,” she said. “I was way too drunk to give consent.”

In the morning, he ordered her an Uber. “I remember feeling terrible. It was the longest ride to Bethesda,” she said. She had been an advocate for sexual assault survivors in college. She had a boyfriend; Lowery was in a relationship, too, as far as she knew. But she was reluctant to speak openly about the night’s events. “In the moment I did feel blame,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought the conversation in a flirty direction. Maybe this experience isn’t worth tearing down this public figure.” 

At the following summer’s NABJ conference, Moise told a few close contacts, in confidence. (She said that she never escalated the matter to the NABJ board, or at any institutional level. “We were aware of public allegations unrelated to NABJ, but we had not received complaints about Wesley,” NABJ told me in a statement.) She also ran into Lowery. “He saw me and was buddy-buddy,” she said. 

Over the course of the event, she heard that he had mentioned their evening to some colleagues. She wanted to set the record straight. She texted him and asked him to meet her for a drink. (I have reviewed screenshots of their exchange.) “I was visibly shaken,” she said. She told him that she was deeply troubled by what had happened when they last saw each other. “He said I was misreading the situation,” she recalled. He’d been drunk, she said he told her, and “he thought we were both feeling it.” 

“I have no plans to blow up your life,” she recalled replying to him. “However, I feel deeply uncomfortable around you, so if I’m in a space, please don’t talk to me.” After the conversation, he sent her a text message, which Moise shared with me: “Appreciate you saying something. Like I said I feel pretty shitty about everything.”

That was that, for the most part. Occasionally, when a circumstance presented itself, Moise would tell someone what happened to her. “My parents raised me to be hyper socially aware,” she said. She had been assaulted before, as a teenager, and when the police asked for the man’s name, she’d refused to provide it. “I did not want to see another Black man go to jail,” she recalled. She has since adjusted her thinking. “Protecting the Black community can mean protecting Black men—I am done with that,” she said. “When this thing happened with Wesley, I made the same decision I made as a teenager, and I was disappointed in myself.”

In 2019, Lowery was again recognized by the Pulitzers, as part of a Post team named a finalist in explanatory reporting. He also came into conflict with his boss, Martin Baron, the executive editor of the Post, over the value of objectivity. On Twitter, Lowery questioned why a New York Times story about the Tea Party neglected to mention that “it was essentially a hysterical grassroots tantrum about the fact that a Black guy was president,” which, according to a leaked memo, Baron saw as a violation of the Post’s standards and ethics policy and damaging to the paper’s “journalistic integrity.” (When asked if the organization was ever aware of Lowery being engaged in sexual misconduct as an employee, a Post spokesperson declined to comment, citing a policy not to discuss personnel matters.) Baron contended that if Lowery wanted to express his views, he should become an opinion writer or find work in advocacy. Before long, Lowery chose to leave. At the start of 2020, he signed on to a 60 Minutes venture with Quibi, the short-lived mobile streaming platform, called 60 in 6, and then became a correspondent for 60 Minutes+. 

That summer, after George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer, and BLM demonstrations unfurled across the country, Lowery published an opinion piece in the Times, “A Reckoning over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists,” outlining his critique of the way newsrooms “too often deprive their readers of plainly stated facts that could expose reporters to accusations of partiality or imbalance.” His argument, and the discussion it prompted, had transformative effects. Lowery’s star rose. He was invited to be an awards judge, give speeches, and serve on nonprofit boards, including the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Prison Journalism Project, and the Center for Public Integrity. Charles Lewis, who established CPI, was also the force behind IRW, where Lowery arrived in the summer of 2023. 

As Lowery’s career took off, he became close with Olivia Messer, now the Barbed Wire editor. “Over the span of our ten-year friendship, Wesley hit on me early and often,” she said. “There were times earlier on in our friendship when I did not always say no to his repeated advances, especially when it involved alcohol.” Back in January of 2020, when she was living in New York and working at the Daily Beast, they got together after work for a happy hour at The Tippler, in Chelsea. “Every time I came to the table there was more alcohol,” Messer recalled. It was the night of a Democratic presidential primary debate; Lowery suggested they go to her place to watch. First they hopped on the subway, but her apartment was all the way in Crown Heights; he offered to pay for an Uber. They arrived, turned the TV on. At some point, Messer remembered, he asked if he could see her bedroom; it was weird, he suggested, that he hadn’t before. She didn’t think too much of the request—she believed he was in a relationship at the time, they were just friends, and she’d been drinking. Once inside, she said, he pressured her into performing oral sex on him. Later on, she told him that she didn’t feel it was consensual—and in the course of their conversations, she sensed that he understood, and learned from the experience. They remained friends. More than a year afterward, he attended a housewarming party she hosted when she moved to Florida; they kissed—which, she said, was consensual. “That was the last time anything consensual happened,” she said.

By the time Lowery was finding his footing at IRW, they had established a platonic and professional relationship, Messer said: “We had clear boundaries that I restated often.” Lowery helped Messer develop a reporting project for Texas Monthly on failure to address alleged sexual harassment in the Texas Senate. He introduced her to Cara Kelly, an editor at large for IRW and an adjunct instructor at American, who became Messer’s reporting partner on the story; Lowery served as an editor. Messer was also in the early stages of starting up the Barbed Wire, for which Lowery was an adviser. In October of 2023, she visited DC to meet with other advisers and potential funders. A small group gathered one evening at a bar. She had, she recalled, maybe one or two drinks. Then she and Lowery split off to debrief. He drove them to a second bar. They had a big meeting with a potential major investor the next morning, so her plan was not to spend a night on the town, but to catch up and confer. She might have had a beer there, she said; she wasn’t sure. “Then basically my memory blacks out,” she told me.

“What I know is that I woke up the next morning confused to find Wesley in my bed with me,” she said. He seemed to remember what had happened. She asked if they’d had sex, she recalled, and he said they had. “I was confused about why I was naked; confused that my new, barely-been-worn pair of boots were broken; confused that one of my earrings was missing; confused why he remembered us having sex when I didn’t; and confused why I wouldn’t have come back with my jacket, when the weather was so cold.”

She panicked. For one thing, she was staying in the same hotel as other members of the Barbed Wire team; she was mortified by what they might think. For another, the nature of their relationship was complex: he had been a friend, a crush, and he was now in a supervisory position—both because of Messer’s work with IRW and his role with the Barbed Wire. “Whatever you do, do not tell Cara,” she remembered him saying. Then she showered, got ready, and went down to the lobby. “I was ill and distracted the next day during meetings that were extremely important to me, and I felt tremendous shame about it,” she said. “I asked him the next morning for answers, and it took months for me to question them.” Later, she told the leadership of the Barbed Wire, and they removed Lowery as an adviser. Messer also did, ultimately, tell Kelly—who, in her capacity as a mandatory reporter at American, described the incident to the school’s Title IX office.

Messer and Kelly’s article was published in Texas Monthly’s August 2024 issue. Once that wrapped up, Kelly resigned from her position at IRW. “I learned that you subjected my reporting partner,” she wrote in a letter to Lowery, shared with me, “to unwanted sexual advances, despite her attempts to set professional boundaries.” She continued, “You told me that she ‘didn’t want to let herself’ sleep with you. A short time later, after getting work drinks with her and her colleagues, she woke up to you in her hotel room with no memory of how you got there.”

Lowery responded to Kelly’s letter. “I read this and gave you a call,” he wrote to her in an email that was shared with me. “Will not keep calling, as I do not want to do anything that could be perceived by you as harassing. That said, I really wish your experience at the IRW had been different—and that you had brought any of these concerns to me in real time.” Several points were made in her letter, some of which, he wrote, felt like misunderstandings, others “objective falsehoods.” 

Then he wrote to Messer, in an email shared with me. “I got a letter from Cara today, which included a description of our interaction when we saw each other in DC,” he began. “Without going into the details, or making any excuses, I’m extremely sorry that you experienced that in any way that caused confusion, or made you feel taken advantage of or things in our personal and professional relationship were inappropriately blurred. The way she laid out what happened felt different from my understanding of things, but it’s clear she has spoken to you more recently than I have about it. I’m sorry, and I’m sorry that you weren’t willing or comfortable talking to me about any of this. Your friendship meant a lot to me, and I never would have purposely done anything to harm you or put you in any fucked up situation.”

A journalist with whom Lowery matched on Bumble recalled her own experience. In the early glimpses of spring, in 2022, he suggested that they get together at Reliable Tavern—the same place he’d met Moise. The Bumble match had followed his work for years, and was flooded with anticipation. When she arrived, he was sitting at the bar, which was mostly empty. She considers herself to be someone with a low tolerance—her limit is two drinks. “He’s like, ‘Oh, let’s get a third one,’” she recalled. She agreed. But then, as she put it, “after that third drink, I do not remember anything until I woke up in his bed in his house and we were having sex. I mean, I can’t say we were having sex, because I was unconscious. He was inside of me.” She flickered in and out of wakefulness, until everything went dark again.

That morning, her first thought was embarrassment. She was also shocked, confused. She noticed that she had bruises on her body and that her foot had a cut. She grabbed her phone. There was a text message from him, from 12:34am (shared with me), which read, “hey – we got more drunk than intended tonight. just got back to my place. tucked you in and am passing out. In case your memory is fuzzy in the AM, we made out but nothing else.” Then he added, “(ok we fooled around. !but we’re both drunk so nothing else).”

She remembered her reaction: that didn’t add up. “I think every woman thinks, ‘When it happens to me, I’m going to go to the police, I’m going to do the test,’” she said. But she was paralyzed by the shock of what had transpired, and didn’t report it.

Instead, she went home. She showered. A week afterward, feeling “gross about it,” she told a friend what happened, in a text message that was shared with me. Lowery reached out a few times, sending media gossip and asking if she wanted to get together, which she didn’t. A couple of weeks went by. Then, at the start of May, she celebrated her birthday. She went out drinking with friends. Later that night, she went back to Lowery’s place. “We hooked up again,” she said. She didn’t tell anyone—except a therapist. “She was like, ‘Oh, you didn’t have control the first time, so you went back on your terms. You can now feel like you have control again. You feel like you regained your power.’” That didn’t make her feel better, but it helped her make sense of the dynamic. 

In the months that followed, the woman got together with Lowery again. “It really just took me a long time to be like, This happened to me,” she said. “We don’t know how to talk about it when it’s someone you know, someone you’re on a date with.” 

In the end, she said, “my only silver lining is that he had no power over my career.”

On the day that Lowery sent Messer his apology note, he sent at least one other, similar email, to the writer-researcher, who asked not to be named in this story. Like Messer, she had been working in conjunction with IRW. Like Messer, she’d counted Lowery as a friend. But in retrospect, she told me in the course of a series of interviews, she came to view the arc of their relationship as a tapping-away at her boundaries. In the summer of 2023, she, her editor, and Lowery got together for a brainstorming session. When the fall semester started, she began going into the office, on the American campus, working on grant proposals for a collaborative project. She got to know Cara Kelly. She enjoyed being at the school and mentoring students, with whom she developed a data sheet on abortion denial. 

They were making good progress, but by the end of the semester, there was still work to be done. After the holidays, she said, Lowery asked her to get dinner, catch up, and discuss IRW business. On the first Friday of February, 2024, they met at Eaton DC, a hotel on K Street. Over drinks, they discussed her planned contract with IRW, the logistics of their project. Every time she would leave to go to the bathroom, she said, she would come back and find a new glass of wine. The conversation drifted from work, turning flirtatious—which wasn’t new, in her experience of him, and she waved him off, as she had in the past. Besides, she had a boyfriend. She got up to go to the bathroom, and again, upon her return, a drink was waiting. She felt herself becoming intoxicated.

At the end of the evening, as Kelly later wrote in a file she kept for her records, and to which she referred in a report for American’s Title IX office, “Wesley offered to drive her but she thought he’d had too much to drink and wanted to take an Uber.” They decided to split a car and put in two stops, for each of their homes. The writer-researcher’s was closer to Eaton DC. When they arrived at her apartment, he walked her to the door—he insisted, she remembered. He asked if he could come upstairs. No, she told him, she was tired. He asked again. She recalled that he told her it was weird that he hadn’t seen her place. Maybe so, she replied, but she didn’t want to have a guest over just then. “He was persistent,” Kelly wrote. “He said that she was just using him for a job/contract at AU and IRW. And that she hadn’t done anything for him. That she was using him and not giving him anything in return. She told me she felt in that moment that her job and career were on the line, and she didn’t feel like she could be blunt in telling him to leave.”

The writer-researcher allowed him up. “She tried to placate him because she knew what he said was a threat and that he could ruin her career,” Kelly wrote in her notes. “He tried to kiss her and she demurred.” Inside, “he tried to get her towards her bed,” but she instead steered him toward the couch. He then tried to undress her, even as she held her hands down on her clothes and asked him to go home. (Kelly’s notes corroborate this.) Finally she pretended to fall asleep—still on the couch, not wanting him to follow her to her bedroom. After a while, he got up to leave. Around 3am, he sent her a text message, which I reviewed: “For the record, I’ve thought a lot about what it will feel like to wake up with you in my arms the next morning.”

The writer-researcher was due at IRW on Monday—a job about which she had been enthusiastic. Plus, she said, she needed the money. She decided that she would go into the office and see how it felt to be there. That day, she had a migraine—something she had never experienced before. It seemed as if her body was telling her something to which her mind hadn’t caught up.

In a series of conversations, the writer-researcher told her editor what happened, and the editor assured her that they would no longer work with IRW. They had not signed a contract yet, so getting out of their arrangement was fairly simple. Rather than tell Lowery their reasons for bailing, they referenced the limits of their time. (The editor confirmed the account of events described here.) He continued to text the writer-researcher: A photo of a screening pass to a movie they had seen as friends, reminding her of when “we had a cute dinner date after.” A note with tearful emoji and the words “i miss you.” He asked her to be his date to a gala. She eventually stopped responding to the messages. (I have reviewed screenshots of the texts.)

In March, the writer-researcher decided to fill Kelly in. They had a follow-up conversation in April. Afterward, Kelly wrote down notes and, within several days, drew from them to file a report to the Title IX office. “I suggested that she report what happened to AU,” Kelly wrote. “She seemed apprehensive and intimidated in coming forward by herself with a complaint. We discussed how Wesley has a pattern of making threats and going to the media. That he often follows through on his threats. She said she’d think about what she wanted to do, but was scared he’d ruin her career and future prospects at AU.”

When Kelly resigned, and Lowery sent his emails, he expressed contrition to the writer-researcher. “I just want to say that I never intended to use the prospect of us working together to leverage anything romantic between us,” he wrote, in an email shown to me. “Given the sometimes romantic nature of our personal relationship, I thought we could balance working together while still figuring things out. Clearly I was wrong, and screwed up the balance of that.” She replied, in a message shared with me, that she didn’t accept his apology—that the way he wrote about their former friendship showed a lack of understanding of what had gone wrong.

Sexually inappropriate behavior can sometimes make itself known over time, in phases, starting with a stray comment that tests a boundary. That can wind up being innocuous—and some who know Lowery may have experienced forms of this as harmless flirtation, or social awkwardness. In other cases, the consequences might be serious. It was cognizance of the latter possibility that raised alarm at IRW—a small, independent operation, based out of American’s School of Communication, with a handful of editors and support staff. Colleagues get to know each other and the student fellows—between eight and twelve at a time—quite well. Lowery oversaw hiring, training of fellows, and partnering students with professional editors and publishers. Lynne Perri—a veteran journalist and senior professorial lecturer, who served as an editor at IRW for years—was initially thrilled to have him there. “I thought we were hiring a maverick,” she said, “a journalist that students could look up to, and a mentor.”

Before long, however, Lowery’s relationship with colleagues grew tense. “There was a lot of him telling us who we could talk to, not to talk to each other,” Perri said. In May of 2024, she retired from IRW. His interactions with student journalists were also sometimes fraught. That summer, Lehrbaum, the IRW fellow, recalled that Lowery made behind-closed-door comments that she considered inappropriate—“When you date somebody, you don’t just ask, ‘Do you wanna fuck?’ You build up to it”—and she contacted the school’s Title IX office. The first formal step in the process is called an “incident report”; Lehrbaum filed one, with the aim of registering a formal complaint. (Lowery has said that he commonly explains reporter-source trust-building to students by comparing the dynamic to that of a date, starting with small questions and building up to more serious topics, and he didn’t recall using the language she attributed to him.)

Lehrbaum’s incident report—like most of those concerning Lowery—was ultimately deemed by American’s Title IX office not to fall “within their purview.” The response went, “The matter was referred to the Office of Human Resources for review to determine if the reported conduct violated other University policies.” (The email was shared with me.) In effect, as Kelly put it, “they closed these incident reports before they opened a case,” which meant that no formal Title IX complaint was ever filed. “It’s a legal maneuver to protect themselves,” she said. (A spokesperson for American University declined to comment for this story.) Lehrbaum, who had grown increasingly uncomfortable at IRW, returned to Michigan as she waited for a determination to be made. She last heard from Lowery in October, about a piece she had been reporting. She never replied, and the article never got published.

It was also in October that Hannah Langenfeld, then a senior at American, entered Lowery’s office. She had signed up enthusiastically for his course on investigative reporting. On the first day, “he makes a weird sort of joke,” she recalled. “He’s telling a story, saying, ‘You don’t want to get in the way of women who are bulldogs, because they know how to get things done.’ That’s why he surrounds himself with women all the time, because he can do as little work as possible. We all sort of look at each other with side-eye in class, but move on.” As the weeks progressed, Langenfeld said, she found that the course deviated from the syllabus entirely: students generally took turns reading articles Lowery recommended, or he’d expatiate on his own work. The only assignment was a pitch, about which she’d received no feedback. She asked to see him during office hours to inquire about his pedagogical approach.

She arrived at 10:30 on a Friday morning. “It’s a big office with smaller offices in it,” she said. No one else was there. “You could hear a pin drop. He’s very friendly, says, ‘Come on in,’ and closes the door.” Inside was Lowery’s desk, a couch, and a bookshelf. He sat at the desk. She sat on the couch. 

Their conversation began with small talk about her weekend plans. Langenfeld raised the subject of class. “Then he says, ‘Wait one minute,’” she recalled. “He rummages through his desk, pulls out a candle, and says, ‘Let me light this candle to set vibes for the room before we start.’ I sort of laughed—I didn’t know how to react in the moment. I was just confused.” She continued, asking him about the reporting project she’d proposed; there was an article she’d pulled up on her laptop that she thought was relevant. Lowery rose from his desk chair. “He comes down, sits next to me on the couch, and asks to look at the article,” she said. “That’s when I start to move away. I am feeling very uncomfortable in this situation. I think I need to leave right now, but I’m still smiling because I don’t want him to think anything.” He asked about her senior-year capstone project. Perri was advising her on it, she told him. “Well, that’s great,” she remembered him saying. “But you can definitely come to me if you have any questions about it—you can come to me again.” Then he handed her a book—The Night of the Gun by David Carr—unrelated to what she was working on. “He puts it in my hands and says, ‘Read it and tell me what you think,’” she recalled. (Lowery has said that he has a reputation for lighting candles in the office, and that he only closes his door if someone asks for privacy. Two editors who were colleagues of his at IRW said that this was not his reputation.) Finally, Langenfeld told me, she got up and left. Class was in an hour.

By November, Langenfeld learned that the Washington Post was working on a story about Lowery. Rumors were going around about his behavior with students, fellows, and journalists who had been associated with IRW, as well as American’s response to Title IX reports. “A whisper network formed,” as Lehrbaum put it. Langenfeld was feeling anxious—about what the interaction in his office meant, what it could still mean. “It felt like I was living in this adrenaline-driven fight-or-flight mode,” she said. She spoke with Perri. “She says, ‘That’s unacceptable. I’m going to inform the journalism division director about this, because it’s characteristic sexual harassment.’” Yet another Title IX incident report was filed; Langenfeld described what happened to a case manager. She also started talking with the Post. But just before winter break, she received the same reply others had: upon review, the Title IX office determined that the conduct did not fall within its scope, and referred the matter to the school’s dean of faculty. Her concerns about her course were also referred to the dean. “I very tragically was not surprised,” Lagenfeld said. She decided not to attend Lowery’s last two classes of the semester, and got an A. 

Weeks later, Lowery advised Maya Cederlund on sensitive interviewing. She recalled him saying, as part of that discussion, when you’re having consensual sex with someone, you’re asking, “Can I do this, can I do that, is this okay?” (Lowery has said that the quote was taken out of context, and he’d only been trying to offer earnest guidance.) By then, the Post had been assembling its story for several months—and, sometime after that, reached out to Lowery. The women who had spoken up felt unsure when, or if, the article would be published. The Post also sought comment from American. 

Soon, the staff of IRW received an email from Marnel Niles Goins, the dean of the School of Communication, shared with me, announcing that Lowery would be leaving American. Perri would return, as IRW’s interim executive editor. No further details were provided. “I thought that was very indicative of AU’s habit of protecting their reputation above anything,” Lagenfeld said. “The only reason” AU and Lowery parted ways “is because they thought the Post was publishing a big investigation—I firmly believe that.” 

The next day, CJR reported on Lowery’s exit and the events that preceded it. Shortly after that, Lowery stepped down as cochair of the upcoming NABJ convention and resigned from the Allbritton Journalism Institute, a journalism education nonprofit. Later, he announced that he was leaving CPI, and that the organization would close down. (He is still listed as a board member of Spotlight DC.) The Post published its own article, citing five reports on behalf of six women. Perri is now back at IRW, tasked with figuring out who should take over. “I’m trying to keep everyone moving forward,” she said.

Lowery has had a vaunted career in celebrated newsrooms and on the boards of major journalistic organizations. It’s not apparent that—with the exception of American, for a time—institutions insulated him, or covered up transgressions. Rather, the women who felt violated by him were journalists, people savvy about his place in their industry—above their own, in all cases—and the stakes of speaking out. Lowery, they feared, could go to great lengths to refute their accounts and undermine their credibility. So they talked with close friends and therapists. Only now, in the wake of his departure from IRW, have they felt willing to make their stories known. The result has been a period of self-imposed, protective quiet—a common consequence of hard-to-hear-about experiences.

Even now, some wonder if their stories can ever pose a serious challenge to Lowery’s stature in the journalism world. Moise, for her part, has found a way forward. Compared with Lowery, she said, “rising up has been a slower progression for me.” And yet: “I am kind of a spiritual person. I believe in karma. I don’t think his career turned into much.”

This piece was edited by a committee from the Columbia Journalism School: Sheila Coronel, Kristen Lombardi, and Emily Bell. This article was checked by an independent fact-checker.

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.