Wesley Lowery Exits Investigative Reporting Workshop and American University Following Student Complaints

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

Wesley J. Lowery, a Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter and one of the most influential journalists of his generation, has left his positions as the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop and as an associate professor of journalism at American University in Washington, DC, after less than two years there. His departure follows a number of complaints against him, according to former colleagues, including at least three Title IX allegations, in which he was accused of improper behavior with colleagues and female students.

Lowery, in an interview with CJR, acknowledged that three complaints had been filed but said that the university never reached out to him as part of an investigation. He insisted that he did nothing wrong and said that he left his job voluntarily to return to reporting and writing. The departure was announced to IRW’s staff on Tuesday by Marnel Niles Goins, the dean of American University’s School of Communication, who named Lynne Perri, who had been the managing editor at IRW from 2009 to 2024, as the interim executive editor. The dean did not elaborate on Lowery’s departure, except to say, “We appreciate his contributions in helping shape where IRW is today, and we wish him well.”

At any time, IRW employs between eight and fifteen students from the DC area in the fall and spring, and from other regions in the summer, partnering them with professional investigative reporters to pursue projects for publication. The workshop was cofounded in 2008 by Chuck Lewis, who created the Center for Public Integrity, which Lowery now chairs.

Sophia Lehrbaum, a senior at the University of Michigan, arrived at IRW in June 2024. She planned to work on a story about abortion denial in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, and sought out Lowery for advice about how to approach sources. She entered his office. The door was closed, she recalled, and he told her, “When you date somebody, you don’t just ask, ‘Do you wanna fuck?’ You build up to it.” He laughed. She, too, laughed, in shock. “I really revered him,” she told CJR. “He completely overstepped the limits of what is in bounds and what isn’t. It’s not even innuendo at that point, it’s just sexual harassment.”

Still, she tried to dismiss what happened. “There’s no way in hell,” she told herself, “that a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner just sexually harassed me.” But a few weeks later, after speaking with mentors, she filed a Title IX complaint. “I am a journalist myself, so I thought like a journalist,” she said. “I left a paper trail.” At the start of July, she spoke with the school’s Office of Equity and Title IX. “I was very clear that if action was not taken, he would continue to hurt students.” She became aware of others lodging complaints. “Because I’m a reporter who covers sexual harassment, I know that what Title IX looks for is a pattern.”

So Lehrbaum was dismayed when, in August, she received an email from Human Resources. “The Office of Equity and Title IX reviewed the reported conduct and determined that it did not fall within the scope of their office,” the message went. “The matter was referred to the Office of Human Resources for review to determine if the reported conduct violated other University policies.” After that, she heard nothing further about the complaint.

As her fellowship progressed, Lehrbaum felt uncomfortable in the office. At one point, she was offered an alternate workspace. “Which I found deeply offensive,” she said, “because it would not only isolate me from my peers, but it would rob me of my experience that I had worked so hard to get. This was not a solution, it was a consequence for me.” Eventually, she decided to leave town. “I was in constant fight-or-flight,” she said. “I went back to Ann Arbor and couch surfed.” She heard from Lowery in mid-August, about a story she’d been reporting. She didn’t hear from him again until October, when he wrote to her about getting it published. She decided not to respond. “I didn’t want to work with him anymore,” she said. “I ghosted him.”

In the interview, Lowery, who is thirty-four, said that, to students, he typically likened the trust-building that occurs in a reporter-source encounter to the rapport that someone on a date might attempt to establish: you start with easy questions, then work to build trust to elicit answers to harder questions. When Lehrbaum entered his office, he said, she shut the door, and he had that in mind. “I don’t recall using the language she attributes to me,” he said. “I was making a direct reference to something I had already said to a class.” He continued: “My intention was not to offend her, much less to sexually harass her, and I wish this had been raised to me directly so that I could have apologized and been more thoughtful about my interactions. This was something I was unaware of that upset her until after she had departed. I run my mouth—anyone who has worked with me knows that. That is who I am. This was not gratuitous. It was not physical.”

Another student, Maya Cederlund, a senior at American University, said that in January, she was in the office and had gotten off the phone with an expert in gun violence prevention, who had also experienced gun violence. She said that she told Lowery of her concern about retraumatizing victims of violence. According to Cederlund, Lowery replied, “Not to use sex as a reference, but when you’re having sex with someone you’re asking, ‘Can I do this, can I do that, is this okay?’” 

Lowery said the quote was taken out of context, and was part of a longer conversation in which he tried to explain that reporters should respect the right of sources—even those who have experienced trauma—to decide what they want to share. It’s paternalistic, he said, to make that choice for someone by not even asking. “I literally said, ‘You’ve probably only heard the term affirmative consent in the sexual context,’” he said.

Cederlund at first left the encounter thinking it was simply weird. “I genuinely didn’t think anything of it—I brushed it off and went about my day,” she said. “I thought it was an isolated incident.” It was only after talking with Lehrbaum, Cederlund said, that she decided to raise her concerns with Perri, who then filed a complaint on February 18 as a mandated reporter of suspected misconduct under Title IX. “He of all people knows how powerful words are, and how careful and intentional you have to be with your words,” Cederlund told CJR. “In no way, shape, or form should you ever be talking about sex in a professional environment.”

Lowery said he did not regret the advice he gave to Cederlund. “I’m not everyone’s cup of tea,” he said. “But I am pretty good at journalism. That was advice given in good faith.”

Cara Kelly—a journalist who has worked at the Washington Post and USA Today, and who teaches journalism at American University—worked as an editor at large at IRW from the summer of 2023 until August of last year. She began on a part-time basis around the time of Lowery’s hiring; he made her a full-time employee. She said that she experienced hostile and abusive behavior from him, and that she became aware of Title IX allegations, which she was obliged to report to the school. “I filed multiple complaints with the university over a course of months—until I decided that I could not, for my health, stay there any longer,” Kelly told CJR. “I was unable to do my job because I could not in good faith work with or recruit partners or sources, because I did not think it was a healthy environment for anyone.”

Kelly filed her first complaint in February 2024 and resigned about six months later. There was some work done on a hostile-work-environment complaint, she said, but she never got details or heard anything about the investigation’s conclusion. “The response from the university left a lot to be desired,” she said. “I warned the university—in writing, in meetings, in formal complaints—that they had a major problem on their hands, that there was an abuse of power happening and that it would get worse if they did not take action about it. And they did not take action until this week.”

Perri, who left IRW about a year ago and has now come back, said that she was aware of at least three Title IX complaints against Lowery but was not told how they were adjudicated. “I was really hopeful when we hired Wesley, and I am so sad it didn’t work out,” she said. “My goal now is to create a positive experience for the students, and to look for a new leader, an equally accomplished and important figure, who will be someone whom they can look up to.”

When asked about the Title IX complaints, Matthew D. Bennett, the vice president and chief communications officer at American University, confirmed that Lowery was no longer working there. “That is all the information I have,” he said, later adding that Lowery had resigned voluntarily. As of Wednesday, the university had not only removed Lowery from its website but also removed the announcement of his appointment, from June 2023.

In recent weeks, problems at the IRW have mounted. On February 24, Lowery told journalists who had been selected for IRW’s spring fellowship that the workshop had failed to secure professional partners to publish their work, “so, for now, unfortunately,” he wrote to them in an email shared with CJR, “I think you all should plan on not working with the IRW this semester.” (Lowery said that email was sent to a handful of members of a proposed expanded cohort, while a larger group of fellows continues to work this spring.)

Lowery told CJR, “I don’t have full insight into this, but my understanding is there were three different complaints filed at various points, and when a complaint is filed, the Title IX office reviews it and decides if they are worthy of an investigation.” He added: “Zero out of these three complaints met that threshold. But I certainly regret if any comment I ever made during editing, or anything else, made anyone feel uncomfortable.

“After two years, I’m excited to get back to working on my craft,” he said. “I was never positive this was the correct fit, and I’m happy to move on. I will always enjoy working with young journalists, and as a young journalist myself, I know there is always a balance, an ever-moving negotiation, about how to engage folks. By design, the ways I speak, the ways I edit, much more mirror a professional newsroom than an academic classroom, and I understand that can be jarring at times.”

Lowery, an Ohio University graduate who had stints at the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe, came to national prominence as a reporter for the Washington Post, for which he covered the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, that followed the killing of an unarmed Black teenager by a police officer. He was a lead reporter on a data project and series that examined deadly shootings of civilians by police officers. The project won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. The same year, Lowery wrote his first book, “They Can’t Kill Us All”: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement.

As Lowery’s profile rose, he began to clash with Martin Baron, the Post’s editor from 2012 to 2021. Baron wrote about their dispute in his memoir Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post (2023). Lowery left the Post in 2020, during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. A few months later, following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Lowery published an influential op-ed in the New York Times, arguing that the traditional journalistic ideal of objectivity was inadequate for the moment and should be replaced by “moral clarity, which will require both editors and reporters to stop doing things like reflexively hiding behind euphemisms that obfuscate the truth, simply because we’ve always done it that way.” The column stirred debate in journalism circles. He later expanded on his views for CJR.

Lowery is deeply involved in the world of nonprofit journalism. He is a cochair of the Center for Public Integrity, based in Washington, and the chair of the Prison Journalism Project, in Chicago.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated.

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