As the principal oboe for the New York Philharmonic, Liang Wang held one of the most prestigious posts in American orchestral music. Until he was fired last fall, he apparently earned more than twice the base pay of his colleagues, he was a member of the faculty at the Manhattan School of Music and NYU, and he gave master classes at Juilliard and the Curtis Institute of Music. According to newly released documents in a lawsuit Wang has filed against the Philharmonic alleging he was wrongfully dismissed, he also faced at least 11 allegations of sexual misconduct, ranging from, in the words of a report commissioned by the Philharmonic, “inappropriate comments and unsolicited invitations, to sexual advances, to unwelcome kisses, to sexual assault and rape.” Wang has denied all of the allegations and the lawsuit is still ongoing.
That report and another one concerning Matthew Muckey, a trumpet player for the Philharmonic, were written by Tracey Levy, an attorney specializing in employment law, who was hired to conduct an investigation after an article I wrote for New York Magazine in April 2024, “A Hidden Sexual-Assault Scandal at the New York Philharmonic,” led to a public outcry. The article detailed accusations of sexual assault that Cara Kizer, a French-horn player, made against Muckey in 2010 and the circumstances surrounding Kizer’s departure from the orchestra shortly afterward. Gary Ginstling, who was the orchestra’s president when the article was published, called the allegations in it “horrifying to me personally” and added that he was “deeply concerned about not only the specifics but broader issues of institutional culture.”
The orchestra suspended Muckey and Wang, and Levy was asked to investigate all allegations of inappropriate conduct against current musicians at the Philharmonic. According to her report, Levy interviewed Muckey and Wang and 67 of their fellow musicians as well as 23 other individuals, including several who reached out to Levy with new information after hearing about the investigation.
In November, Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s executive adviser, announced that Levy’s investigation had uncovered new allegations against Wang and Muckey, but she provided few details. The orchestra moved to dismiss both men through a clause in their contracts that provided for “non-reengagement” even though they have tenure. It was such an unusual move that Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, which represents the orchestra’s players, asked the Philharmonic to confirm that it would not use this process to get around tenure protections in the future, according to separate lawsuits filed by Muckey and Wang against the Philharmonic and Local 802 in the Southern District of New York.
In their suits, Muckey and Wang ask the court to reverse their suspensions and stop the effort to dismiss them. Wang’s attorney called Levy’s investigation “a fig leaf to mask the Philharmonic’s predetermined termination decision” to “placate the mob that was clamoring for Wang and Muckey’s heads.” (Separately, Wang sued me and New York in May 2024 for defamation. In January, a judge threw out the lawsuit.)
Now, because of court filings by the Philharmonic in the SDNY lawsuits, the public can see the reports Levy wrote and the evidence gathered there. The reports, which the orchestra’s lawyers added as separate exhibits to motions to dismiss the two lawsuits, enumerate multiple allegations of misconduct against both men, inside and outside the orchestra: the 11 faced by Wang and three claims of misconduct against Muckey, including Kizer’s.
Muckey, Levy concluded, demonstrated “a repeated failure to recognize when sexual partners lacked capacity or withdrew consent to sex.” In the report on Wang, she wrote that he “has engaged in a persistent pattern of sexual harassment toward women, ranging from offensive comments to rape and a range of abusive behaviors in between those extremes.” The earliest complaint, against Wang, dated back to 2006. Ginstling’s concerns about the culture of the Philharmonic seemed warranted. (A spokesman for the Philharmonic and for Local 802 declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.)
In a statement, Alan S. Lewis, Wang’s attorney, wrote, “Many of the flaws in Levy’s process — like her exclusion of evidence exonerating her two targets and disregard of every allegation heard about any other member of management or the orchestra — are readily apparent.” Lewis declined to “litigate issues surrounding that subject in the media” but said that “Mr. Wang is a victim of the Philharmonic’s cowardice.”
Muckey’s attorney, Steven Hyman, told New York that the Philharmonic and the union “have chosen to flatly ignore” evidence that refuted Levy’s conclusions. “We fully expect, as set forth in our court documents, that Mr. Muckey will be rightfully restored to his position in the orchestra,” Hyman wrote.
Earlier this month, I spoke with one of the women interviewed for Levy’s report, where she is referred to as LW Complainant 10. She told Levy about an incident at the summer music program at Bowdoin in which, at a gathering in the dorms, Wang allegedly “kept asking to kiss her and when she eventually offered her cheek, Mr. Wang grabbed her face and kissed her on the mouth.” (She requested to maintain anonymity, saying she feared retaliation.) Levy’s report includes similar stories of alleged forcible kissing involving three other women, all of which Wang denies.
LW Complainant 10 questioned why the orchestra took so long to talk with her. “Of course I would have tried to reach out in 2018 had anyone made any sort of effort,” she said. She told me that she was angered, but not surprised, to learn of the many allegations that have surfaced. “All the allegations point to a huge power imbalance,” she told me, part of what she says as a “much bigger cycle of abuse of power” at the Philharmonic.
Wang has argued in court that Levy exhibited bias in her investigation when she “appeared to automatically credit the stories told to her by female interviewees while either discounting or dismissing entirely Wang’s statements” and “characterizing normal, if sometimes awkward, human dating interactions in nefarious terms.”
One of the women who spoke to Levy was a former student of Wang’s. While she was studying under Wang, “he kept her under his control,” in the words of the report. One night in the fall of 2010, she said, Wang offered to cook her dinner. He served her port wine and salmon, and she “passed out before finishing even one glass.” She woke up naked in Wang’s bed, with him next to her and her black tights lying near her. The report said that the next morning she went to a walk-in clinic to be tested for a sexually transmitted infection: “She wanted to learn from the clinic if she and Mr. Wang had sex,” Levy wrote, “but she did not tell the clinic she thought she had been raped.”
After the alleged incident, according to Levy’s report, Wang called the woman repeatedly but she did not answer. He also tried to find her at her home. “He came almost daily to see her in front of her house and tried to explain,” Levy wrote. Wang apologized to her and said that he could not help himself. The woman said that “she was so traumatized by what had occurred that she just lay on her bed and did not go out for a month.” She told a friend at the time and a former teacher two years later about what happened, and both corroborated the consistency of her account, according to Levy. Her confession to her friend happened at a Chinese restaurant: “She was hysterical, crying, and loudly said ‘Liang raped me.’”
Wang admitted to Levy that he’d had a sexual relationship with the former student, but he said that it had been consensual and had begun some three years after she’d graduated. Levy concluded that she found the woman “credible in her account of Mr. Wang having raped and most likely drugged her.”
The allegation of being rapidly incapacitated by a glass of wine has an echo in another incident Levy included in her report, an accusation of rape and drugging made against Wang in 2006. The Philharmonic had investigated this incident in 2018 along with Kizer’s allegations of sexual assault against Muckey and fired both men, but an arbitration action contesting their termination brought by Local 802 got them both reinstated 18 months later.
Levy did not interview the woman involved in the alleged 2006 incident but spoke with two orchestra members who “each recounted to me that Arbitration Witness 1 had confided in them that she had been drugged and raped by Mr. Wang.” Levy also quotes from the woman’s arbitration testimony in the 2018 matter. “It was the same routine of me asking him not to do it, to stop, and tell him to behave,” the woman said, but “he wasn’t hearing anything I would say.” The arbitrator “questioned Arbitration Witness 1’s claim of nonconsensual relations because she and Mr. Wang continued to stay in contact and engaged in sexual activity several times thereafter.” Levy disagreed with the arbitrator and found it more likely than not that Wang had engaged in the behavior she described.
“I find that Mr. Wang has engaged in a pattern of abusing his power that persists to the present,” Levy wrote. “At its most extreme, I find this likely has involved rape and sexual assault, and it has also included less severe forms of sexual harassment.” These included brief incidents at the Philharmonic, such as reports of Wang calling a woman “so ugly” and “vicious” and a conversation in which Wang allegedly predicted a musician who “got #MeToo’d” would “bounce back.” (“Look at me,” Wang reportedly commented.)
According to Levy’s report, Wang was also accused of making sexual advances toward another student, referred to as LW Complainant 7, who was attending the summer music program at Bowdoin, where Wang was a visiting artist. The student reported that Wang cornered her at a party, trapping her against a wall, and asking if she would dance for him and “show some skin.”
The list of alleged incidents of sexual harassment in the report stretches on for many pages. Wang apparently denied them all in the course of the investigation, but Levy did not find his denials credible. In one instance, she describes an allegation made by a 21- or 22-year-old oboe student at the University of Redlands, where he was a guest artist. The student said that she spoke to him about her career ambitions. He asked for her phone number and “texted her later that day and invited her to his hotel room, which she declined.” Wang initially denied being at the university at all, Levy wrote, but “in our second meeting, he provided photos of himself posing with students there.” Eventually Wang “acknowledged he spent several days in Redlands, being escorted by his former teacher.” He denied making inappropriate advances toward the student, and in a court filing, Wang’s attorney wrote that, “Levy thwarted Wang’s attempts to present his side of the story.”
In her report, Levy wrote about her methods for investigating claims against both men. In addition to interviews with witnesses and victims, she reviewed the evidence gathered by the arbitrator after their first dismissal as well as emails, text messages, Facebook messages, and photographs. In Muckey’s case, she also reviewed the report prepared by the Vail police department in 2010, after Kizer accused him of sexual assault. Muckey’s attorneys have argued that the sex with Kizer was consensual and that Levy’s report about their client represents “a false narrative of sexual misconduct arrived at it in an irregular and intentionally manipulated process.”
In addition to Kizer’s assault claims, Levy’s report includes a discussion of two more instances, both from 2008, in which he was accused of having sex with a woman without her consent. One of these incidents involved a college student who met Muckey shortly after he joined the Philharmonic as a tenured trumpet player. The woman, known as Complainant 3 in Levy’s report, said Muckey invited her to a party in Washington Heights where several members of the orchestra had gathered. Muckey and another musician encouraged her to drink, at one point ladling alcohol over an ice luge.
Of Muckey and the ice luge, the investigator wrote, “Mr. Muckey also told me in our first meeting that he never served drinks to anyone, and then in our second meeting he shared a picture of him ladling alcohol into the ice luge to serve to a sub with the Philharmonic. Mr. Muckey said he had no independent recollection of anyone drinking at the party, yet he acknowledged there were other photos from the party that he had not shared with me including perhaps one of him on the receiving end of the ice luge.”
Complainant 3 “recounted vague memories of later that night, which included kissing Mr. Muckey at some point, waking up in his bed, and then getting back to her dorm.” She did not remember having sex with Muckey but when she “showered in her dorm, she realized her vagina was sore.” She told Levy she “did not realize the inappropriateness of her interactions with Mr. Muckey until she was much older” but that she now believed Muckey took advantage of her.
“Curiously,” Levy wrote in her report, “in my first meeting with Mr. Muckey, when I began generally asking if he recalled inviting a female student to a party in Washington Heights, Mr. Muckey replied that he ‘did not invite an 18-year-old’ even though I had not mentioned anyone’s age.” Muckey claimed he engaged in consensual sex with the woman, initially denying that either of them had been intoxicated. His attorneys also pointed to Facebook messages he received from the woman in which she wrote, “i know you’ll want to say that i consented, which i did.”
Levy did not find those messages exculpatory. “I credit Mr. Muckey’s account that he and Complainant 3 had sex at his apartment after the party and she may even have seemed like a willing participant, but contrary to Mr. Muckey’s assertion I find it more likely than not that Complainant 3 lacked the capacity to consent to that interaction” because she was intoxicated, Levy wrote.
Levy’s report includes details about the other 2008 incident involving Muckey, which was previously examined in the 2018 investigation and subsequent arbitration, which she cites. Levy wrote that a woman reported to the orchestra that she and Muckey had engaged in consensual foreplay but Muckey did not stop after she told him “it hurts” and “no.” The woman “testified that she attempted to close her legs and pushed Mr. Muckey off her a little.” The arbitrator questioned whether Muckey knew of the woman’s “desire to stop and concluded that there was not clear and convincing evidence that the sex was not consensual.” Levy wrote that this allegation, along with Kizer’s and Complainant 3’s allegations, suggested that Muckey “could be physically forward with women to a degree that presumed consent without considering power disparities, capacity, or more subtle indicators to the contrary.”
According to numerous musicians, Levy wrote, “new women who join the Philharmonic are warned to be careful around him.” Levy also noted, however, that the complaints about Muckey’s behavior related to his early years with the Philharmonic, when multiple members of the orchestra described him as immature and irresponsible. She did not find that there have been any reports of “offensive conduct by Mr. Muckey, of any sort, that occurred in the past decade.”
After Kizer reported her assault to the Vail police department, she felt that the Philharmonic turned against her, and in 2012, she was denied tenure. Levy’s report contains new information about the extent of Wang’s alleged involvement in that decision. One of Wang’s former students told Levy that she witnessed Wang call “powerful people” — including Phil Myers, the principal horn player for the Philharmonic — because he felt Kizer’s continued presence in the orchestra “was not safe for him.” According to the report, the student heard him making more than one of these calls, saying that Kizer was lying and that the situation was “shameful” for the orchestra.
Levy also wrote that two orchestra members said that Wang had prompted Myers to change his mind about supporting Kizer for tenure. “I therefore find it more likely than not that Mr. Wang retaliated against Ms. Kizer by seeking to have her removed from the Orchestra,” Levy concluded.
For Kizer, the report’s findings on her tenure application offered little solace. “What good does it do me, or anyone, to finally know that they fucked up my process?” she told me recently. Since being denied tenure, she left New York and has struggled to find a tenured position elsewhere. “My whole career was derailed by that,” she said, “and they didn’t care and they didn’t bother to look into it.”
Kizer, however, felt grateful that Levy’s investigation, and the New York article that prompted it, allowed more women to come forward. “I feel lucky to have told my story,” she said. “It gave these women a window to open up.”
Beyond the individual accusations leveled against Wang and Muckey, Levy’s investigation suggests that sexism and misogyny continue to plague the upper ranks of classical music, one that would allow many of these allegations to go unaddressed for years. After Kizer’s allegations came to light last April, the president of Local 802 pledged to “erase the culture of complicity that has raged at the N.Y. Philharmonic for too long.” Today, with a new music director — and, thanks to the dramatic consequences of the past year of allegations and inquiries, a new president — the Philharmonic has the opportunity to address these problems head-on.
In an interview last week, Erik Ralske, the principal horn in the Metropolitan Opera and a former musician in the Philharmonic, spoke of the continued need for change. “This situation still hasn’t been resolved, really, and I’m sure that there have been many changes inside the organization to try to improve it but there are so many more that need to happen,” Ralske said. “It should never have happened in the first place and it should never, ever happen again.”
