Her lawyers soon widened the suit to include two other male principal dancers, a male donor to City Ballet, and the School of American Ballet.
The case was both distressing and riveting in many ways, strongly suggesting that City Ballet had allowed a pattern whereby heterosexual men were condoned or encouraged in mistreating women.
Some errors and problems in the suit, however, were immediately apparent, while others were confusingly stated. The male donor was misidentified as a board member; it was unclear which men were part of which chains of texts and photo-sharings. There are ramifications to these claims and complaints that we will never solve or understand.
For one thing, some of the misogynistically heterosexual climate ascribed to City Ballet was associated with its already departed ballet-master-in-chief Peter Martins but, when he departed, the company issued no new rules of sexual ethics to tell its straight men to start improving their behaviour to the opposite sex. For another, the United States then had, as President, a man who had been nationally elected to his post after recommending that women should be grabbed by the pussy.
In a nation that condoned such an attitude to women from its president, how much should some badly-behaved male ballet dancers be punished for texts that were further examples of the same locker-room lewdness? The whole situation was deeply confusing and disturbing. She herself seems not to have known the difference. Ballet is often seen as the glorification of women - but, wherever it stands now, it condoned and encouraged the sexual trafficking of women for most of its history: a factor to which no history of ballet has given enough attention.
