Stanford alum details affair with ‘celebrity’ dean, who is now Palo Alto City Council member

Before Julie Lythcott-Haims became a best-selling author, a coveted speaker and a member of the Palo Alto City Council, she had spent more than a decade at Stanford University as a dean of freshmen and associate vice provost, experiences that she occasionally recalls in her memoirs and lectures.

Her writings do not dwell on the circumstances of her departure from Stanford University. This week, however, a former Stanford University student published an essay that describes her prolonged affair with her college dean — a “school celebrity” who she said left Stanford shortly after her parents learned about the affair and anonymously complained to the university.

The writer, Olivia Swanson Haas, does not name Lythcott-Haims in her essay, which was published on the website Autostraddle and which is titled, “I had an Affair with my College Dean.” But the details of the affair, which took place more than a decade ago, left little doubt about the identity of the former dean. Haas described the dean as someone who completed her MFA after leaving Stanford and then published a book that became a New York Times bestseller.

When asked about the essay by this publication, Lythcott-Haims acknowledged that the story is about her and called her actions from that time “inappropriate.”

Haas, who graduated from Stanford University in 2011, described her relationship with the dean as a close friendship that turned physically intimate. It began when she was a 22-year-old senior and “the kind of young person who craved attention from powerful people.” When the relationship turned physically intimate, Haas wrote that she was “convinced I was in love and so I lived a double life.”

“It was a lot for a young person, especially in this particular collegiate environment —going through the pomp and circumstance of senior year, meanwhile secretly sleeping with one of the most public figures on campus,” wrote Haas, who did not respond to an inquiry from this publication.

Haas wrote that she and the dean first slept together in a rustic cabin hours south of campus. They also enjoyed getaways at a luxury hotel near the campus and a motel two miles away, she wrote. Haas had aspired at the time to be an actress and she described the dean’s attention as “like a special spotlight.”

“We told ourselves she was teaching me how to love myself, how to act on my desires,” Haas wrote. “This is what love looks like, we said, and I became adept at anticipating her desires — which I fulfilled, eagerly. She was my audience; I was her secret star.”

The affair continued after Haas graduated and moved to New York City. She continued to receive letters and poems from the dean about how much she missed her. As she juggled side gigs in Manhattan, “the potency of her desire fed my hunger to believe I was special,” Haas wrote.

“In the absence of my self-love, her attention reassured me that anxiety and financial stress were just the backstory of my character’s future triumph,” Haas wrote.

At one point, the dean flew to visit her and brought her a bouquet of irises before they traveled to a cottage upstate for the weekend. The cottage, she wrote, was “the kind of dreamy place I had only ever seen in movies.”

Haas, who had a boyfriend at the time, ultimately decided to confess her affair to him and to break off the relationship, according to the essay. She then moved back to California and told her parents about the affair. 

“They were horrified,” Haas wrote. “Suddenly words like manipulated and abuse of power were being used and shame started to calcify in the parts of me that had desired her — tremendous embarrassment — as I began to see my great love story through a very different lens. I had felt like such an adult, living this beautiful, sexy adventure of intimacy and growth, swirling in a soft glow. But I told my parents and in an instant it was now closing time at a grimy bar — blinding fluorescent lights revealing makeup caked on cheeks sweaty from too many cheap shots.”

Stanford University declined to comment on the circumstances of Lythcott-Haims’ departure or on any other aspects of the story. When asked about the university’s policy on relationships between deans and students, Luisa Rapport, the university’s director of media relations, said in an email that Stanford’s policy “prohibits consensual relationships between undergraduates and faculty or certain staff roles, including deans, coaches, advisers and others.”

The university’s current policy, which was adopted in 2013, states that because of the “relative youth of undergraduates and their particular vulnerability in such relationships, sexual or romantic relationships between teachers and undergraduate students are prohibited — regardless of current or future academic or supervisory responsibilities for that student.”

“Because of the potential for conflict of interest, exploitation, favoritism and bias, such relationships may undermine the real or perceived integrity of the supervision and evaluation provided,” the policy states. “Further, these relationships are often less consensual than the individual whose position confers power or authority believes. In addition, circumstances may change, and conduct that was previously welcome may become unwelcome. Even when both parties have consented at the outset to a sexual or romantic involvement, this past consent does not remove grounds for a charge based upon subsequent unwelcome conduct.”

The prohibition on romantic relationships between professors and students also applies to deans, coaches and other senior administrators, who according to the university “have broad influence on or authority over students and their experience at Stanford.”

“For this reason, sexual or romantic relationships between such staff members and undergraduate students are prohibited,” the policy states. “Similarly, relationships between staff members and other students over whom the staff member has had or is likely in the future to have such influence or authority are prohibited.”

Haas wrote in her story that a few weeks after she told her parents about the affair, her mom told her that she had anonymously informed the university about the dean’s actions.

“As a result, the dean would be leaving,” Haas wrote. “This was profoundly upsetting because I felt, at the time, that I had ruined her life — that I was entirely responsible. Stuck in the liminal space of regret, I returned again and again to my memories with her, haunted by my own choices, still reeling from attachment withdrawals.”

Haas wrote that over the coming months, she watched Stanford officials and her peers celebrate the dean’s “commitment to authenticity and commend her bravery for pursuing this calling.”

“Meanwhile, I was drowning from the distress of ending the relationship and my own inability to launch a creative life as I hydroplaned across heartbreak and a newfound anger,” she wrote.

In communications with this publication, Lythcott-Haims did not dispute any of the details in Haas’ account, including her allegation that Lythcott-Haims left Stanford because of the anonymous complaint about the affair. She told this publication that she had departed Stanford voluntarily but declined to say whether the relationship played a role in her decision to leave the university.

In the years since the relationship ended, Haas described her shift in how she viewed the relationship. With the cultural conversation about consent shifting, she wrote that she didn’t see herself in the “clear-cut wrongness of the stories that made headlines.”

“Yes, she should have known better,” she wrote. “And yet, I had agency. She showed poor judgment. And I made poor choices. She misused her power. She made me feel beautiful. For years, I thrashed between the simplicity of right and wrong, lost in paradox, needing to cast a villain. How do you reconcile a story that exists in the gray space between love and abuse? She has done much good for many people. She did something inappropriate with me. I eagerly sought her affection. I was very young.”

She wrote that a few years ago, the dean emailed to ask for forgiveness and tell her that she’s been ashamed of her conduct.

“I shouldn’t have been in a romantic relationship with you. I shouldn’t have done any of that given my position and I am deeply sorry,” the email stated, according to Haas.

Haas wrote that she and the dean got in touch after the email and had, until recently, lived within a few miles of each other. According to her story, the dean told her that she supports her telling the story of the affair “because she knows it’s quite a thing, what happened.”

“I am sorry, too. For all the ways I have abused myself. For hurting her. I do not wish her harm,” Haas wrote.

Lythcott-Haims said in a statement to this publication that Haas’ memories and feelings about her experience in the relationship are valid.

“We’d been writing and recording music together and got to a point where we expressed love for each other. That is where it should have ended. I should not have taken it further,” Lythcott-Haims said in a statement. “While I was not in a position of authority over her grades or academic status at the university, being in a relationship with a student was inappropriate when it happened 13 years ago, and it would be inappropriate now.

“A year after the relationship started, it ended. I resigned from my position. I focused on learning  from my mistakes and doing the work necessary to repair where repair was possible,” she continued.

“I apologized privately to Ms. Haas years ago. Now I want to publicly apologize to her for my actions and their impact on her. I also apologize to my former colleagues and students who had the right to expect better of me. And to members of my extended family for whom the public airing of this matter may be difficult. 

I am grateful for the support of my amazing partner and our adult children, and for the grace that has been shown to me along the way.”