The scandal got here to light on Wednesday when student Olivia Swanson Haas posted a protracted Essay entitled “I had an affair with my college dean” on the web site Autostraddle, as first reported from the Palo Alto Weekly. Haas didn’t mention Lythcott-Haims by name within the essay, as a substitute referring to her as a “school celebrity.”
“Recently, Olivia Haas published an article describing her relationship with her college dean,” Lythcott-Haims wrote in a post on her website on Friday. “I was that dean.”
The essay describes intimately Haas's years-long secret affair with the dean and its lasting effects on her.
“For years I vacillated between the simplicity of right and wrong, lost in paradox, and the need to cast a villain,” Haas wrote. “How do you reconcile a story that exists in the gray area between love and abuse? She did a lot of good to a lot of people. She did something inappropriate to me. I eagerly sought her affection. I was very young.”
Haas' memories and feelings concerning the relationship are valid, Lythcott-Haims said.
“We were writing and recording music together and got to a point where we expressed our love for each other,” Lythcott-Haims wrote within the post. “That's where it should have ended. I shouldn't have taken it any further.”
Lythcott-Haims had no “position of authority” over Haas' grades or academic status, but “having a relationship with a student was inappropriate 13 years ago and would be inappropriate today,” she wrote within the post.
In the essay, Haas describes how she ended the affair, moved back home, and welcomed her parents into the community.
“They were horrified,” she wrote. “Suddenly words like manipulated and abuse of power were being used, and in the parts of me that had desired them, shame began to form – tremendous embarrassment – as I began to see my great love story through a very different lens.”
“What happened was shocking. I had been manipulated,” she wrote.
Haas' mother filed an anonymous criticism with the university, and a month later Lythcott-Haims announced she desired to resign and pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree.
Since retiring in 2012, Lythcott-Haims has written books, including the New York Times bestseller “How to Raise an Adult,” and now serves on the Palo Alto City Council. She recently ran to succeed U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, but finished at the underside of the pack.
Lythcott-Haims said she apologized privately to Haas years ago.
“Now I want to publicly apologize to her for my actions and their impact on her,” she wrote within the post.
“I also apologize to my former colleagues and students who had the right to expect more from me,” she added. “And to members of my extended family for whom the public broadcast of this matter may be difficult.”
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