In a ruling on one of the art world’s notable #MeToo lawsuits, a court found that Artforum magazine can be held responsible for retaliation against a former employee — but that Knight Landesman, the influential former publisher whom the employee accused of sexual harassment, legally remains in the clear.
Amanda Schmitt, who started at Artforum in 2009 when she was 21, filed a complaint in late 2017. Mr. Landesman — accused in the lawsuit of groping, attempting to kiss, sending lewd messages to, or otherwise harassing at least nine women in incidents stretching back a decade — resigned hours later. The other women were not named as plaintiffs.
Early last year, the lawsuit was dismissed. Last week, in a ruling first reported by Artnet News, a New York appeals court affirmed the dismissal of the retaliation claim against Mr. Landesman but ruled that Ms. Schmitt should be allowed to try to prove her claim against Artforum. (Lawyers for Artforum and Mr. Landesman declined to comment on Thursday.)
Rather than suing for workplace sexual misconduct, for which the statute of limitations had run out, Ms. Schmitt filed a suit accusing Mr. Landesman of retaliating against her. Mr. Landesman cornered her at a restaurant in May 2017 and demanded an explanation for having been “unfairly accused,” she said. Too much time, however, had passed between her employment at Artforum — Ms. Schmitt left the magazine in 2012 — and the confrontation for it to qualify as retaliation, the lower court judge ruled in January 2019.
The explicit messages from Mr. Landesman continued after Ms. Schmitt left the magazine, and she said in the suit that she brought her concerns to two of Artforum’s other co-publishers in June 2016. Ms. Schmitt, who still works in the art world, asserted in the lawsuit that after that meeting, the magazine began excluding her from its events — which she said were essential for business development and meeting others in the industry.
A year later, when Ms. Schmitt began taking legal action, the magazine denied her allegations in a staff meeting and told employees that she was trying to “take down Artforum.”
The magazine’s “verbal and written disparagement” of Ms. Schmitt, the court decided last week, along with “allegations that Artforum sought to effectively freeze her out of the close-knit business,” are still pertinent, even though the complaint against Mr. Landesman was dismissed.
Mr. Landesman had been a powerful mainstay in the art industry, and the allegations against him in 2017 represented a shift in the #MeToo reckoning. After he stepped down from Artforum, hundreds of artists, writers, curators and directors signed an open letter condemning him and vowing to address sexual misconduct in the art world.
Ms. Schmitt’s lawyer, Emily Reisbaum, said in a statement that the appeals court’s decision holds the magazine “accountable for its efforts to undermine her professionally after she sounded the alarm about Knight Landesman’s years of abuse.”
She added, “There is now no doubt, as Schmitt has been saying all along, that Artforum not only permitted Landesman’s abuse to pervade its workplace and prestigious events, but it also punished Schmitt — not Landesman — for speaking the truth about his perversity.”
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January 03, 2020 at 03:27AM
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Suit Against Artforum Can Proceed, but Not Claims Naming Publisher - The New York Times
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