Wow. I just finished reading the new article in New York Magazine detailing the sex life and scandal of Harvard Law School professor Bruce Hay, and to say my mouth is agape is an understatement.
The article details Hay’s interactions with two women, Maria-Pia Shuman and Mischa Haider, which began when Shuman picked Hay up in a hardware store in 2015. What may have seemed like a standard start to a relationship — though it should be noted at the time Hay met Shuman he was living with his ex-wife Jennifer Zacks and co-parenting their children — over a four year period it devolved:
Over the next four years, the law professor would be drawn into a “campaign of fraud, extortion, and false accusations,” as one of his lawyers would later say in legal proceedings. At one point, Hay’s family would be left suddenly homeless. At another, owing to what his lawyer has described as the “weaponiz[ation] of the university’s Title IX machinery against Hay,” he would find himself indefinitely suspended from his job. He would accrue over $300,000 in legal bills with no end to the litigation in sight. “Maria-Pia and Mischa want money,” Hay told me last summer, “but only for the sake of squeezing it out of people — it’s the exertion of power.”
The article also contains a lot of details, maybe even some you don’t want, about Hay’s sex life. He says he had sex with Shuman twice, and though he didn’t ejaculate, found himself in a paternity situation:
Six weeks after they broke off contact, Shuman called Hay to tell him she was pregnant with his baby. She hadn’t had sex with another man in the past year, she said. Hay was stunned; he hadn’t ejaculated during either of their encounters, a side effect of his medication. But he understood that pregnancy was possible, if rare, without orgasm.
Soon after Hay was told he was the father of Shuman’s unborn baby, he learned she was moving to Cambridge and living with Haider, a trans woman Shuman called her “soul sister.” When Hay met Haider he says he had “a protective feeling for her” and, among other things helped Haider, who was a physics graduate student at Harvard, with her writing. Though Hay says the relationship with Haider wasn’t sexual, it was increasingly close:
Hay believed he’d identified a kindred spirit in Haider, so he was sensitive to her emotional state. They confided in each other about their depression and suicidal thoughts. Hay had been molested as a teenager, and he told Haider about the experience and the lingering trauma from it. Hay also struggled with drinking. He insists his friendship with Haider was more familial than romantic: “It wasn’t uncommon for us to say ‘I love you’ in texts. I just offered Mischa as much support as I could.”
The story gets even more convoluted from there, so I’m just going to hit the high (low?) lights. He says Shuman wouldn’t put him on the baby’s birth certificate because he was still in a relationship with Zacks. When Zacks eventually found out about the women and blocked their number, Hay says they came to the house he shares with Zacks and police had to be called. Hay even says Shuman and Haider orchestrated a complex scheme where they moved his family’s stuff out of their house, created fake lease documents, and moved into the house themselves. Then there was the time Hay says they hit his car with a Zipcar they rented. In May of 2018, after threatening to do so for a while, Haider filed a formal Title IX complaint against Hay with the university. (Hay is not currently teaching at Harvard while the Title IX investigation is ongoing.)
Hay has hired attorney Douglas Brooks to help disentangle him from this mess. As it turns out, Brooks has another client “Richard Roe” who Shuman said was the father of her son — the same son Hay believed he was the father of — which led them to more men, “John Poe” and “John Doe,” who have similar stories to tell.
With the university’s Title IX investigation ongoing, both sides have filed lawsuits:
Both sides have now filed suit against each other. In their complaint against him, Shuman and Haider claim he sexually assaulted Shuman and groped Haider and ejaculated on her while she slept, all of which he denies. After Hay filed his suit against them for the years of harassment, he finally asked for a paternity test. So far, they’ve refused. He hasn’t seen the baby since 2017, when the child was a year and a half old.
The women didn’t speak to New York for the story but denied most of Hay’s story saying it’s “a fantastical tale that conjures stereotypes and nativist tropes to exact revenge against Mischa Haider for filing a Title IX complaint against him.”
We may never know exactly what happened between Hay and Shuman and Haider. But, as even he acknowledges, it may be “ridiculous” for him to continue teaching the Harvard Law class on “Judgment and Decision-Making.”
The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge [The Cut]
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).