Wall Street’s sacked music director: I am bankrupt
NewsJulian Wachner, fired this week as director of music at Trinity Wall Street. has posted his version of the events that led – unfairly, in his view – to his dismissal.
The consequences, he says, have been devastating:
… Emily then looked at me and said, “I love you so much, and I love our family. You are an excellent husband and an amazing father – you know we are going to lose everything, and your career is over because it’s 2022.”
And that is exactly what has happened: we are going to need to file for bankruptcy, we’ve put the house on the market, and are planning to move in with Emily’s parents in Indiana. Thank you to my mother-in-law for paying for our lawyer, we couldn’t have survived this long without your help. Thank you to my mother for being such a loving source of support. And thanks and love to all the hundreds of friends who reached out and to the many others who were told not to reach out. We also have incredible respect for the “Believe Women” movement, as our political leaning has always been to lift up the silenced voices of our human race. It’s just that this is NOT one of those cases.
Read the full account here.
Why should his in laws pay.
I was asking myself the same question! Regardless of the veracity of the allegations, he was still unfaithful to their daughter. He even admits that much!
Just perhaps because they love their daughter and son-in-law, and have the means.
Is this really your business?
It seems that he likes other people’s money….he even started a Gofundme now… instead of looking for a job as soon as possible…go figure…
I have no information with which to judge his case, but it’s rare to have a right to lifetime employment. Being let go from a job is always a possibility even if you don’t do anything inappropriate. The institution itself may be at fault for dismissing him if the reasons were inappropriate, but immediately filing bankruptcy points to a problem unrelated to the institution.
I also have no information about this case, but if you were let go for any number of other reasons from another job, you would reasonably expect to be able to get another job, sooner rather than later. But in this case?
Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Conductors and others in highly visible, leadership positions should expect long potential gaps in employment at the best of times. Have at least a 3 – 6 month emergency fund, like most experts advise. Especially if you have a wife and kids.
Ridiculous, anonymous. If you have a salary and upcoming engagements, and you have a mortgage and living expenses that have to be paid out of those, and all of a sudden you’re at zero with no prospects, guess what?
Since you have “no information with which to judge his case,” and also no clue, it would have been an excellent moment to pipe down.
Ridiculous? You actually illustrated the point of having savings and an emergency fund perfectly. Unfortunately financial literacy and living within your means is a foreign concept to many Americans. It sounds like you’re an apologist for the Wachner family. Please send my regards, as I wish them well.
Guessing truth is somewhere in the middle. Ms Poole at least gets to see Wachner and his family run out of town, broken and destitute. Gotta be a win in her book, but I’m sure nothing short of imprisonment will please the #metoo crowd.
This is not a win at all for her, not even for all the people that have been victims of his harassment in whatever form they took. There are many victims coming forward now, though nobody wants to go on the record publicly as Ms. Poole has. But the cases are horrific. This was not a one-off case. In fact, Julians MO appears to be very similar: grooming young women, talking about all his marital disappointments to gain pity from the women he wants to sleep with… Source? I work a little too close to the investigation to not see the documents going around. It’s disturbing.
Is this real? It’s a grotesque story.
It seems that nowadays, adults moving in public space need a chaperonne to be sure they don’t get together unsupervised.
Trinity did hot fire him for sexual harassment, Trinity fired him for conduct unbecoming of someone of his position:
1) Trinity is a church
2) Wachner was married at the time (to an Episcopalian reverend)
3) Wachner made out with a 24 year old
These bare facts, indisputable, are enough for a church to dismiss someone of his position, irrespective of whether there was mutual consent or whatever specific sexual activity was involved.
A church answers to a higher authority than a court of law.
Hold up- Mary, are you changing your story now? Originally you said he didn’t stop after you said “no”, now it’s “we made out”? So JW ‘s account is correct, that after you supposedly said no, you went back to his room and kissed the rest of the night in front of a fireplace? This is very illuminating.
Why would you assume it’s the same Mary? You think Ms. Poole has time to go around commenting on every site? Let me answer the question for you: no. It’s not the same Mary.
The problem with this ‘higher authority’ is that communication channels are not clear at all, so that any message from above can be interpreted according to the personal opinions of the interpreter. It is questionable, to say the least, whether an organized religion has the exact meaning of God’s intentions concerning humanity. This explains the behavior of, for instance, pope Julius II, Michelangelo’s boss, who did so much for art, and fathered three illegitimate daughters and had relationships with men. The schismatic Conciliabulum of Pisa, which sought to depose him in 1511, openly accused him of being a sodomite. And this was only ONE pope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes
Did ‘God’ ever had any ‘intentions’ ?? I doubt it….
Apparently this Higher Authority told the Catholic Church to shuttle around sex offenders for the good of the offenders and the horror of the victims for as long as was possible. This Higher Authority seems to follow a troubling pattern throughout our troubling, if trifling, brief history on an indifferent planet we can’t seem to appreciate. Oh well, we built ourselves for Dies Irae.
The church answers to the law of the land. Period. No exceptions. We have one system of justice.
The laws of every land permit, indeed encourage, a man to marry a woman, have sex with her, and to reproduce.
If that man is a Catholic priest, and he does any of the aforementioned acts, you are telling me the Catholic church cannot dismiss that priest because it would violate of the laws of the land?
It’s called the separation of church and state. It’s a founding principal of the United States.
the establishment clause prohibits all levels of government from either advancing or inhibiting religion, separates church from state, but not religion from politics or public life. Individual citizens are free to bring their religious convictions into the public arena, but ONLY if they do not violate another’s rights or the laws of the land!
“The laws of every land permit, indeed encourage, a man to marry a woman, have sex with her, and to reproduce.”
Why did nobody tell me??!
Sally
Since the age of consent is way lower than 24 the last point is not relevant. An age gap between to consenting adults is neither unlawfull nor immoral or wrong or in any way relevant how an incident is judged.
You’re still fixated on “consent”, which @Mary has already stipulated was irrelevant.
The age-gap was mentioned to demonstrate quite another point: the imbalance of power, that between an older male in a position of authority over a younger female in a position of subordination.
A church has every right to judge as immoral the abuse of this imbalance of power, as evidenced in part by the age gap, even if both parties are “consenting adults”.
Except, in this case, there is no subordinate. She worked for the organization (Julliard) that hired him as a freelance contracted musician. There wasn’t a power differential.
With great respect Marie, citing a mythical higher authority is a load of (word that rhymes with rowlocks).
And the job involves him having access to and even working with children. An admitted adulterer should not be allowed to work with children. I would not let my children sing under Julian Wachner.
“A church answers to a higher authority than a court of law.”
In that case, would it be ok for a church to fire someone for coming out as gay?
There are several chuches that welcome gay bisexual and heterosexual people in the USA. Not officialy recognized by the Vatican and others, but they are there, if you are interested.
So her (your?) vengeful behaviour has managed to air his family’s dirty laundry, get him fired, bankrupt him, tear his wife and two kids from their community, and deprive NYC of the joy of listening to him.
If his account is even remotely true, this is a weaponization of the media that should not go unnoticed, and he should sue her for defamation.
Finally, a 24 year old, who is a college graduate, is an adult, capable of making her own decisions, even if she was star-struck and thought better of her behaviour in the morning.
Her vengeful behavior? His family’s dirty laundry would still be dirty either way. She was assaulted, sexually, by someone she respected. Not her own decision, mind you. You are saying SHE did that to THEM? Nah, Julian did that to himself and his family.
The only joy I wish you could hear is the many women who are now coming forward. Many. I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count them. I am disturbingly close to the investigation. Julian is and has been an active sexual predator, with his first known case dating back to the year 2,000. And the letter his lawyer wrote is beyond laughable. “Because it’s 2022”? No, it’s because he’s been grooming, touching, and kissing young women for over two decades. Many of these cases were reported to the institutions, and, just like Juilliard did with Mary, they were all laughed off. And now he wants your money. He must thing everyone here is an idiot.
Where are these women coming forward? Not that I’m necessarily surprised that there are such women, but I’ve seen no report of them except from you.
For everyone wondering, the Mary above is not Mary Poole. I am Mary Poole, and I’m choosing not to engage here (as I’ve said everything I need to on my social media and in the NYT) but wanted to clear up that not everyone on here named “Mary” is me. Check yourself before you make assumptions. Sheesh.
Just as a reminder, Trinity’s statement about the firing indicates that it was not over the 2014 incident with Mary Poole in South Carolina.
Very sad story to read.
It’s easy to ruin a family, a career, and a reputation through a few poor decisions in one night.
But decisions have consequences. As adults we all know that.
In the case of two consenting adults, it’s “he said” vs “she said”.
And lawyers love this stuff. It helps pay for their second home in Florida.
It was more than one poor decisión and one night. Mary Poole is one of several real victims there….
What an honest man, and very dishonest woman! Unfortunately, he shall lose his whole career because of a Bunny Boiler.
I obviously don’t know what happened, but I am embarrassed that all this competitive victimhood is aired in public.
OK…dude is bankrupt after less than a month? Trinity pays WELL. And he guest conducts. Did his wife lose her job? Have they never saved anything.
Also his little web diatribe–yeeeeeah, people don’t spew forth that kind of shit unless they are grasping at straws and guilty. And he needs a new lawyer if his thought that was a good idea.
Yup – a declaration of innocence is proof of guilt. I think at times they used that rule in the Inquisition too.
You’ve obviously never paid a lawyer…..
I think it was his attorney’s advice: go bankrupt so nobody can sue and get any money….
A dirty trick…
Feel sorry for his missus. On so many levels.
The sort of guy one imagines producing this sort of lurid cheese in public with a hundred people behind, head in hands.
I recall from a previous SD article that the firing happened only after the institution ascertained that there was more than just “one” incident.
It’s pretty rare in the US to get fired for *one thing*. The one thing that is mentioned is often merely *the last straw.*
What a coward to hide behind his wife in kids.
“We also have incredible respect for the “Believe Women” movement”. What a cuck! The same thing happened to Al Franken. How long are these idiots going to keep supporting metoo? There are credible studies that show HALF of all rape accusations are false. And the false accusers rarely get prosecuted. A woman who accused a senator in my state even admitted to lying under oath and she still wasn’t prosecuted. Instead the DA found another woman to make charges and after three years of legal battles the poor guy was acquitted. He lost his state senate seat and spent over $100 k on lawyers too.
A “well known” film star made an easily refuted sexual assault accusation against a random stranger at a Waterloo train station in 2016 and the authorities made that man’s life a living hell for years. She was not prosecuted and still gets rolls in film and TV.
Can’t help, being an inveterate amateur copy editor, that your misuse of “rolls” for “roles” is quite amusing.
A female music lover.
Excellent husband ?? Amazing father ??
Next time, stay in the lobby of your hotel, buddy !!
It is interesting to see that this man and his wife seem obsessed with MONEY…they even have a Gofundme now, pretending they are in need…
There goes “The best Messiah in New York”…
Bankrupt? He has been at Trinity over a decade, makes $250k a year plus outside gigs, and royalties, and lived in free housing for much of the past decade. This, without factoring his wife’s salary.
In addition to his incredibly poor judgment, he appears to be an appalling money manager.
For coming from one of the wealthiest churches in the country, it appears he’s not a master of his finances. It’s been what, a couple weeks, and he’s already running out of cash? Yikes.
Perhaps he wouldn’t be in such a position had he not misbehaved in the first place (assuming, of course, that the allegations are true.)
Julian has been sleazy since I met him in the 1990s at Boston U. He would hit on anything that moved, even if they weren’t receptive. No one I know was surprised to hear this news. Mary Poole has courage to come out about this years later. I think she’s saved other women and men from having to avoid being alone with him.