Protests Call for New York Phil to Dissolve Alleged Assault Victim's NDA

A protest was held today at Lincoln Center demanding that the NY Phil dissolve the standing non-disclosure and settlement agreement imposed upon Cara Kizer

On April 12, 2024, investigative reporter Sammy Sussman published an article in Vulture, a part of New York Magazine, outlining allegations of misconduct by Matthew Muckey and Liang Wang against former NY Philharmonic horn player, Cara Kizer, in 2010.

After the article, the associate principal trumpet and principal oboist were suspended from the ensemble. Muckey and Wang have now filed separate lawsuits in the Federal District Court in Manhattan, The New York Times reports. The pair is claiming that the NY Phil removed them without cause and in violation of an arbitrator’s ruling, which had ordered the orchestra to reinstate them in 2020 after an earlier attempt to dismiss them.

After the Vulture article, more than 6,000 people, including thousands of professionals in orchestras, academia, opera and ballet companies, and arts administrators, have signed a petition demanding that Kizer be completely released from a 2012 NDA.

The NDA was imposed on Kizer as part of a settlement two years after she was allegedly drugged and raped while the orchestra was in residency in Vail, CO in 2010; she was subsequently denied tenure.

Today, advocates violinist Lara St. John and oboist Katherine Needleman led numerous classical music leaders in a protest at Lincoln Center to demand that the New York Philharmonic dissolve the standing NDA (non-disclosure agreement) and settlement agreement imposed upon Cara Kizer.

The group is also demanding transparency about the report of Barbara Jones, the lawyer who led an investigation in 2018 that led to the firing of Muckey and Wang.

"We think that Cara should be allowed to speak," St. John and Needleman today told The Violin Channel."It will be beneficial not only to Cara and the New York Philharmonic to understand everything that's happened there, but also to our industry as a whole. We are having a reckoning right now with misogyny and sexism and this is an opportunity for the New York Philharmonic to be leaders in righting the ship."

"Everything is always swept under the carpet, and women always lose. We think we need to put an end to that and there are a lot of people in our industry that want change."

A representative of the New York Philharmonic told The Violin Channel that they cannot "disclose details of personnel matters including information about the existence or not of an NDA."

This is a developing story.