When Thomas Pogge travels around the world, he finds eager young fans waiting for him in every lecture hall. The 62-year-old German-born professor, a protégé of the philosopher John Rawls, is bespectacled and slight of stature. But he’s a giant in the field of global ethics, and one of only a small handful of philosophers who have managed to translate prominence within the academy to an influential place in debates about policy.

A self-identified “thought leader,” Pogge directs international health and anti-poverty initiatives, publishes papers in leading journals, and gives TED Talks. His provocative argument that wealthy countries, and their citizens, are morally responsible for correcting the global economic order that keeps other countries poor revolutionized debates about global justice. He’s also a dedicated professor and mentor, at Yale University — where he founded and directs the Global Justice Program, a policy and public health research group — as well as at other prestigious institutions worldwide. By Pogge’s own count, he’s taught 34 graduate seminars, given 1,218 lectures in 46 countries, and supervised 66 doctoral dissertations.

But a recent federal civil rights complaint describes a distinction unlikely to appear on any curriculum vitae: It claims Pogge uses his fame and influence to manipulate much younger women in his field into sexual relationships. One former student said she was punished professionally after resisting his advances.

Pogge did not respond to more than a dozen emails and phone calls from BuzzFeed News, nor to a detailed letter laying out all the claims that were likely to appear in this article. Yale’s spokesperson, Thomas Conroy, declined to comment.

Thomas Pogge

Wikipedia / Tobias Klenze / CC-BY-SA 4.0 / Via commons.wikimedia.org

The allegations against Pogge are an increasingly open secret in the international philosophy community, an overwhelmingly male field in which, many women say, pervasive sexual harassment is an impediment to success. But for the first time, confidential documents obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal the extent of the claims against Pogge.

In the 1990s, a student at Columbia University, where Pogge was then teaching, accused him of sexually harassing her. In 2010, a recent Yale graduate named Fernanda Lopez Aguilar accused Pogge of sexually harassing her and then retaliating against her by rescinding a fellowship offer. In 2014, a Ph.D. student at a European university accused Pogge of proffering career opportunities to her and other young women in his field as a pretext to beginning a sexual relationship.

Yale has known about these allegations, and others, for years. When Lopez Aguilar first reported Pogge for sexual harassment, she said, Yale offered to buy her silence with $2,000.

Eventually, a hearing panel did find “substantial evidence” that Pogge had acted unprofessionally and irresponsibly, noting “numerous incidents” where he “failed to uphold the standards of ethical behavior” expected of him. But the panel voted that there was "insufficient evidence to charge him with sexual harassment," according to disciplinary records.

More recently, Yale received letters from concerned professors and students at other institutions providing further evidence of Pogge’s alleged misconduct and asking Yale to reinvestigate. But Yale said those allegations were outside of its jurisdiction and that it would not reopen the case. Pogge is still at Yale, directing the Global Justice Program and teaching philosophy and international affairs classes on the New Haven, Connecticut, campus.

When Lopez Aguilar first reported Pogge for sexual harassment, she said, Yale offered to buy her silence with $2,000.

In October 2015, Lopez Aguilar filed a federal civil rights complaint, alleging that Yale violated Title IX, the statute that holds schools responsible for eliminating hostile educational environments caused by sexual harassment. Lopez Aguilar is asking the government to investigate whether Yale has ignored the “exhaustive attempts” she and others have made to prove Pogge is a danger to female students.

Her complaint also accuses Yale of violating Title VI, which prohibits race discrimination, on the grounds that Pogge specifically targets foreign women of color who were unfamiliar with how to navigate power in the United States.

The claims against Pogge pose critical questions about how universities manage the power dynamic between faculty members and students.

But they also raise questions that are more, well, philosophical.

Can someone fight tirelessly to balance the inequities of global power while at the same time abusing his own power? And can a discipline built on the quest to describe a just society — and suffering from a major diversity problem — afford to ignore these issues?

Fernanda Lopez Aguilar

Susana Raab for BuzzFeed News

“If you don’t understand, who will?”

Lopez Aguilar grew up in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She was a star student who published a book of poems about social justice at the age of 13; when she applied to college, her high school adviser wrote that she would one day be president. She enrolled at Yale in 2006, and took one of Pogge’s classes as a junior. When he agreed to supervise her senior thesis the following year, Lopez Aguilar was thrilled.

“It wasn’t even that he was famous,” said Lopez Aguilar, now 27. It was his commitment to morality and global justice, and the way he seemed to find his young students’ ideas as compelling as his own. “It inspired me to keep going.”

Pogge, then 56, and Lopez Aguilar, then 21, started corresponding about her thesis. Emails obtained by BuzzFeed News show that Pogge chided Lopez Aguilar for being too formal with him.

“Please don't treat me like some porcelain primadonna,” he wrote when she said she hoped she wasn’t taking up too much of his time. When she said she was “forever indebted” to him for writing her a letter of recommendation, he told her to “cut it out.” When she apologized, he said he was “sorry for the scolding": "I just thought you knew a little bit about me by now.” She assured him she did. “That’s a relief, Fernanda,” he wrote. “If you don’t understand, who will?”

She told herself it was normal to discuss her thesis on a bike ride with him and at his home, alone.

Lopez Aguilar said she felt a little uncomfortable, but chalked it up to cultural differences. So she told herself it was normal to discuss her thesis on a bike ride with him and at his home, alone. She thought it was strange that he wanted to crash at the Washington, D.C., apartment where she planned to live with her boyfriend over the summer — Pogge was “very tired” of wasting grant money, he explained — but she told him he was more than welcome.

When Pogge offered Lopez Aguilar work at the Global Justice Program, she eagerly accepted. Pogge listed her as a fellow on the program’s website and introduced her as a junior Global Justice fellow in an email to his colleagues, explaining that she would join them for a year of practical training after graduation. “Just tell me what you’d minimally need per month and I’d find a way to pay you that,” he wrote her in May 2010 when she asked about payment. “We’ll make it work out, don’t worry,” he wrote in another email. “I even have a little money of my own.”

Pogge also asked her to be his interpreter during a conference in Chile shortly after graduation, adding that she could stay in a hostel or was “welcome” to stay in his hotel room if she was “comfortable doing so; we can upgrade the room.” Lopez Aguilar said she didn’t want to make demands, so she offered to sleep on a cot or bring a sleeping bag, but she always expected that he would book them in separate rooms. When she arrived at the hotel, she found that there was only one, but still didn’t think it was her place to object.

“He was my mentor,” Lopez Aguilar said. “Now I see that I was naive, but I thought he actually appreciated me for my intellect. I was flattered that he saw promise in me.”

Only Pogge and Lopez Aguilar know what happened in that room, and Pogge has insisted to Yale he never made sexual comments or advances to her. But she later told the university that he asked her to join him in his bed to watch a movie, The Constant Gardner, on his laptop, with the lights off. That he said he couldn’t look at her in a black dress she wore because it was too “dangerous.” That he said perhaps she would consider marrying him someday. That he told the hotel staff to call them “Mr. and Mrs. Pogge.” That he mentioned he had been accused of sexual harassment at Columbia, and said she was “the Monica Lewinsky to his Bill Clinton.”

Lopez Aguilar said she tried her best to get through the trip, but one night as she sat at a desk translating documents, she felt Pogge slide in behind her on her chair, press his erection against her and grab her breast.

She says he told her that he couldn’t look at her because her dress was too “dangerous,” and that she was “the Monica Lewinsky to his Bill Clinton.”

She fled the room but had nowhere to go, she would later tell Yale. When she came back, Pogge said nothing.

“There’s something not natural all of a sudden,” she frantically Gchatted to her boyfriend. “I'm not feeling comfortable.” She asked him to stay online as she slept.

On the flight back to the United States, Pogge fell asleep with his head in Lopez Aguilar’s lap. She said she couldn’t wait to leave him at baggage claim. But he was coming to stay with her in D.C. in just a few days, and she said she felt too intimidated to refuse him.

The visit was awkward. Nervous that her fellowship was in jeopardy, Lopez Aguilar said, she tried to change the tone with some effusive emails.

“I am still ecstatic and sometimes pinch myself thinking about all the doors that you’ve lately opened (philosophically, I mean) in terms of better structuring my notions and convictions.”

In July, she asked Pogge for a "theoretical" document she could show to a landlord to prove she was employed by the Global Justice Program. He wrote her one on Yale stationery, which stated she would start on Sept. 1, 2010, and would earn $2,000 per month.

Still, she said, she felt anxious about the arrangement, so she showed up to work two days ahead of that date — only to be told there was no record of her employment.

She showed an administrator her name on the website, along with the letter, and then emailed Pogge. His response was furious. “You got me into a huge amount of trouble, Fernanda, as I am not authorized to give out jobs to people on my own,” he wrote her. “You manage to destroy in an hour as much as I manage to build in months.”

Fernanda Lopez Aguilar

Susana Raab for BuzzFeed News

Emails show that when Lopez Aguilar realized there would be no salary, she asked Pogge at least to pay her “whatever price you think fair” for the work she had completed that summer, providing $2,000 as an estimate. He refused, saying she hadn’t done enough work to deserve that much money. On September 7, he told her he did “not want GJP to receive further help from you, paid or unpaid.”

Lopez Aguilar said she was crushed: As she saw it, she had withstood months of unwanted, unprofessional behavior from a man she believed to be her mentor, only to be fired under bewildering circumstances after she had rejected his advances. She decided to report Pogge for sexual harassment. But she didn’t know whom to report him to. And according to her recent federal complaint, Yale officials told her she had no recourse since she was no longer a student and hadn’t ever truly been an employee.

Eventually, Yale offered her a $2,000 settlement, on the condition that she sign away her right to pursue further claims against Pogge or the university — or to tell anyone about Pogge’s behavior from “the beginning of the world to the day of the date of this Release.”

The federal government has said that it’s illegal to use conditional nondisclosure agreements in sexual harassment cases. But Yale treated Lopez Aguilar’s report as a workplace dispute, ignoring her claims of sexual harassment, her recent complaint states.

She signed the agreement. She said she didn’t think she had any recourse.

She told Yale that Pogge had slid behind her, but she did not specifically mention an erection, or his hands on her breasts.

The following spring, however, 16 other current and former students filed a Title IX complaint with the Department of Education claiming that Yale had failed to properly address their sexual misconduct claims. A formal investigation was opened. (It concluded that Yale had underreported incidents of sexual violence “for a very long time,” among other violations.) Their complaint had nothing directly to do with Pogge, but it motivated Lopez Aguilar to try again.

This time, she said, she was told the nondisclosure agreement she signed was not actually binding. So Lopez Aguilar filed an official sexual harassment complaint to Yale on May 17, 2011. She brought up the harassment accusation that Pogge told her he faced at Columbia, and wrote out her own side of the story in painstaking detail. She would later say she stopped short of the whole truth on one point: She said that in their hotel room in Chile, Pogge had slid behind her in the chair so that his "pelvic area" touched her buttocks, but she did not specifically mention an erection, or his hands on her breasts.

“I was still too humiliated to tell my parents about everything that had happened,” she now said. “I assumed Yale would find Pogge’s other actions unwelcome enough.”

“Playing the hotel room card”

Yale assigned an arbitrator and hearing panel to the case that fall.

Pogge told the hearing panel that he had indeed been accused of sexual harassment at Columbia, but that the allegation was false. Yale knew about it, he said, and an official “took great pains to investigate what had happened” before offering him a job.

“This was by far the most traumatic event of my life, as can be seen, for instance, from the gap it left in my publication record,” Pogge wrote.

Yale University's New Haven campus.

Bob Child / AP

As for his interactions with Lopez Aguilar, Pogge insisted he did not have “any non-professional relationship with or intentions toward” her, the arbitrator wrote in her report. Lopez Aguilar was a weak student, he said, who from the beginning had worked toward “relaxing the terms of the relationship.” He never meant to offer her a paying job, he wrote; she knew he was just trying to help her stay in the U.S. after college. Pogge never forced Lopez Aguilar to share a hotel room in Chile, he continued, or made any sexual comments or advances to her. He acknowledged that they watched a movie together on a bed and he slept in her lap during the flight home, but said both activities were Lopez Aguilar’s suggestion.

Given his “contribution of frequent flier miles to her trip to Chile and given my knowledge that her apartment was large and shared with her boyfriend,” Pogge wrote, he thought it was fine to accept her hospitality in D.C.

He said Lopez Aguilar knew the letter he gave her to show her landlord was fake, and asked the panel why he would have “agreed to supply the non-genuine job offer needed to solve her apartment problem” if he had “been disposed to retaliate” against her after their trip to Chile.

A hearing panel found “substantial evidence” that he “failed to uphold the standards of ethical behavior” for a mentor.