A male former student at York University who worked for Jian Ghomeshi when Ghomeshi was student federation president alleges the disgraced CBC host “grabbed my genitals and fondled them.”

Jim Hounslow, now the e-learning specialist at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, said Ghomeshi’s sudden attack while they waited for an elevator was part of a pattern of conduct towards fellow students. Hounslow just happened to be male.

Hounslow said he and others at the campus viewed Ghomeshi as a “sexual predator.” He is not aware of other men who were victims. He did not file a complaint.

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A York spokesperson told the Star the university has conducted an extensive internal search and found no record of complaints related to Ghomeshi. However, “under our file retention schedule, given that this was more than 25 years ago, it is highly unlikely any record exists,” she said.

In the 1990-91 school year, Ghomeshi was working on a political science thesis and working in a paid job as president of the York Federation of Students.

Hounslow was also attending school and working in a paid position for Ghomeshi as his communications co-ordinator. Both men were in their early 20s.

In addition to his duties at York and his music career (his band, Moxy Früvous, was just getting started), Ghomeshi was heavily involved in student politics at the Canadian Federation of Students and the Ontario Federation of Students.

“I recall him as being very charismatic and flattering,” said Hounslow. “It was exciting at first.”

But one night after a student meeting at a pub, he and Ghomeshi were waiting for an elevator.

“With no warning, he just reached over and grabbed my genitals (through Hounslow’s jeans) and started fondling them. I was completely shocked and I reacted,” Hounslow said.

Hounslow, who is roughly the same height and build as Ghomeshi (“I am built like a cyclist and I am a cyclist”), said he grabbed Ghomeshi’s arm, pulled it behind his back and then pushed Ghomeshi hard against the elevator doors.

“I told him, ‘You are never to do that again,’” Hounslow recalls.

The next day, in the student federation office, Hounslow said, Ghomeshi accused him of being “macho, violent and homophobic.” Hounslow recalls Ghomeshi saying that he had just been “playing around.”

“I told him that what he did was sexual harassment, and that shut him up,” Hounslow said.

Over the past two weeks, as news has emerged that a number of women are alleging abuse or harassment by Ghomeshi, Hounslow, who is married with children, has been mulling over the incident and his time working for Ghomeshi.

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He recalled that women he worked with told him of being hit on very aggressively by Ghomeshi. “Ghomeshi would creep on women all day long. I don’t know how he got any work done.”

Ghomeshi made it appear in conversations that he was a feminist, but he was “very sexist and womanizing,” Hounslow said.

Ghomeshi has told Maclean’s magazine he majored in political science, with a double minor in history and women’s studies.

When the year ended and Ghomeshi was no longer president of the student federation, Hounslow said there “was a massive amount of relief” among other members.

“We all felt emotionally damaged,” said Hounslow.

“When I first heard of the new allegations against Jian Ghomeshi, I was not surprised,” he said. “I just wondered why it took so long.”

The Star attempted to contact Ghomeshi about this story but did not receive a reply to questions posed to him through email or sent to his lawyers.

Another former student, Kerry Eady, now an arts and crafts teacher in Nova Scotia, recalls attending an informal meeting at York University in the fall of 1988, where residence advisers (senior students) “told us they’d had reports from a couple of young women who had bad dates with Jian Ghomeshi … that he had hit them.” One female student had told the residence advisers she was choked, Eady said.

The former York University student said a few residence advisers at the school were very concerned about Ghomeshi’s behaviour.

“There was no accusation of date rape, but (students had told the residence advisers) that he’d hit them, and one of them had been choked in the stairwell,” Eady said. The residence advisers “wanted us to have a warning and said that if we saw him at parties to get them,” said Eady.

She said that at the meeting, attended by about 25 students, the residence advisers warned them to be careful in co-ed washrooms and “to be careful in stairwells.”

“There was nothing official, because these girls were talking to them confidentially, to get advice on what to do. They told them to report it but none of them wanted to,” said Eady.

Ghomeshi, who lived a different residence building from Eady, was well known on campus and would often play bongo drums in the stairwell of her building, she said.

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