How sexual harassment starts on campus: One student's story

HIGHLAND HEIGHTS – Her black painted fingernails are chewed to the quick. She fidgets as she recalls the first time she met Randy Pennington.

It was spring 2015. Aspiring jazz soprano Natalie Brady was a senior in high school in Milford looking for places to expand her talent. She loved the voices of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn and dreamt of singing professionally.

A last-minute visit to Northern Kentucky University turned into an impromptu audition with Pennington, the school’s vocal program director.

The veteran professor took her back to his cramped office and told her to sit next to him on a small piano bench so he could play while she sang.

“It was very close quarters … I just didn’t know what to think,” Brady says, near tears. “It made me feel creepy, but that could have been normal for all I knew.”

After all, Pennington seemed to be just like her music director from high school, with whom she had a close relationship.

“So I just went with it,” says Brady, who was 17 at the time and is now 20.

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Brady readily accepted NKU's offer to attend.

But those uneasy feelings – and Pennington’s actions – only increased over the coming years.

“I’ve since gone back and agonized and analyzed this and I realize that perhaps he targeted me from that very day,” says Brady.

“And by the time I realized it, I was already trapped.

“I’ve done therapy and a lot of self-analysis and realize I was probably being groomed,” Brady says.

"Now, I just want to ensure that other women know that it is OK for them to stand up for themselves and do something against any individual who is sexually harassing or assaulting them in any way."

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Last month, nearly three years after Brady’s first encounter with Pennington, NKU announced that the veteran music professor violated the school’s sexual conduct policy. In a March 16 email to faculty and staff, Interim President Gerard St. Armand wrote that Pennington was gone permanently.

The decision was the culmination of complaints filed by Brady and four other women – three students and one faculty member – in October, St. Armand said in the email.

NKU officials investigated immediately after the complaints were filed, and Pennington was put on unpaid leave.

After finding early this year that he had violated the policy, NKU officials began “informal discussions” with him, NKU spokeswoman Anna Wright said. Those discussions are the first step in NKU’s official termination process involving tenured faculty, Wright said.

Negotiations resulted in this: NKU officials agreed to let Pennington resign. His official status is "involuntary resignation," Wright said.

He will earn his full salary – $73,000 annually – through July and his benefits through June. Pennington, 61, also keeps his retirement benefits, according to the agreement obtained by The Enquirer.

Through an open records request, The Enquirer has asked for the complaints from all five women, investigation notes and the final report from NKU. The school has not yet provided the materials.

Brady, who gave The Enquirer a copy of her complaint, says she knows the other women. None wanted to publicly discuss Pennington or their complaints.

In his email, St. Armand wrote that Pennington had “violated the University’s sexual misconduct policy, specifically, sexual harassment as defined within the policy."

Pennington did not return calls seeking comment. His lawyer, H. Jeffrey Blankenship, issued a statement which explained that Pennington "denies much of what has been alleged and that a lot of this was taken out of context."

The lawyer was not specific about which allegations his client said did not occur.

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Like many incoming freshmen, Natalie Brady didn’t know many people on the NKU campus, having come from Milford across the river in Ohio.

“I just had so much anxiety and insecurity and isolated myself more and more,” she says.

So Brady sunk herself into music, spending a lot of time with Pennington in the process.

He offered to give her private lessons, something Brady didn't think he did with other students.

“He started giving me little talks that would slowly evolve from ‘you're so talented … you need to be confident’ to ‘you’re so talented, you're so much better than everybody else and you’re so sexy and beautiful and you need to hold yourself like that,’" she says.

Soon thereafter, she explains that Pennington became increasingly affectionate with hugs that lingered, kisses on the forehead and wandering hands.

He grabbed or slapped her backside at least four times, Brady says, and would "accidentally" graze her breasts.

“At first, I thought it was an accident as he would do stuff on the piano bench or during hugs and tried to ignore it,” Brady says. “And I didn’t think much of it at first because he’s, like, in his 60s.”

“Then it wouldn’t stop even when I told him it made me uncomfortable. He would just laugh it off and call it an accident.”

Pennington later started calling her “his ‘go-to’ girl,” Brady says.

He would confide in her his feelings about her classmates and his fellow faculty members. Pennington would ask about her love life and criticize new boyfriends.

“He would say stuff like I needed to be dating a real man, like him,” Brady says.

“But since day one, he has preached to me about how he is the only one at NKU that can do anything for my career, and that I had to trust him. I believed him at first. He kept saying that if I did my time, I would reap the rewards and opportunities.”

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Pennington’s departure is the latest in a string of high-profile case at NKU involving complaints of sexual misbehavior over the last two years.

In December, school administrators ruled that former law school dean Jeffrey Standen did not violate the sexual conduct policy after three women complained about his behavior.

Investigators did find "sufficient evidence to support a finding of an unhealthy culture of fear, intimidation and bullying," and Standen immediately resigned as dean.

Standen is on a paid leave of absence at his full salary of $260,100 and is being allowed to come back to campus in the fall with a 15 percent pay cut. That would put his annual pay $222,000 a year – the highest among all NKU faculty.

Last year, the school also settled a separate Title IX lawsuit for nearly $1 million. The female plaintiff sued in 2016 alleging NKU officials allowed a male student to continually harass her, even after he had been found responsible for sexually assaulting her.

And in 2015, NKU conducted an extensive investigation into the men's basketball team over possible sexual misconduct by some players. A female student accused three players of sexual assault, but an administrative panel found them not responsible.

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As the months progressed, Pennington gave Brady a key to his office.

She found herself running mundane errands for him, as the touching and commentary on her love life stepped up.

Even worse for Brady, Pennington manipulated her class schedule so she would be in his formal choir despite the fact she wanted to focus on jazz, she says.

And what she calls "creepy behavior" only got worse.

In texts Brady provided to NKU and The Enquirer, she wrote Pennington she wanted to know “what’s going on in your mind.”

Pennington’s response: “You can always ask … remember I have a dirty and weird mind.”

Brady says she was always on edge around Pennington, and lost her cool in the spring of 2016.

That’s when NKU’s small jazz vocal group had a concert at the cozy York Street Café. The singers dressed in fancy evening wear, including black cocktail dresses.

Hers “was pretty low cut and he just couldn’t stop looking and making a fuss and telling me how sexy I was,” Brady says.

“I went to the bathroom and cried, and when I came out he said something else and I finally flipped him off.”

Pennington also served as the music director at Loveland Presbyterian Church, where he also was an elder.

Brady says he hired her to sing there as well, putting her in close contact with his wife.

“That was about as weird as you can imagine,” she says.

Someone answering the phone at the church declined comment. Brady and her mother, Andrea Brady, say they were told that the church removed Pennington as music director recently.

Brady acknowledges that it may appear to outsiders that she was complicit or wanting attention.

After all, why wasn’t she more forceful in rebuffing him or why didn’t she report him? Was she leading him on?

She admits to having the same self-doubts.

“I felt like I had to stay in touch with him as his student,” Brady says. “But now? Yeah, I feel guilty and like I didn’t do enough to try and stop him.

"I kept worrying that somehow that if I went to tell somebody that I was going to be held responsible and not him ... that I egged him on somehow," Brady says.

“I guess I kind of thought that I was keeping all the other girls safe by keeping his attention on me.”

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Early in her freshman year, Brady confided in her parents what was going on.

“And, boy, they were lit up,” Brady says.

But both Ed and Andrea Brady say that their daughter was adamant that she handle it herself.

That led to many trips through rural Clermont County to talk things through.

"We trusted her and knew she would never put herself in a situation where she could be really compromised, but that certainly was a worry," says Brady's father.

"It wasn't until I saw some of the texts when she was documenting everything for her complaint that I really got angry," he says.

Andrea Brady explains that she "knew that chance (of Brady being pressured into sex with Pennington) was very slim, as Nat is extremely savvy, realized what was going on, and would have dropped out sooner than submit.

"But I knew it was likely he would push in that direction, and I was worried about the psychological and emotional ramifications of what that would do to her. She was already questioning herself."

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Last fall, Brady took a class examining feminist punk rock, just at the time that the #MeToo movement erupted all over the country.

That got her thinking about her relationship with Pennington and ways out.

Then Brady says she asked him for a favor.

Her jazz singing mentor, Darmon Meader, was coming to NKU from New York to give a master class, and Brady wanted to sing a duet with him.

For that to happen, “‘you’re going to have to give me a lot more than you do now,’” Brady says Pennington told her.

There it was – for Brady, as close to an overt proposition for sex as Pennington had ever come.

“That’s certainly the way I took it,” Brady says. “I went back to him two days later and told him that’s the way I took it and that it was not acceptable."

Soon after that, another female student approached Brady, saying a mutual friend told her that Brady had complained of Pennington’s behavior.

The other student then told a tale that sounded familiar. Needing to stay in touch and asking to keep things private, an increased need for affection. Inappropriate comments and touching.

Then she knew she had protected no one.

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Brady and the four other women filed their official complaints on Monday, Oct. 23.

That Friday, Pennington was placed on an unpaid leave of absence. An NKU police officer was standing by at his office in the fine arts building just in case as he left campus via another building.

“I waved at him as he went by,” Brady says.

She says she "was pretty livid that a lot of people knew about him and didn't do anything but, then again, I didn't do anything for three years."

Now she has several standing singing gigs around the area and even travels occasionally to perform.

Brady also has written a children's book about conquering fear.

Her honors project is to create a series of six seminars focusing on exposing and preventing sexual assault/harassment on campus and elsewhere.

"We've got to find opportunities," she says, "to fix the problem instead of just talking about it."

Enquirer reporter Kate Murphy contributed.