His Mindful Designs company raked in a total of $656,000 from 2011 to 2018, according to a CUNY which said the work was cleared by a conflict of interest panel. Parsons’ photographer husband had been paid by CHEST for freelance work for years. “If he wanted to do lines of cocaine on his desk, this is his office, this is his world.” “He operated that office like his fiefdom,” David Bimbi told The Chronicle. One colleague said he saw Parsons snort cocaine in his office. The unidentified staffer said he witnessed Parsons openly perform oral sex on a bar patron and then tried to force the employee to do the same on someone else.
EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP via Getty Imagesīut Parsons’ out-of-bounds behavior went back far longer.Ī former staffer at CHEST told The Chronicle that he went with Parsons to a gay bar more than a decade ago to help recruit subjects for a research study. Hunter College professor Jeffrey Parsons allegedly stripped staff members without permission at parties. The action ground the party to a halt and infuriated staffers who complained to officials at CUNY. He then, without permission, lifted up the shirt of a staffer to expose the person’s chest. The probe was sparked by an annual staff party called CHESTFest that, in 2018, was thrown on the second floor of the Stonewall Inn in the West Village.Īttendees told The Post that Parsons, as was typical at such events, encouraged guests to drink. Among the allegations: Parsons “engaged in the use, and in the distribution, of illegal drugs (cocaine) at CHEST events … and/or with CHEST employees and CUNY faculty and students associated with CHEST,” according to a document seen by The Post. The Post broke the news that Parsons stepped down from Hunter in 2019 after an investigation into complaints about the professor’s behavior. The Chronicle cited documents from the 2019 agreement showing Parsons, and his husband Christopher Hietikko-Parsons, paid $150,000 of the settlement, which totaled $1.4 million.įive of the staffers cited emotional distress with one also claiming physical assault and the sixth citing unspecified misconduct. The alcohol- and drug-fueled antics of a star Hunter College professor cost the City University of New York $1.25 million to settle claims by his aggrieved staffers, according to a report.ĬUNY and Jeffrey Parsons, a psychology professor and sex and drug researcher, reached the hush-hush settlement with six staffers who worked with Parsons at his Center for HIV Educational Studies & Training, known as CHEST, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. Teachers at Hunter College Schools warn they may still strike over COVID-19 Protesters at Hunter College hijack Zoom with ‘anti-Semitic’ rhetoric: students CUNY spends $1M on ‘hole in ground’ in stalled construction projectĮx-Hunter College HS staffer acquitted of sexually abusing two students