Following his dismissal from the Trinity Wall Street Church, Julian Wachner has released a statement detailing his view of the 2014 incident.

The conductor said, “in March 2014, I was engaged by Juilliard to work at their residency in Aiken, South Carolina. At a post-concert reception, the administrator of the department of Historical Performance, Mary Poole, and I had a few drinks together and were very publicly flirting. This led to us leaving the reception together, with her driving. We joked that it was a LEXUS RX, the exact same model I had, and that we had the same taste in cars. We ended up first at a donor’s house where we kissed briefly in the kitchen and then she drove us back to my hotel room where we spent hours talking and kissing by the living room fireplace in my suite. She kept saying that the other conductor on the tour was boring and no good, and she wished she had hired me, and intended to do so in the future. I shared that I wasn’t sure about my marriage and that Emily and I had moved too quickly to get married. Everything physical (limited to kissing) was totally consensual and often initiated by Mary.”

He added, “The next morning, Saturday, it was clear that she had regretted being with me and said, ‘you’ll be hearing from me later.’ I tried to reach out to her later that day by email and on Facebook and sent her a sincere apology after receiving a note from her that made it very clear she was unhappy about our consensual activities the evening before. This is the communication that has now been so widely spread on social media and has been tweaked to imply maximum proof of guilt. I was immediately incredibly afraid, and later that day, I got a lawyer. The following Monday, I had lunch with a high-level member of Juilliard’s faculty. I told him what had happened, and that I was concerned. He said I was overreacting and that what happens between two consenting adults shouldn’t be categorized as sexual harassment. Later that afternoon, I received a note from Mary’s supervisor, Ben Sosland, informing me that I was being investigated as a title IX case. I went home and told my wife about what had happened.”

The conductor went on to talk about the investigation and noted that Juilliard school said “I wouldn’t worry about it, it’s just a piece of paper in a file.” He also noted that the school never interviewed him nor did he ever find out the outcome of the investigation.

Wachner concluded his statement stating, “we are going to need to file for bankruptcy, we’ve put the house on the market, and are planning to move in with Emily’s parents in Indiana. Thank you to my mother-in-law for paying for our lawyer, we couldn’t have survived this long without your help. Thank you to my mother for being such a loving source of support. And thanks and love to all the hundreds of friends who reached out and to the many others who were told not to reach out. We also have incredible respect for the ‘Believe Women’ movement, as our political leaning has always been to lift up the silenced voices of our human race. It’s just that this is NOT one of those cases.”