Joe Biden is to attend a 2020 campaign fundraiser hosted by a lawyer who changed his name after having an affair with a student when he was a philosophy professor.
David Sanford, formerly named David Weisbord, and his wife were listed as the hosts of a Biden fundraiser in Bronxville, New York, on Saturday.
Sanford, then David Weisbord, was an associate professor of philosophy at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, from 1989 to 1991. A unnamed former student said she had a monthslong sexual relationship with Sanford/Weisbord, Law & Crime reported in May. Williams told Law & Crime that he changed his name for “private, family reasons” unrelated to the complaint from the former student.
“I said then, and still say that professors who get involved with undergraduate students, especially their own students, who are sexually inexperienced and say so, and who are susceptible to romanticizing the powerful dynamics that have always existed between student and teachers, are simply unscrupulous predators,” the former student wrote in a letter to Sanford through his firm’s public relations agency. She said that she did not file a formal complaint against Weisbord/Sanford.
Professor-student relationships were not prohibited at Williams at the time Sanford was a professor.
“I categorically deny that and any other allegation of misconduct,” Sanford told Law & Crime. He noted that three other professors “were fired for misconduct relating to female students.”
The Biden campaign and Sanford did not respond to requests for comment.
Sanford’s firm, Sanford Heisler Sharp, LLP, represented several of high-profile sexual misconduct and assault cases. The firm brought a lawsuit in 2017 against Columbia University and its former dean of students who allegedly coerced a graduate student into an sexual and romantic relationship, seeking $50 million in damages.
“Columbia pays lip service to the ideals of a safe campus, but it has a well-documented record of violating Title IX in preventing and responding to reports of sexual misconduct,” Sanford said his law firm’s press release on the case.
“One would think you would not only have behaved better at the time, but would now acknowledge your wrongdoing, especially now that you are pretending to make campuses ‘safe’ from the very likes of you,” the former student who made the allegation against Sanford wrote.
