Lolita gone wrong

As if things weren’t going bad enough for the University of Wisconsin, word came out yesterday that Lewis Keith Cohen – one of the three professors convicted of sexually perverse crimes – was in fact back on campus, sitting in his office. What followed was a day of harsh criticism, media scrambling to get the story straight and an ever-growing black cloud over Bascom Hall.

I, of course, spent my day at the Badger Herald. We published two pieces on the scandal this morning – a news story detailing how he kept his job on campus and an editorial condemning the administration for allowing a predator to roam Madison.

Of particular note are some excerpts from court documents found at the very bottom of the news piece. The Herald obtained numerous documents yesterday related to Mr. Cohen, including panoply of papers deriving from his divorce. They are extremely unflattering and paint a picture of the man previously unseen by the public at large. A letter from his wife to a judge, portions of which are published in today’s paper, condemns Mr. Cohen:

Neither therapy nor the domestic-abuse program were successful at getting Keith to accept responsibility for his actions. The fact that Keith was asked to leave a domestic-abuse program because he was too abusive offers little encouragement about his ability to change … He is tenacious, manipulative and unrelenting.

In follow-up pieces next week, the Herald will likely share more about Mr. Cohen’s past and the documents that UW hopefully never saw before. We are looking to bring fresh angles to our readers that will explain more about the story itself, the circumstances that created such a fiasco and how things may differ in the future. This is a story that has shaken our campus and is one of just many sad tales in what some have begun to refer to as the “summer of shame,” an era that is now slipping into an equally disgraceful fall.