Former Concordia creative writing student names professor who sexually abused her

In a Twitter thread, former Concordia student Emma Healey named Jon Paul Fiorentino as the creative writing professor who allegedly sexually abused her. She said she spoke to the Office of Rights and Responsibilities about filing an official complaint against him.

Fiorentino is a part-time professor in Concordia’s english department. His classes were reassigned during the 2018 winter semester amid allegations of sexual misconduct.

On May 22, 2018, Healey alleged that Fiorentino was the professor from her 2014 essay “Stories Like Passwords” in a long chain of tweets. She wrote the essay about a relationship she had with her 34-year-old professor when she was 19 years old, explaining that it wasn’t fully consensual. Healey also said that her experience was a “drop in the bucket” and that student-teacher relationships occur frequently.

Healey explained in the thread that once the story had started to die down, she had allowed herself forget about the issue until last week, when she learned the university did not have enough formal complaints to prosecute the professors in question. “I felt so angry I wanted to throw up,” she wrote. “Feel. I feel that angry. I am shaking as I type this.”

The Twitter thread ended with Healey naming the professor her essay was about, saying, “‘Stories Like Passwords’ is about Jon Paul Fiorentino. He’s the professor who manipulated me into a relationship, emotionally abused me, assaulted me, coerced me into sex and raped me while I was a student at Concordia and he was a teacher”.

Healey had agreed to giving an anonymous testimony to a third party investigator that Concordia had hired back when her essay had gained attention, adding that she “did not trust the school to handle [her] complaints appropriately”. She said she had never named the professor in the essay or during her testimony out of fear.

She also tweeted a link to Concordia’s Task Force on Sexual Misconduct and Sexual Violence and encouraged victims to make a formal or anonymous complaint. She closed off the thread of tweets by saying, “I’m sorry for bringing all of this up again. I hate it. I hope I am not doing the wrong thing.”

Graphic by Zeze Le Lin

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