Professor Accused of ‘Pimping’ Students Was Given $500,000 to Study Prostitution

A professor at a Manhattan criminal justice college who has been accused of multiple sex-related crimes including “pimping” out his female students was once given $500,000 to study prostitution.

John Jay College Professor Ric Curtis received a $520,000 grant by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2005  to study child sex workers in New York City. Now, Curtis, along with several of his colleagues, has been accused of sex crimes including “pimping” out his female students.

Breitbart News covered the initial accusations last week in which professors Ric Curtis and Anthony Marcus were accused of various sex-related offenses. Naomi Haber, a former John Jay College student, claims that Anthropology Department chair Anthony Marcus violently raped her during a night out at an academic conference in 2015. “He put his hands around my throat, choked me with both hands and forced himself inside me without warning,” she wrote in a document that described the accusation. “The only thing I could do was to go numb and detach myself from my body.”

A new report from the New York Post revealed that Curtis, who has been accused of encouraging students to have sex with colleagues, selling drugs on campus and groping a student, was paid over $500,000 by the state to study child sex workers in New York City. Additionally, in 2011, Curtis received a $120,000 grant from the AHA Foundation for Women’s Rights to study “honor killings, female genital cutting and forced marriage in the United States.”

Curtis’ research in the field of sex work has been controversial. In a letter written by Curtis, he describes a potentially inappropriate attitude he held toward a 19-year-old sex worker. “I had a rather intimate interview with a 19-year-old sex worker where I started to feel a friendship developing … we cut it off quickly there, and did not go in any deeper,” he wrote. “She died the next week — again, numbness, confusion, fatigue. Actually, I left her out of that article about research.”

Curtis was criticized by some for offering cigarettes to his interview subjects. An investigation ultimately revealed that Curtis only offered cigarettes to those who could connect him with sex workers to interview and not the sex workers themselves.