In a shocking irony, the John Jay College professors accused of pimping out their students raked in more than half a million dollars in government money to study prostitution.
Thousands more in taxpayer and non-profit cash poured in for the academics to study addiction — at the same time the profs were allegedly running their own on-campus snakepit called “the swamp” where drugs were sold and used.
Four professors at the publicly funded criminal justice college are on paid leave while the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and State Inspector General probe allegations they brought the underworld they studied into the hallways of John Jay.
Accusations of rape, sexual harassment, facilitating prostitution, and using and selling drugs first surfaced several weeks ago in the written complaints of two John Jay graduates, which were shared with The Post and authorities.
Investigators from the NYPD’s special victims unit, the Inspector General’s Office and the DA’s sex crimes unit interviewed one of the accusers, Naomi Haber, in a four-hour-long meeting Thursday, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
A representative of the DA’s financial crimes unit was also present as part of a probe into whether the profs misused grant money, according to a source.
They pulled in nearly $1 million from 2005 to 2016, according to a Post analysis.
Separately, the NYPD is analyzing what appear to be various controlled substances found in the offices of the professors during an August raid, the source said. The NYPD confirmed Saturday that “a quantity of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and drug paraphernalia were vouchered” at Midtown North on Sept. 10.
Prostitution research was a cash cow for two of the professors, Ric Curtis and Anthony Marcus. Curtis received a $520,000 grant in 2005 from the US Department of Justice to research child sex workers in New York City. He also led a study on young people working in the sex trade as part of a $1.3 million federally-funded research project in Atlantic City and other cities across the US.
But the feds halted the Atlantic City study in 2012 after receiving “serious allegations in regards to the human subjects’ activities undertaken as part of research,” according to a copy of an investigation into the study’s methods.
Among the issues was whether Curtis handed out cigarettes to underage sex workers. Investigators eventually found that Curtis offered smokes to people who agreed to connect him with prostitutes to interview, but he did not give them to interview subjects, according to the investigators’ report, which was obtained by The Post.
Curtis later wrote that “the findings from my research in 2008 and 2010 earned me scorn among a number of leading practitioners in the field of rescuing these children because it undermined the rationale behind their appeals for funding,” according to an email he sent to one of the alleged victims that was included in her complaint.
One of his controversial “findings” was that most teen prostitutes did not have pimps, and were not led into the sex trade by pimps.
Marcus also wrote about the Atlantic City research in a letter to one of his accusers: “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. She died the next week — again, numbness, confusion, fatigue. Actually, I left her out of that article about research.”
In a study of young sex workers in NYC, according to Slate, the researchers found that pimps and prostitutes often didn’t fit the stereotypical mold of coercion and violence.
Marcus noted in the article that one sex worker told him she led her pimp to believe he coerced her into the sex game in order to maintain the “narrative of hypermasculine enticement and feminine vulnerability.
“It’s like when you listen to couples debating about who made the move on who,” Marcus told Slate.
Haber has accused Marcus of violently raping her during a weekend they attended a conference in Washington, D.C. in 2015.
The National Institutes of Health also gave Curtis $25,518 for a study on the HIV epidemic, and he and Marcus received $20,000 from the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice to research homeless encampments.
The AHA Foundation for women’s rights awarded Marcus $120,000 to study “honor killings, female genital cutting and forced marriage in the United States” in 2011.
Marcus and Curtis also got $6,000 for a sex worker mapping project, and $45,000 from the National Institute of Justice for an evaluation of the Red Hook Community Court.
Additional reporting by Isabel Vincent, Stephanie Pagones and Amanda Woods