Posted on 10/19/2025 5:55:43 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
BALTIMORE — Claire Pollock kept quiet for years about the sexual trauma that she says forced her to abandon a promising career in classical music.
“I couldn’t handle playing anymore,” says the former baritone horn player, who now works as a chef. “I would have panic attacks.”
Last year, at age 24 — finally ready to share her story, but unsure how — Pollock stumbled upon the Facebook page for Katherine Needleman.
A Baltimore Symphony Orchestra oboist, Needleman, 47, has gained 22,000 followers and millions of views for her scathing commentary about gender disparity in the orchestra world — and her practice of calling out specific men in the field for alleged sexual misconduct.
She’s also been surprisingly effective at prompting managers to remove these men from their posts. It’s a controversial evolution of the #MeToo movement, which began with claims assessed in deeply reported investigative news stories or slowly litigated through the judicial system. Needleman and some fellow activists, though, simply take allegations straight to the court of public opinion, via social media.
In Texas, a longtime Rice University horn professor abruptly retired after Needleman reposted an explicit photo he had sent to another woman. In Calgary, Alberta, two tenured symphony players — one of them a Grammy-winning oboist — were fired after Needleman published vulgar and sexist online exchanges that had been leaked to her. A voice coach lost a teaching post after Needleman helped a onetime music student publish her allegations.
With her popularity growing, Needleman launched a Substack in 2024. But the life of an online vigilante can be all-consuming; her tactics have drawn sharp public criticism from fellow musicians, to whom she frequently claps back, and a number of these exchanges have blown up into days-long battles in the comment threads of Facebook posts. Needleman...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Smells like BS.
I do not doubt that it is going on somewhere, but I never saw any evidence of it.
I was never looking either, but I was married and never talked to the other women either.
Needle man is nothing more than a gossip publisher. I loathe this kind of vigilante and communist style attacks which serve turn needle man into the judge, jury and executioner and not giving the accused party the ability to defend oneself.
Her actual victims should sue her into oblivion for libel and slander.
Figures Needle Person is an oboe player. The double reed causes a lot of back pressure, which bursts blood vessels in the brain, rendering the player crazy.
Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music
By Blair Tindall 2005(?)
And the beat goes on...
Don’t have time for this - is the point that she was called on to blow more than the Oboe?
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