are "both gay," not because she was sexually harassing him. On August 16, 2018, Reitman filed a lawsuit against Ronell and the university, alleging sexual harassment, sexual assault, and stalking. Brian Leiter published a letter dated May 11, 2018 to NYU in defense of Ronell signed by major figures in the areas of feminism, philosophy, literature, and history, including Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Scott, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others. The letter was subsequently criticized for suggesting that Ronell should be excused on the basis of the significance of her academic contributions and for imputing a "malicious intention" to Reitman. The #MeToo movement came under scrutiny as feminist scholars continued to support Ronell, despite the charges of sexual misconduct. Butler later regretted some wording of the letter and regretted implying "that Ronell’s status and reputation earn her differential treatment of any kind". while Žižek argued that Ronell's years long sexual harassment of Reitman was "a series of acts of eccentricity." Providing historical and institutional context, an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books argued that Ronell's inappropriate conduct was intimately linked to the power that she wields within the humanities as a "theory star." Political scientist Corey Robin noted that "Ronell’s largest claims were on his time, on his life, on his attention and energy". Writer and critic Andrea Long Chu in The Chronicle of Higher Education described her experiences as a teaching assistant for Ronell at NYU, which made her believe Reitman's allegations. Noting that Ronell seemed to have felt 'persecuted' even while teaching, Andrea Long Chu argued that Ronell's desire for Reitman to make her 'feel loved' stemmed not from feeling 'entitle[d]' by 'status' to 'fuck'[sic] students, but, on the contrary, because "the relentless misogyny of the university" still seemed present to her: Ronell returned to teaching at NYU in the fall of 2019. Her course, "Unsettled Scores: Theories of Grievance, Stuckness, & Boundary Troubles," was advertised on campus with a flyer asking: "How have we secretly internalized penitentiary structures?" Ronell's return caused protests and frequent demands by student groups for her termination, such as the petition circulated by the graduate-student workers’ union, carrying some 600 signatures, which called upon NYU to fire Ronell, a demand that was endorsed by NYU’s Student Government general assembly. In February 2020, she took a semester-long leave of absence. By 2022, she was teaching a course titled "The ethos