Michael Lohman

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Michael Lohman is a former Ph.D. student in the Applied and Computational Mathematics Department at Princeton University. He is a Baton Rouge, Louisiana native and a graduate of Louisiana State University, where he was the top mathematics undergraduate in 2001.

In 2002, Lohman was accepted into Princeton's graduate program. On March 30, 2005, he was arrested by Princeton Borough Police and charged with two counts of recklessly endangering another person, two counts of tampering with a food product, one count of harassment and one count of theft from a person. The charges stemmed from a two-week investigation by the Princeton Borough Police. The police stated that between 2002 and his arrest, Lohman deliberately and exclusively targeted Asian women for harassment. On several occasions, police allege he would cut the hair of Asian women without their knowledge or consent. The police also stated that Lohman admitted to filling small plastic bottles with his urine or semen and then either spraying it on unsuspecting women or pouring the bodily fluids into their beverages when they were not looking. Police stated that Lohman engaged in over 50 acts of such harassment.

[edit] Reaction

The charges against Lohman were covered in the New York Post, and received local television coverage. However, a number of blogs from New York to California [1] spread word, and anger, about the incident nationwide. One blog encouraged readers to ask prosecutors to treat the incident as a hate crime, [2] a sentiment which was also expressed among members of the Princeton community, some of whom questioned whether Lohman's case demonstrated a failure of the University to take adequate steps to protect its students.

[edit] Settlement

On June 22, 2005, the 28-year-old Lohman admitted his guilt and reached an agreement with the prosecutor's office to enter a pretrial intervention program which, upon completion, would leave him with no criminal record. His lawyer was quoted in the Daily Princetonian as saying "He feels bad for the people it happened to. He feels bad for his family… I say he's accepting responsibility for it." Many of the blogs that had followed Lohman's story reacted with anger to the news of Lohman's settlement. [3]