‘Collateral damage’: Houston’s top horn musician allegedly harassed Rice students for decades. And the school knew.

Rice University’s famed horn professor William VerMeulen abruptly retired last spring amid a swirl of sexual misconduct allegations. But dozens of students and industry insiders say “the administration has known for 30 years” — and failed to act.

By Riya Misra     2/8/25 3:09pm

This story has been published in collaboration with The Barbed Wire, a Texas-based digital news outlet. Read the story online at thebarbedwire.com and at ricethresher.org.

This story contains descriptions of sexual trauma that may be triggering to some readers. Visit RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), which has a 24/7 hotline and helpful resources. The National Sexual Assault Hotline can also be reached at 800-656-HOPE (4673). 

Myrna Meeroff hadn’t had a seizure in four years. But in 1995, on her first day of graduate classes at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, she had one. Recovering in the hospital, she missed the beginning of the semester.

---

---

She entered the French horn studio a week behind her peers — “compromised in every way,” she said. Meeroff’s horn instructor, William VerMeulen, invited her to lunch off-campus in what seemed to Meeroff like a gesture of goodwill. VerMeulen gave her a lay of the land and caught Meeroff up on missed material. He reassured her about her absences and even offered to find her opportunities with community orchestras, she told the Thresher.. 

Everything would be alright, she remembered him saying. Then, she said, he placed his hand on her thigh.

Why is this man touching me in any way? Meeroff remembered thinking. It gave her pause. Other teachers had touched her during lessons, placing their heads on top of hers to hear the horn’s sound — weird, she said, though not sexual — but this was different. She forced herself to brush it off.

The touching continued in lessons, Meeroff said, even as other male studio members watched. Though her previous teachers sat across from her as she played, VerMeulen sat next to her. He often touched her stomach, without permission, to ensure she was breathing deeply enough for her belly to expand. He’d rest his hand on top of her thigh, she said, letting it stay for too long.

“When the hand is on your thigh?” she told the Thresher. “That has nothing to do with music whatsoever.”

Meeroff had a sheltered childhood — “the music was my life,” she said — and she sometimes wondered if VerMeulen’s behavior was a figment of her imagination. She’d been told he was one of the best teachers in the field. That he had the ability to make stars out of his students. “This was going to be the defining moment that was going to get me the career that I wanted in music,” she said.

She wore pants to lessons, moved her chair, practiced at home in her apartment — quiet rebuffs to his repeated advances.  

“Once he realized that he wasn’t going to get anything from me,” Meeroff said, VerMeulen began “systematically destroying my confidence.” 

Meeroff said he ranked her last in auditions. He gave her parts she felt he knew she couldn’t do, then would “berate me for not being able to do it to his satisfaction,” she said. Beat down, she slowly stopped attending classes. 

Because she was afraid of losing her spot in the studio, Meeroff said she didn’t report the behavior, or dare say the words “sexual harassment” out loud. But she felt sure others knew. “They saw what was happening, and they couldn't help me without running the risk of, you know, having their career destroyed,” she said.

Meeroff often confided in a close friend, who trained at VerMeulen’s studio from 1995 to 2000. “I know she was always fighting him off,” he confirmed to the Thresher. “I remember her telling me one day that Bill [VerMeulen] told her that if she tries to come back to Rice to finish her master’s, he'll make her life a living hell. I remember her telling me that like it was yesterday.”

A few months into the fall semester, Meeroff said VerMeulen insisted the pair visit the school’s counseling center. Meeroff wasn’t homesick — she had easily spent months away from home at summer camps — but she said both VerMeulen and the counselor insisted otherwise. “They kept trying to convince me to go home, and stay home.”

“People like that, they plant a seed and water it, and water it, and water it until it bears fruit. And you don't realize how much it's hurting you until you’re completely destroyed,” she said.

Then, in their second-to-last lesson of the year, Meeroff said VerMeulen told her she’d been kicked out of the studio. “You’ve been replaced,” are the words she remembered. “And then he said, ‘We're gonna sit down and talk about what you can do for a living, because you're never going to be a horn player.’”

Meeroff didn’t fight it. She left the Shepherd School of Music “a shell of (her) former self.” 

She went home at the end of the spring semester in 1996, back to Florida. She took a job at a music camp in upstate New York that summer to help clear her head. At the end of the season, the orchestra conductor told her she was the most accurate horn player he’d ever heard. “It was a complete and total shock to me, because I believed that my career was over,” she said.  

She completed her master’s at Florida Atlantic University and continued performing. In 2011, she founded the South Florida Chamber Ensemble, a music nonprofit that often partners with sexual abuse advocacy organizations. She took the group to Belgium for the 2019 International Horn Symposium. Meeroff knew VerMeulen would be there, and she wanted to see him. She needed closure. Then, climbing the stairs from the dressing room on her way to a concert, the two collided. 

“He didn't recognize me at all,” she said. “And that’s when it dawned on me. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, he's done this to so many other people that he doesn't remember.’”

‘Everyone knew that Rice knew’

A wave of  #MeToo-esque reckonings rolled through the classical music world last year, prompted in part by a New York Magazine report published in April. The article detailed sexual assault and misconduct allegations against two members of the New York Philharmonic who were fired in 2018, then reinstated through union arbitration.

The uproar was swift: The Philharmonic commissioned an outside investigation into the organizational culture. More women came forward with additional allegations against both players, who were placed on leave then fired in November. The players have denied the allegations and sued the Philharmonic and players union. A federal judge recently dismissed a $100 million lawsuit filed by one of the players against the magazine. 

Online discussion erupted in the insular industry. And more allegations emerged. Two musicians were removed from the Calgary Philharmonic. Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music announced it had removed one of its professors. 

Then, in May 2024, Rice announced then-63-year-old William VerMeulen’s retirement, effective immediately. 

“Professor VerMeulen has been teaching at the Shepherd School since 1990, building one of the country’s most prominent horn studios — with numerous professional placements for his students, who are performing in many of the top ensembles around the world,” wrote Dean Matthew Loden in an email to music students and alumni, which the Thresher and The Barbed Wire independently reviewed. 

“Despite his teaching record, there have recently been serious allegations made against Professor VerMeulen, which we will continue to address.”

The email continued: “Rice is aware of private images that have recently resurfaced on social media. Rice is reviewing the allegations and is prepared to investigate any reports of misconduct.” 

Many Shepherd students and faculty understood this to be a dismissal; many said it was long overdue for the self-proclaimed “horn guru.” Dozens of former students, colleagues and acquaintances of VerMeulen who spoke to the Thresher seem to agree on another thing: The allegations were far from recent.

“We knew,” said Corin Droullard, who earned his master’s in 2019 under VerMeulen. “Everyone knew there were dick pics floating around.

“Everyone knew that Rice knew. The administration has known for 30 years.”

In the eight months since VerMeulen’s retirement, 15 of his former students came forward to the Thresher with allegations of sexual misconduct in his studio. Four women told the Thresher that VerMeulen sexually solicited them or physically forced himself on them when they were current or recent students — describing experiences of unwanted touching, groping and kissing. One was so traumatized by her experience in the late 2000s that, after speaking with reporters for months, she decided she was not emotionally prepared to detail her story publicly — but consented to being anonymously included in a total of survivors, since she does not want any other women to experience what happened to her. 

Eleven of those former students — who studied under VerMeulen as early as 1995, and as late as 2019 — said they witnessed sexualized jokes, overtures, innuendos and a broader culture of misogyny apparent in VerMeulen’s lessons. His studio, “the Crew,” became a microcosm of the larger brass world, those former students said: male-dominated, crude and often cruel, especially toward female students.

Although Rice parted ways with VerMeulen after the private photos emerged on Facebook in 2024, several sources told the Thresher that they directly warned school administrators  — starting with an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint and lawsuit in 1997, all the way up to 2022 — about allegations of the professor’s allegedly inappropriate behavior toward students.

The Thresher spoke with six working female horn players in the industry today who said their former professors had warned them to proceed with caution around VerMeulen, who is married, and that he had a reputation for being a “creep” or “womanizer.”

Another five horn players — who teach the instrument in addition to playing with orchestras, common among professional musicians — told the Thresher that they would not feel safe sending students to study in VerMeulen’s studio. 

In total, 26 people — former Shepherd pupils, horn students, previous colleagues of VerMeulen and professional hornists — said VerMeulen’s reputation of sexual misbehavior was an open secret in the music world at large.

VerMeulen declined an interview request, and despite multiple attempts, his attorney declined to respond to a list of questions about the allegations reported throughout this article, saying that he did not want to lend legitimacy to the claims.

In response to a detailed list of questions about VerMeulen and Rice’s handling of allegations against him the university said, “Rice takes all concerns of harassment and misconduct seriously. We cannot disclose specific details of investigations due to privacy protections.” 

“We can share the faculty member retired last summer and Rice is no longer affiliated with him in any capacity,” the statement continued. “Last November, the Safety and Trust Taskforce was launched with faculty and staff at the Shepherd School of Music to focus on student safety, wellbeing and culture at the school. Dean Matthew Loden laid out a multi-phased approach to explore and implement measures to ensure safety, emotional support and inclusive practices that respect all individuals. Rice is committed to maintaining a respectful and safe environment. Sexual harassment or misconduct will not be tolerated.”

Though he is no longer at the school, VerMeulen still teaches private lessons and workshops, according to his personal website, and he remains the principal horn player and an endowed chair at the Grammy Award-winning Houston Symphony, a role he’s held since 1990. Endowed chairs are common in major orchestras, where patrons, in exchange for a hefty donation, can have an orchestral chair named after them. The Houston Symphony, an historic and well-respected arts organization in the nation’s fourth-largest city, asks for a $5 million donation to secure an endowed principal chair, meaning VerMeulen occupies one of the orchestra’s most coveted and high-profile seats.

“This matter has been brought to our attention,” the symphony said in a statement after VerMeulen’s departure from Rice, and again in response to questions from the Thresher and The Barbed Wire. “While we do not comment on individual personnel matters, as a fundamental principle we evaluate any allegations of misconduct and will take any actions we determine are necessary and appropriate to ensure that we are providing a safe environment for our musicians, staff, and the public.”

The symphony confirmed on Friday Jan. 31 that VerMeulen still holds his position as principal hornist. 

The majority of sources for this story were named victims of VerMeulen’s alleged advances, but many of those who say they experienced what they described as his predatory behavior within the last 15 years spoke only on the condition of anonymity, out of fear of professional retaliation. 

“People still fear the influence that he has, even now. He’s risen from the ashes before,” said Dominic Rotella, who studied with VerMeulen from 2017 to 2019 and is currently principal horn of the Richmond Symphony. “He's still employed by the Houston Symphony, and so he's still responsible for who gets to [substitute] with that orchestra. And what's to say that a couple years from now the temperature gets dialed down a bit and some other university hires him?”

Several sources also expressed fear of a lawsuit by VerMeulen. 

When the Thresher reached VerMeulen’s attorney, Steve Silverman, for comment about the allegations, he wrote back, “Should you print such an article, there may be unintended consequences for you and your paper.” 

In follow-up emails and conversations, Silverman claimed that other news outlets in both Houston and Baltimore had been working on stories about VerMeulen or the private photos that led to his retirement. But Silverman claimed he had successfully convinced other news organizations to drop any articles before they reached publication, citing potential litigation.

The Thresher and The Barbed Wire were not able to independently verify those claims.

‘Collateral damage’

The very first time Carey Potts met William VerMeulen, she knew something was wrong. It was the spring of 1995 and she, like many young horn players at the time, wanted to join the Shepherd School of Music. VerMeulen, then five years into his tenure at Rice, had already started to establish his horn studio as a home for burgeoning talent.

But at the first audition, her gut said something didn’t feel right, she told the Thresher. He leered at her the whole time, gave her “creepy, ugly” looks. He told Potts that she reminded him of his first girlfriend, she said. She left that audition unsettled and declined a seat in VerMeulen’s horn studio, then took a year off music and got married.

But Potts, who had spent her entire young life playing the horn, didn’t know a world without music. So in 1996, she tried again and re-auditioned at Rice. She joined in the fall semester.

Within a year, she had filed a complaint against the school with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that shortly after the start of her classes at Shepherd, “Mr. VerMeulen began making remarks to me of a sexual nature and comments that indicated my staying in the program was contingent on staying in his good graces.” 

Potts subsequently sued Rice, claiming the school maintained “a policy of sexual harassment (hostile work environment and quid pro quo),” according to court records obtained by the Thresher. The civil lawsuit was filed Dec. 9, 1997 in federal court for the Southern District of Texas, and the school settled the case for an undisclosed amount. Potts agreed to speak with the Thresher about her experience at Rice and with VerMeulen but did not discuss the lawsuit or her EEOC complaint, the latter of which did not lead to further action. Reporters used records and interviews with additional sources to fill in the sequence of events.

From the moment she entered Rice, Potts said she felt indebted to VerMeulen for giving her another chance. As classes began, VerMeulen “proceeded to make sexually suggestive remarks and innuendos,” Potts alleged in her civil lawsuit. His “pressure caused her marriage to fail,” she continued in her civil lawsuit, “and she and her husband got divorced as a result.”

He began to invite her to lunch and to dinner, she wrote in her EEOC notice of charge of discrimination, and “his sexual innuendo, comments and sexual propositions escalated while he continuously reminded me of the tenuous nature of my involvement in the program and his ability to oust me from the school.”

“In order to be referred for playing jobs outside the school, recommendations for professional positions and commendations to the faculty and students at the Shepherd School, he insisted that I acquiesce to his sexual demands,” Potts continued in her EEOC charge. 

“I really felt a lot of shame,” she told the Thresher. “I was such a young, eager to please, easy to shame person back then, and I think he knew it.” 

She relented to his advances and began a sexual relationship that lasted about two months. 

By the end of the semester, Potts was saddled with health problems — “significant physical manifestations of her mental anguish,” as alleged in her civil suit — and she had sought help from Paul English, a Houston-based composer and VerMeulen’s best friend at the time. 

While away on vacation, VerMeulen had asked English to check in on Potts, who “broke down” and told English everything: “She felt like her whole career at Rice depended on that relationship,” English said in an interview with the Thresher.

“The definition of ‘rape’ back then for innocent white males like me was different,” English said. “Did he hold her down? Did he strap her to a table? Did he hold a gun to her head?”

“Not to my knowledge, but there are other kinds of rape,” he added. “One is ‘You'll either do this or you won't have your scholarship.’”

Before classes began for the spring 1997 semester, the three agreed that Potts and VerMeulen would maintain a professional student-teacher relationship and that they’d keep what happened to themselves. 

Yet, as the semester progressed, VerMeulen became “irate and hostile,” retaliating against Potts, court records allege. 

“Among other things, he excluded her from participation in class programs, constantly criticized her, failed to provide her with proper instruction, made false and untrue remarks about her to classmates and others,” according to Potts’ civil suit. 

Later, as Potts and English spent more time together, they began dating. On Oct. 2, 1997, Potts and English met with Catherine Keneally, Rice’s then-director of the school’s Office of Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity, “to complain about Mr. VerMeulen’s sexual harassment and retaliation,” according to the lawsuit. 

At the time, Rice’s sexual harassment policy — issued in 1981, then revised in 1989 and 1992 — defined sexual harassment as “unwelcome sexual advances, unwelcome requests for sexual favors, and other unwelcome verbal or physical behavior of a sexual nature,” often when an individual’s education or employment status is conditional on “submission to such conduct.”

Potts and English said the meeting with Keneally was for informal advice. There, they said, Keneally pushed Potts to file a formal complaint. Potts pushed back.

“I'm like, ‘No, I really don't want to do that,’” she said. Instead, Potts remembered asking if there was a way to get VerMeulen to back off quietly without it escalating. “But that didn’t happen.”

Potts had a meeting scheduled with then-Shepherd Dean Michael Hammond the next day to seek his advice, which she said Keneally advised her to cancel. After choosing to keep the appointment anyway, Potts and English remembered arriving at Hammond’s office the next morning and the doors opening to reveal Keneally already inside, sitting opposite Hammond’s desk.

“Paul, I already know everything,” English remembered Hammond saying. English told Hammond that it was “impossible not to suspect that it was a damage control meeting,” according to records.

According to the lawsuit, “Ms. Keneally breached the confidentiality of Plaintiff’s complaints and informed the Dean of the Shepherd School, Michael Hammond, about her allegations. This information was then disseminated to Mr. VerMeulen who offered to resign, but was refused by Dean Hammond.” 

Both Keneally and Hammond are deceased, and thus, could not be reached to verify the lawsuit’s claims. Rice’s statement above did not include answers to questions from the Thresher  about Potts’ lawsuit, complaint or experience with school administrators.

Two days later, Kristina Crago — another student in the horn studio — was confused when her classmate, Carey Potts, gathered the group after a recital. Potts had been having “sexual relations” with their professor, she told the studio. She was going to sue Rice.

Crago was one grade below Potts. The two had barely spoken, but she had heard rumors about Potts’ relationship with VerMeulen.

“My first thought was, ‘This is horrible. I hate that this happened to her,’” Crago remembers.

Her next thought: “I'm five weeks into my master's. What am I going to do with my degree?” It seemed almost guaranteed, she said, that Potts’ allegations would get him dismissed at Rice. When they didn’t, she said, “You go from, ‘Oh, good, we still have him [at Shepherd]. And then you're like, ‘Wait a minute, will I be safe around him?’”

VerMeulen was instead suspended for an academic year, and his studio was temporarily led by hornists Bruce Henniss and Roger Kaza. Henniss declined a request for comment, but Kaza, who had previously played as an associate hornist with the Houston Symphony Orchestra, confirmed that he arrived at Rice in the spring of 1998 as a substitute instructor for Potts. He and Henniss led VerMeulen’s studio during the 1998-1999 school year, according to digitized Shepherd programs.

“Everybody knew everything,” Kaza said about VerMeulen’s suspension that year. “There were no secrets at all.”

At the time, administrators tasked a grievance committee made up of Rice graduate students and professors from different departments to determine if VerMeulen was fit to continue teaching. In a final report obtained by the Thresher, the committee acknowledged that VerMeulen was in a position of direct authority over Potts and such “circumstances call into question the very concept of consent.” 

The report referenced the “Amorous Relationships Statement,” ratified by Rice faculty a few years earlier to discourage sexual relationships between teachers and students, prompted by another sexual harassment case between a male professor and female student, according to a New York Times article. The statement said, in part: “When the faculty member has professional jurisdiction over the student, sexual relationships (including sexual touching and sexual propositioning) violate professional ethics and could result in disciplinary action as described in the Sexual Harassment Policy." 

But the committee did not suggest disciplinary action for VerMeulen. 

It categorized Potts’ allegations as an “affair” that was “more than likely” consensual and found that she “arrived at a distorted perspective of the affair after the relationship ended.” The report  described Potts as an uncommitted student and horn player, angry, difficult to teach and with “unresolved problems in both her personal and professional life.” 

English, who was interviewed by the committee, wrote a 46-page rebuttal to the report  — calling it “poorly presented, factually incorrect, misleading and dangerously irresponsible” and filled with “smear tactics” — which he said he printed, bound and delivered to nearly a dozen administrators. He never received a response.

“The school protects the teacher because they have an investment in the teacher,” English told the Thresher. “The investment in the student is minimal.

“‘We can trash a few students, collateral damage,’” he added. “That's basically their attitude.” 

Throughout the ad hoc committee’s report are references to evidence of inappropriate patterns of behavior consistent with violations of Rice’s sexual harassment policy at the time, including:

• a domineering, forceful style of teaching that included a “crew” concept that meant “socializing with him was a significant element” of the program, and disagreement with him could lead to the “group as a whole closing ranks” on the disagreeing individual
• use of “sexually-explicit similes and metaphors in classroom situations”
• “comments to female students that could be taken to imply sexual interest like ‘Oh, you're a babe, you're just the sort of girl I'd have been interested in myself 15 years ago.’”
• an undisputed case in which VerMeulen engaged in “flirtatious banter with clear sexual innuendos”
• another “former female student who, like Ms. Potts, claims she was sexually

harrassed by Mr. VerMeulen.” 

Yet, the committee justified each element: A domineering teaching style was “clearly viewed by many as the only way to train and produce absolutely first-rate, world-class musicians.” Sexually explicit language in class also “probably has genuine musical validity.” Also, VerMeulen had learned his lesson, and he’d “clearly recognized the problems inherent in his flirtatious interactions with some young women and has made significant changes towards a more appropriate professional style.” 

As for the other allegation of sexual harassment? “The testimony of this student is problematic,” the committee concluded. “She is known to have persistently mis-interpreted the non-sexual friendly behavior of a fellow male student, despite repeated protestations to the contrary by the young man in question.” (The committee did not include evidence of that assertion.)

The committee’s stance is all the more striking in light of one key detail: Though he initially denied it, VerMeulen admitted in a final interview that he’d had a “sexual relationship” with Potts and that his “behavior was a disgrace,” according to the report.

“I did everything exactly according to their rules,” Potts said. “I followed the steps exactly, and they failed me. And so I had to go then and find an attorney.” The committee’s response, she said, “felt like a witch hunt.”

One piece of evidence gathered by Potts and titled “What I know” detailed conversations Potts had with other witnesses, including Myrna Meeroff and another female student who, according to a copy obtained by the Thresher, said that she had experienced similar sexual solicitations, innuendos and intimidation. 

VerMeulen’s alleged misconduct apparently hadn’t gone unnoticed by other members of the studio, either: Two men who studied in the studio that same year would often “work out a schedule” to attend Crago’s private lessons, she told The Barbed Wire. VerMeulen was still employing his open-door policy, which allowed any students to observe their peers’ lessons. She didn’t realize until they told her, months later, but the two students had taken turns observing her lessons — quietly watching over her in fear that VerMeulen might soon “target” Crago.

“He made my skin crawl,” she told the Thresher.

Still, the committee concluded that the additional harassment complaints involved “the general teaching style of Mr. VerMeulen which cannot be viewed as a specific discrimination.”

VerMeulen returned to Shepherd in the fall of 1999.

‘They fear retribution’

“That laissez-faire attitude allowed very prominent male teachers to create their own reality. And the administration went along with it, which is the case with Bill VerMeulen,” said Julie Landsman, former principal horn player at the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and current faculty at University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. “They wanted to let Bill do his thing. He attracted students, and the administrators were all about attracting students and letting the teachers with power have as much power as they could take.” 

For years, the most prominent horn players in the country came through one of two studios: VerMeulen’s or Landsman’s. Landsman spent three decades at Juilliard, and she taught at Shepherd from 1982 to 1985. The two instructors rarely crossed paths, she said, but often disagreed with each other’s pedagogy from afar. Landsman particularly disliked the “hero-worshiping, macho culture” that VerMeulen cultivated in his studio, often at the expense of his female students’ well-being, she told the Thresher.

In August of 2022, Landsman scheduled a phone call with Matthew Loden, Shepherd’s dean. Landsman and Loden had known each other for years, she said, meeting previously at a classical music festival and again at the Philadelphia Orchestra. At the time, Loden was new to the job at Rice — he was named in 2021 — and Landsman said she reached out to Loden on a related issue in VerMeulen’s horn studio.

Among the topics discussed was the “toxic” culture, which it seemed that Loden already knew about, said Landsman. 

“Oh, yes, I'm aware that Bill has a history. He is on a short leash,” Landsman remembers Loden saying. 

In a statement to The Barbed Wire, Loden confirmed that the two spoke on the phone about VerMeulen in 2022 but said he did not remember specific wording. “Because we take all allegations of misconduct seriously, I notified the Title IX office and they initiated a review process in accordance with our policies,” Loden said Monday. “At that time, we did not have sufficient information to take immediate or specific action.” 

Before VerMeulen’s retirement, the Thresher and The Barbed Wire found that Rice and its Title IX office were informed through the complaint and lawsuit in 1997, a Title IX case in the late 2010s, and through Loden  — via Landsman — in 2022. 

Attorney Cari Simon, who has represented sexual assault survivors in university and K-12 settings, told the Thresher that “Title IX’s mandate (is) that a school stop sexual harassment and prevent its reoccurrence.”

In an interview during which the Thresher provided Simon with the contours of the reporting for this story, the attorney said, “To the extent that there's been a pattern and you're seeing that pattern, why aren’t you addressing the pattern?”

According to other emails obtained by the Thresher, Rice retained an outside law firm after VerMeulen’s 2024 retirement to investigate the allegations against him. They contacted Potts with a list of questions about her time at Rice, emails show, and reached out to at least three other people with knowledge of VerMeulen’s alleged misconduct. 

Neither Potts, nor the three other people, have heard from the university in months.

Rice would not comment on the existence or status of any pending investigations.

The Captain

Some call the French horn a weapon of war. The 12-foot-long child of the sonorous brass family is one of the loudest instruments in an orchestra. It demands a certain brawn — and lung capacity — from its user. Because of that, the brass music scene, which includes trumpets, tubas and trombones, is often a hyper-masculine one: more akin to a “boys’ club,” said trombonist Abbie Conant.

In the studio, the instructor is tantamount to God. Many professional players start young, first picking up their instrument in early childhood. As they grow up, their art demands more hours, more energy. Young musicians learn to place their faith, sometimes blindly, in an all-knowing instructor who promises success. 

These powerful figures often go unbridled by their institutions — several music veterans and students told the Thresher — granted free rein over their students, studios and symphonies.

Conductors and principal players often wield the most power in the highly competitive music world, where there isn’t enough orchestra demand to match the supply of talent. Cutthroat audition processes  — the “orchestral Olympics,” a current hornist called them — tend to favor those who curry favor among music’s most-celebrated elite: just like William VerMeulen. 

VerMeulen grew up in a musical household, learning the ropes from his cellist mother, he told The Houston Chronicle in 2012.

As a teenager, he studied horn at Michigan’s Interlochen Arts Academy, a world-renowned boarding school and training program for burgeoning artists. As a freshman at Northwestern University, VerMeulen won a spot in the Kansas City Symphony. It was his first-ever audition, he said in a 1984 interview with The Horn Call, the International Horn Society’s biannual journal, music blog Horn Matters reported in June 2024.

Four years later, VerMeulen was on his third professional job, principal horn at the Honolulu Symphony. The principal slots, or the section leaders of each instrument, are some of the most coveted positions in an orchestra, earned through years of ceaseless training and stiff competition. By all accounts, VerMeulen seemed somewhat of a young prodigy: Peers his age were still training in their undergraduate studios.

The Shepherd School of Music, established in 1974, was still recruiting new talent to prove itself as a nationally-ranked music school by the late ’80s and early ’90s. Then came VerMeulen, barely 30 years old and already with plenty of accolades under his belt. 

Hired in 1990, he spent the next 34 years at Rice drawing auditions from bright-eyed horn players across the country. His students won coveted orchestra roles, and his success rates were high — 90% according to The Horn Call. Over time, his reputation started to precede him: Dominic Rotella, principal horn of the Richmond Symphony, recalls knowing VerMeulen as a “hot shot teacher” before they met in the summer of 2005. 

The door to VerMeulen’s studio was covered in yellow index cards, each detailing employment offers that his students had received over the decades. By 2021, he had amassed 515 offers, according to a post VerMeulen made on Facebook that year.

Emblazoned across the door in capitalized cobalt letters: “The Few. The Proud. The Employed.” 

For many aspiring musicians, a career path is clear: Start young. Train hard, and for many years. Audition at a studio to receive even more training. Then, audition for coveted — and ultra-competitive — orchestra seats. For this path, it seemed like VerMeulen’s studio was the place to be. He had a unique formula for winning orchestral auditions, according to a former student from the ’90s: a training program that taught students how to play under extreme pressure, how to hide their weaknesses and display their strengths. 

At Rice, “he was the (brass) program, in so many ways,” said Corin Droullard, who earned his master’s in 2019 under VerMeulen.

VerMeulen’s studio housed his “Crew,” the nickname he developed for his studio members. Immer crewdom, he would often write on his Facebook. Always the crew. Over time, this rhetoric gave way to a studio so tight-knit it bordered on cult-ish, six former students say. Steering the ship: the “Captain,” a title VerMeulen embraced with enthusiasm. It was on posters for his recital; it was engraved into his whiskey bottles.

“It was a boys’ club, sort of a Bill fanboy environment in the studio,” Droullard said. “There’s this sort of like demigod figure who walks in and commands the respect of the room … It’s interesting talking to people afterwards, because I thought that everyone bought in. I thought they were all on board [with] this ‘Bill effect.’

“He didn’t feel like a professor,” said Droullard. “There was this otherness.”

Many grew loyal to VerMeulen, and for good reason. He delivered on his promises to advance their careers. In an Houston audition described in a 2015 article in The Horn Call, the partition separating the candidates from the hiring committee dropped to reveal that all five finalists were VerMeulen’s students. VerMeulen “recused himself because he was so invested in each candidate's success.”

VerMeulen’s defenders dismissed critiques of his style as jealousy. “It should be noted that VerMeulen has his detractors despite (or because of!) his success,” The Horn Call published that same year. “There are those who intimate that his teaching is borderline cultism, tantamount to brainwashing. I asked him about these allegations and he good-humoredly acknowledged that he was certainly aware of them. No, he laughed, he does not call students at 4 am and demand they play Shostakovich!” 

Even now, VerMeulen remains a beloved figure to some in the industry. In a May 2024 story, classical music site Slipped Disc portrayed VerMeulen as a victim of revenge porn. And a recent graduate of Shepherd’s horn studio said VerMeulen was an incredible instructor who paved the path for every student who has graduated in recent years. For her part, Meeroff estimates that over half the industry still remains supportive of him. Several former students expressed apprehension about speaking to the Thresher on the record, saying they were conflicted about their former professor because he had given them so much.

“I show my resume, and I don't have to take auditions to get into recording gigs and [substitute] lists,” Droullard said. “Rice is an insanely powerful tool, and it 100 percent made me a better musician.”

VerMeulen’s page on the Houston Symphony website claims he is “one of today’s superstars of the international brass scene” and is “one of the most influential horn teachers of all time,” whose students have received 250 positions of employment at orchestras in New York, Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Los Angeles, Chicago and Israel.

Still, one former student, who trained at Shepherd’s horn studio in the ’90s, remembered his professor as a volatile man, often marked by a temper, a deep conviction in his own talents, and a self-assurance so strong he was almost capable of “creating his own reality.” In the studio, Rotella — the principal horn of the Richmond Symphony — describes a tenuous balance between VerMeulen’s adept talents and “boorish” personality. Two current Shepherd professors, one former colleague, and one former student all describe him as an outright “bully.”

Nine horn players who studied with VerMeulen said cruelty was a cornerstone of his instruction. “The music industry can be tough love,” said one former student. “Bill was definitely the toughest.” 

“He sort of appears to have self-styled himself as the ‘horn guru,’” said violinist Lara St. John. St. John is also a gender equity activist and describes herself as an “unofficial spokesperson of this music #MeToo movement.” Though St. John never attended Shepherd or studied with VerMeulen, she said his reputation of alleged sexual misconduct was widely known across the horn world.

“People bought into that [horn guru attitude], it seems,” St. John said. “And what’s really disgusting is, so did Rice. So did the Shepherd School.”

‘He was the victim’

The first movement of Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 features a horn solo, which is often taught in VerMeulen’s studio. The solo starts off unassuming, just a whisper — pianissimo, very softly — as the pace briskens, unfolding into a soaring crescendo. Stringendo, the sheet music instructs: Tempo should quicken to a climax.

Rebekah Daley joined Shepherd in 2010. In his lessons with her, VerMeulen described these bars as the build-up to an orgasm, Daley told the Thresher. A passage with dulcet tones: vaginal lubrication, he said. Articulating a short, staccato note through the instrument’s mouthpiece: “spitting a cunt hair” out of your teeth. “Any way that he could fit sex in, he would,” Daley said.

The grievance committee detailed VerMeulen’s penchant for using sexual metaphors in class in its 1998 report, even using the Brahms example specifically, noting that it “probably has genuine music validity and apparently is a well-known interpretation of the piece.” Another example the committee learned about — comparing lip and mouth positions while playing the horn to a “blow job” — “obviously has no validity,” the committee wrote.

Though the committee found at least one student had been embarrassed by VerMeulen’s “sexually-explicit language,” it also said that “it was clear to us that Mr. VerMeulen has been undergoing a learning process, recognizing that language and conversation styles appropriate for his professional orchestra friends are not appropriate for the classroom.” 

Yet, for decades afterwards, the Thresher found that at least eight students continued to witness inappropriate, explicitly sexual metaphors employed in his instruction.

The Thresher and The Barbed Wire reviewed more than 20 hours of one-on-one lessons recorded by a former student in the late 2000s through 2010. 

In an early 2010 lesson, VerMeulen said “I was about to kiss you for how gorgeous you sounded right here” after the former student played a verse. Several months later, he was discussing his finances mid-lesson — “I mean, I make a ton of money” — before saying to her: “I take you [students] out all the time. I haven't taken you out in a while.” In another, he asks the student about the meaning of a German title of a musical piece — which translates to “maiden in the bridal chamber” — and says: “Before or after the wedding? I’m just trying to get my motivation.”

Later, in an interview with the Thresher, the student said re-listening to the audio made her “uncomfortable.” In the moment, she remembered deflecting the conversation to talk about his family.

“I wanted to start recording my lessons because if anything made me uncomfortable, I wanted to be recording,” she said, “in order to have that protection.”

In another recorded lesson from 2010, the student is audibly stifling tears after an hour of sharp reviews. “You know I think you’re wonderful, right?” VerMeulen asks, saying he will take her to lunch “to be nice.”

Hannah*, who spoke to the Thresher  on the condition of anonymity out of fear of professional retaliation, joined Rice’s horn studio in the late 2000s for her master’s degree. She remembers the “vaginal lubrication” metaphor used often, and vividly, in her lessons. VerMeulen’s harsh criticism — “forceful and domineering,” as the 1997 report said — was often intertwined with overt sexualization and dirty jokes.

She said many horn students, both Rice and Houston-based, would often sit in on her lessons, in line with VerMeulen’s open door policy. After one such lesson ended, she remembered being pulled aside by a local freelancer who had observed her session.

“The man asked me, like, ‘Are you okay? That was the filthiest lesson I’ve ever witnessed.’”

Hannah doesn’t remember what VerMeulen had said to her that day.

“It was just normal. The only thing that stuck with me was that this freelancer asked me about it after, because it kind of broke the spell for me,” she said.

In early 2017, VerMeulen — then 56 years old — was in a relationship with a graduate student and the original recipient of the private photos mentioned in Rice’s announcement of his retirement. She wasn’t a horn player and didn’t study directly under VerMeulen. But her close friend, Lindsay*, confirmed to the Thresher that the relationship started when she was a graduate student at the Shepherd School. Lindsay spoke to the Thresher about her experience with VerMeulen on the condition of anonymity out of fear of professional retaliation.

“He absolutely abused his position of power,” she said, “and I think that he knowingly engaged in an inappropriate relationship.”

A few months after that relationship ended, in 2017, VerMeulen was visiting Lindsay’s school to teach masterclasses. The two got coffee and, despite her attempts to keep conversation neutral, he quickly pivoted to discussing the relationship with Lindsay’s friend.

“He did not seem remorseful at all [about the relationship],” she told the Thresher. “He seemed to feel, in a lot of ways, that he was the victim.”

Lindsay said he spoke disparagingly about the #MeToo movement, which had just started to reach its zenith: “He felt the whole thing had been blown out of proportion because of the #MeToo movement. Not because it was an inappropriate relationship, but because of the culture that was happening.”

Thirty minutes later, she returned to campus with one thought in her mind: This is the worst person I know. 

VerMeulen’s attorney claimed that a Title IX investigation by Rice over the photos yielded no findings of wrongdoing by VerMeulen. (Rice would not comment on specific Title IX investigations related to VerMeulen during his tenure.)

Rice did not have an official policy prohibiting student-teacher sexual relationships in 2017. 

It wasn’t until two years later, in September 2019, when Rice instituted a new policy that sexual or romantic relationships between graduate students and teachers with “direct or indirect professional or supervisory responsibility” are prohibited. For undergraduate students, relationships “are prohibited, regardless of current or future professional responsibility over such students.”

He kissed her. It was unwanted. 

When Rebekah Daley joined Shepherd in 2010, she had heard rumors about VerMeulen’s history of sleeping with students and was familiar with VerMeulen’s reputation for sexual misbehavior — calling it one of the industry’s “poorly kept secrets.” 

“People would say, ‘What the fuck are you doing, going to Rice and studying with him?’” But at the end of the day, VerMeulen was good at what he did. His career spanned decades and continents; his students won coveted spots in orchestras. So Daley walked into his studio, braced for what may come. 

“It was known that [VerMeulen] broke as many as he made,” Corin Droullard contends. “I had heard, ‘If you’re a girl, don’t go to Rice.’”

Sarah*, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of professional retaliation, said the thought of auditioning at Shepherd never crossed her mind as a young musician. Around 2005, her high school teacher had steered her away from the horn studio — and she believed it was because of VerMeulen’s reputation with female students.

“When this sort of behavior is considered acceptable by an institution, it hurts women. It hurts our chances at success in these really small ways that add up,” she said. “I was successful without Bill’s tutelage. But I always wonder, if I had been a student, what would it have afforded me?”

Daley, who stayed long enough to finish her degree, tried her best to grit her way through. VerMeulen’s lessons, she said, were draped in sexual overtones; his gaze, when not on his music, was often fixated elsewhere.

“You could just tell when he was attracted to students,” Daley said. “It was very obvious, like when he was seeing them as a sexual object.”

When she was 22 years old, her drink of choice was a Belgian tripel. VerMeulen often bought them for her, she said, just before his semi-frequent “crew parties” at his house. 

“He did these grooming behaviors (that) are so effective,” Daley said. “This is a very, very busy man. And he made a special trip, to a special store, just to get me the beer that I like.”

Most of the horn studio attended the parties, eight former students told the Thresher. Crew parties were often incomplete without the communal Captain’s punch, a brew of VerMeulen’s own making. It was typically a giant picnic cooler filled with a few types of rum and juice; “it really sneaks up on you,” one former student remembered. Adults were scarce at these parties, Daley said.

“There was a lot of alcohol, a lot of underage drinking in his presence,” said Jeffrey Rogers, who attended Shepherd for his undergraduate degree from 1994-1999. “We used to get completely wasted and he’d make us play through pieces.”

“In hindsight, the thing that sticks in my mind the most is that the level of drunkenness was extreme,” said Hannah, who studied with VerMeulen in the late 2000s. She departed the studio after winning a short-lived job in an orchestra several cities away, though would sometimes return to Houston — common for many of VerMeulen’s former students — to take private lessons before important auditions.

During one such visit, Hannah found herself in Houston just in time for a notorious crew party. Toward the end of the night, she said VerMeulen drunkenly pulled her aside. He often got “extraordinarily drunk, as drunk as (the students) did,” she remembers.

Hannah’s memory is blurry from the alcohol, she said — she, too, had partaken in VerMeulen’s remarkably strong punch — but she remembered two things: He kissed her. It was unwanted.

“I just was like, ‘Ew, gross. What the fuck was that?’” she said. She didn’t speak of that night for years afterward, she told the Thresher. Not until she started hearing about other allegations against him, 

“It didn’t bother me until I heard all of this other stuff coming out,” she said, “and then I saw it as part of a larger pattern, rather than just this drunken moment.” 

Rachel*, who studied with VerMeulen in the late 2000s — and similarly requested anonymity, fearing professional retribution — said her time at Shepherd was similarly marked by overly sexual jokes and flirtatious remarks, leaving her uncomfortable and often frozen. “I love a woman with a good bottom,” she remembered him commenting in group chamber coaching, chuckling at the double entendre; she had just played a deep, low note at the bottom of her range.

At least four or five times, she remembers VerMeulen complimenting her body, saying she looked great in a bikini. Sometimes it was during private lessons, other times at his house during the studio’s crew parties, where he often encouraged students to use his hot tub, she said. She additionally remembers him being “discouraging” of her relationships at the time. 

She didn’t know it at the moment, she said, but looking back, she said she has since realized his jokes and comments were an invitation to have “some sort of a flirtatious, romantic, sexual relationship with him.”

“He gradually throws in little comments that are too sexual to see how you'll tolerate it,” she added. “They just keep getting more and more and more sexual and more inappropriate until you're just in a pot of boiling water, and you don't realize it.”

Rebekah Daley’s time at Shepherd was draining, she remembered. Too much of her energy — energy that she believes should have been spent honing her instrument — was instead directed toward protecting herself. 

“I think it would be really interesting to go to school and assume that the teacher is there trying to teach you, and trying to do his best by you,” Daley said. “But I always knew that that was not going to be the reality for me.”

Daley has kept close contact with several of her peers from Shepherd, many of whom grappled with similar behavior in VerMeulen’s studio. “I think that no one has a lot of trust in Rice.”

“And what about you?” the Thresher asked.

“Absolutely not. None.”

This story was fact checked by Leslie Rangel. Copy editing by Brian Gaar. Editing by Cara Kelly and Olivia Messer. Additional support by The Barbed Wire’s art team and by Candace Henry and Billy Begala.

---