Musician Sues Ex-Girlfriend After She Fakes Rejection Letter to Dream School
Becoming a professional musician is hard work. A musician’s life is filled with hours of practicing, being mentored by the right people, and always improving their craft.
But if someone is a musician, they absolutely love what they do; they have a deep passion for creating and performing art.
Such is the case for clarinetist, Eric Abramovitz. He first learned to play the clarinet when he was 7 years old. Over the following 13 years, he won awards, studied with the top performers, and was even a featured soloist with multiple symphonies.
All of his training, practicing and performing had been preparing him for a chance to study with Yehuda Gilad.
Gilad teaches at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles, California, and only accepts two students each year at that particular institution. A chance to study with the internationally renowned clarinetist would basically guarantee a symphony career after graduating.
He had practiced for hours in preparation for his live audition in 2014 and despite the odds, Abramovitz was confident that he would be accepted.
About a month later, he received an email informing him that he had not been accepted. Crushed, he turned to Jennifer Lee, his girlfriend at the time, for comfort and finished his degree at McGill University, his professional music career was put on hold.
Abramovitz applied for another opportunity to study with Gilad almost two years later, but when he walked in Gilad remembered the young artist and asked him a question that changed everything.
Gilad looked at him and asked, “What are you doing here? You rejected me.” Abramovitz was confused.
“You don’t reject him,” he told the Montreal Gazette. The young clarinetist went home extremely confused. He decided to forward the email to Gilad who responded that he had never seen that email.
Now that Abramovitz knew the truth, well, at least part of it. He just didn’t know who would do such a thing.
He first thought that maybe a bitter, tech-savvy clarinetist was responsible until one of his friends suggested that it could’ve been Lee, the girl Abramovitz was dating at the time of his audition. The two had ended their relationship since.
Abramovitz basically lived with his ex-girlfriend and trusted her very quickly. He often left his laptop where she could easily access it.
They decided to log into the email address, giladyehuda09@gmail.com, with one of her old Facebook passwords. It was a match! “We felt like Sherlock Holmes,” he said.
He later found out that she had also sent him a fake email in response to his application to study at Julliard School in New York.
“I never would’ve even considered that the person I trusted the most would have done something like this to me,” he said. “It was not only a stab in the back but in the heart.”
After discovering the fake email accounts, Abramovitz sued Lee for “loss of reputation, loss of educational opportunity, and delay in the exercise of his chosen profession.” She never responded.
The judge ruled in favor of his case, recognizing that his loss of chance was due to Lee’s impersonation of both Gilad and Abramovitz. He also took into consideration the extra tuition Abramovitz paid as a result of not knowing about his full-scholarship offer to Colburn.
Abramovitz finally got the opportunity to study with Gilad at the University of Southern California and afterward accepted positions with both the Nashville Symphony and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
“I am certain that had Eric not been robbed of his opportunity to study with me two years earlier, he could already have won an audition and been commanding this respectable salary two years earlier,” Gilad said in his affidavit.
He continued, “I am very frustrated that a highly talented musician like Eric was the victim of such an unthinkable, immoral act that delayed his progress and advancement as an up-and-coming young musician and delayed his embarking on a most promising career.”
As for Abramovitz, he is just thankful that his dream career eventually came to fruition. “I’m very thankful that despite what happened and what she did I still landed on my feet and realized what I set out to do,” he said.
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