Jerry Gorovoy, a longtime assistant to the famed French-American artist Louise Bourgeois and a New York art-world figure, has been accused of repeatedly sexually assaulting a young artist between 2001 and 2002.
Blair David Hines, the artist, alleged Gorovoy sexually abused him in a lawsuit filed in a Manhattan Supreme Court in October 2023, according to court filings. The suit was filed under New York’s Adult Survivors’ Act, which created a one-year window in which people could bring civil sexual assault lawsuits, even decades after the alleged conduct occurred and after the applicable deadline for filing a claim had expired.
Following an extended discovery phase, the court ordered in October 2024 that both parties finish depositions and other examinations and disclosures by June 2025.
Gorovoy has denied the allegations, according to court documents, which also include claims of grooming and blackmail.
Hines, born in Canada in 1978, moved to New York in 2000 to pursue a career in art when he was 22 years old but struggled with making his way in the city, the lawsuit stated. One night, as he was planning his return home, he met Gorovoy, who offered to look at his portfolio. At the time, Gorovoy was 47 and had already worked for Bourgeois for two decades.
Gorovoy had become closely linked to Bourgeois in the early 1980s as her fame grew after a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. As the artist became more reclusive, Gorovoy reportedly managed aspects of her personal life, artwork, and finances. In 1997, he helped facilitate Bourgeois’s move to Cheim and Read gallery, solidifying his influence in New York’s art world, according to Hines’s lawsuit. (Bourgeois, who died in 2010, is not accused of any wrongdoing.)
When Gorovoy visited Hines’s studio two days after they met, he quickly glanced at Hines’s artwork before telling him it wasn’t interesting and leaving. But Hines found a note from Gorovoy at his studio two days later apologizing for his rudeness and proposing to meet him for a drink.
Hines moved back to Canada in December 2000, but Gorovoy allegedly launched a campaign to get him to return to New York by promising to support his professional development. Hines ultimately agreed to return to New York in January 2001 with Gorovoy’s help in obtaining housing, a studio, and a job as an assistant to photographer Adam Fuss.
“Within a matter of months after Mr. Hines’s return to New York, and by Mr. Gorovoy’s design, nearly every aspect of Mr. Hines’s personal and professional life—from his housing, to his work, to his art materials and career prospects—was provided by, controlled by, and could be taken away by Mr. Gorovoy,” Hines’s lawyers claimed in the lawsuit.
When Gorovoy made his first alleged advances at a dinner in Spring 2001, Hines said he told him that he was not gay. Hines claimed that Gorovoy later claimed he could no longer support him but quickly changed his mind.
In the lawsuit, Hines alleged that, beginning that summer, Gorovoy engaged in increasingly violent sex acts starting with an incident of masturbation in front of him to violent kissing and unwanted touching and eventually forced anal rape.
“Mr. Hines never consented to or participated in any manner in any of Mr. Gorovoy’s sexual assaults,” his lawyers said in the lawsuit. “Mr. Hines disassociated during the rapes to escape the trauma. He was shell-shocked. He felt he had been erased from the world.”
The last alleged incident occurred in June 2002 and Hines fled to Portugal in August to escape Gorovoy, according to the lawyers. He confessed to a friend who visited him the following year that he had allegedly been raped and has purportedly seen therapists for treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, anxiety, and insomnia ever since.
Hines has also accused Gorovoy of blackmail in the lawsuit, alleging that Gorovoy threatened to take away his home, job, studio, and U.S. visa, which he said Gorovoy helped him secure. Hines is seeking damages to be determined at trial.
Lawyers for both Gorovoy and Hines did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
“The fabricated allegations in the complaint were initially made as part of a demand that Mr. Gorovoy pay the plaintiff millions of dollars to avoid the filing of a lawsuit,” Gorovoy’s lawyers said in a statement to the Daily Beast in November, adding that they investigated the claims made by Hines and are confident they are “baseless and falsely sensationalized.”