Chapter 1: What content warnings should listeners be aware of?
Something Was Wrong is intended for mature audiences and discusses topics that may be upsetting. Please consume the following episodes with care. This season discusses sexual, physical and psychological violence. For a full content warning, sources and resources for each episode, please visit the episode notes.
Opinions shared by guests of the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Broken Cycle Media. The podcast and any linked materials should not be misconstrued as a substitution for legal or medical advice. We reached out to Professor Cato Buss and the University of Central Oklahoma for comment in response to allegations in the weeks prior to this episode's release.
We have not received a response. Thank you so much for listening. sexual harassment and assault on campus isn't just peer-to-peer. A large institutional survey across eight collegiate campuses found that among undergraduates who reported sexual harassment, 12.5% of freshmen and nearly 25% of seniors reported experiencing sexual harassment by faculty or staff.
In these incidents, about 61% of reported faculty and staff harassment perpetrators were faculty members, with most identified as male. At the heart of professor-student abuse is a power imbalance. Professors control grades, recommendations, educational opportunities, scholarships, and in some cases, even future career opportunities.
This imbalance can easily be exploited when harm continuously goes unchecked. Abuse between educator and student can take many forms and can include but are not limited to unwanted sexual advances or propositions, requests for sexual favors tied to academic benefit, sexual harassment during office hours, and or grooming behaviors that build trust before exploitation.
Because of the authority the professor holds, students may fear retaliation, damage to their academic standing, or disbelief if they speak up. And even when students do report, disciplinary action is taken in a minority of reported cases, an outcome many survivors describe as deeply re-traumatizing.
In Chapter 2 of this season, you'll hear from survivors Miranda, Olivia, Rihanna, and Morgan, who crossed paths while studying theater at the University of Central Oklahoma. Miranda was a first-year student when she met Cato Buss, a tenured professor who later became head of the theater department and who initially offered her scholarship support.
Over time, Miranda says the relationship became less consensual, shaped by a growing imbalance of power. As allegations surfaced and Miranda learned of Morgan's Title IX investigation, she began to better understand her own experience. With the support of her friends, Miranda eventually entered into her own Title IX process, one she says left her demanding more justice.
Together, their stories reveal how abuse of power persists in hierarchical campus spaces and how institutional betrayals can compound harm. What's often lost in institutional responses is the human cost. In their wake, perpetrators often leave a profoundly devastating impact on their victims.
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Chapter 2: How does institutional betrayal manifest in campus environments?
I'm here mostly because of my best friend, Olivia, who is pretty integral to the story. Olivia and I studied theater in college, and it's a huge part of why I'm telling this story and what happened to me. And Olivia was there for all of it. Her being my best friend has given me a lot of the strength and bravery that I have to be able to speak out about what happened to me.
She is kind of the catalyst to why I chose to record this. So this is dedicated to Olivia.
If your best friends were describing you, how would they describe you to somebody who's never met you?
I would say that they would describe me as funny, brave, and smart. I grew up in a town called Sand Springs, which is not the biggest town in Oklahoma. Oklahoma itself is pretty small and generally conservative. I had a pretty chaotic childhood. My parents divorced one another when I was pretty young. I was two, and I was toted back and forth between the two of them.
Until I turned 18 and went to college. My mom, I think, has struggled a lot with various addiction and pain in her life. And until I was in fifth grade, she was married to a man who was very abusive to our family. Half of the time I was with her and my stepdad and the other half of the time I was with my dad. My dad is quite the opposite of who I am. We don't see eye to eye on a lot of things.
I have non-conservative views and don't get along with some of my family because of that. They also never spoke to one another, so I was the middleman between the two of them. And my first recollection of them ever being in a room together was in high school when I graduated.
All that to say, I'm pretty close with my mom now and we have worked really hard on our relationship and forgiving one another. Yeah, it was just generally chaotic and I think set the stage for me to be 18 and moving away from home for the first time and being really excited.
It was the first time that I'd ever been living in one place longer than a week because I had spent one week with my dad and then one week with my mom. And I had done that ever since I was two. I went to University of Central Oklahoma, which is about an hour and a half away from where I grew up and where all of my family lives.
I did that intentionally because I was pretty tired of my family life and I was really excited to go to school far away. I would have gone out of state had we had the money or the ability to go out of state. My high school was relatively small, so I knew where everyone was going to college.
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Chapter 3: What experiences do survivors share about professor-student relationships?
But to all of us, it felt like he was in charge of our futures.
A lot of times in grooming situations, there's some boundary testing where professors may gradually cross professional lines. Did you sense any of that behavior from him? Totally.
My sophomore year, I was cast in my first play of his. It was a show called Love and Information. It was this immersive piece of theater where we would eventually perform it in a warehouse. The idea is that the audience would walk around and catch these clips of scenes as they were happening live in person. I was cast in this play of his, and it was a very small cast.
I think there was probably like 14 of us total.
Chapter 4: How does power imbalance play a role in abuse on campus?
The play used something called Meisner technique, which is what he was trained in. He does have real accolades when it comes to this.
For those who are not familiar, could you explain a little bit more about the Meisner technique?
Yeah, I think it's really important to the story, and I think it is a really big piece in the way that he was able to groom me specifically. Meisner is built on repetition and vulnerability. He would always say like, you're living truthfully in imaginary circumstances, which is the whole idea of Meisner. He took us through all of these training techniques that he had just learned.
It was like pretty fresh on the brain for him, I suppose. My only experience in Meisner really is him. And so I'm not certain how much of it is actual Meisner technique and how much of it is like his version of Meisner technique. The way that this rehearsal process went is different than any other show that I've ever done. He started us not even with the script.
He started us with these exercises of repetition. You sit across from your partner and you start with physical observations. So like I would sit across from Olivia, who is my best friend. And this is where our friendship also started because she was in this play with me. I would sit across from her and I would go, you have brown hair. And she would repeat it. She would say, I have brown hair.
And you would go back and forth until it leans into something more specific. And the whole idea is that you're trying to like allow yourself to be vulnerable enough to be seen. And you're trying to allow yourself to hurt on purpose. And the idea is eventually you're sitting across from your peer who you see every day at school and you go into stuff like, You're scared. I'm scared.
You're terrified. I'm terrified. You're depressed. I'm depressed. You reach these incredibly sad and deep moments. Then he would dig into it and would amp up the repetition by yelling at us and being like, I don't believe you. Tell the truth. Tell the truth.
I'm sitting across from one of my peers and we're in the midst of saying all this really intense stuff that's not necessarily true, but you begin to believe it. And he is yelling at you to amplify how you're feeling so then by the end of your scene or practice you're sobbing so hard you can't breathe and then he's there to console you and to be like you did so amazing what an excellent job
Don't you feel awesome? Also, he's crying. He also breaks down into tears to act like an empathetic person and to make your guard totally down because you've just experienced this crazy emotional high and low. That's just week three of rehearsal, of this three-month rehearsal process. So that's not even like working with the text of the play. Eventually, we start using Meisner's
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Chapter 5: How do travel experiences impact boundaries in student-professor relationships?
So I was in a vignette with a guy who, at no fault of his own, he was just cast in this play. He just happened to be someone in our department who was older. I was 19 when this play started. He was probably 25. All of our scene content was about sex and relationships.
Meisner was just like the thread through all of this and it allowed him to break each one of us down individually and then be there to put us back together. I had been able to convince myself that it was something that I was really excited about. Kato had cast me in this and had made me feel like he thought of me as a sexual being. I decided to be comfortable with it.
I wanted to be a sexual being. I don't really, to be honest, remember feeling weird about it either because it was my first play that I was doing at UCO that was different than anything else that I'd ever done. In my head, it was also like, none of this is real. I'm just playing pretend because I'm an actor. And it was around that time when he would get my phone number and
I remember he emailed me and was like, can I get your phone number so that I can text you about the show? Before this, he would email me way more than any normal professor would email a student back and forth on my school email account. Once he got my phone number, he would text me after rehearsal and be like, really excellent job. It's so moving to watch you be so vulnerable.
You brought me to tears with this scene. So that was all throughout this rehearsal process. And then at some point during the rehearsal process, he would add me on Snapchat, which was like the next tier of if you are cool enough in this group of Kato favorites, you would eventually get added on Snapchat. Part of the promotional work of this play was a Snapchat filter.
It's the Snapchat filter where your mouth is open and rainbow spills out of your mouth. It was so weird that that was our promotional image because it basically resulted in him adding a lot of us on Snapchat so that we took pictures of ourselves with the filter and then sent it to him on Snapchat so that he could screenshot it and then use it as the promotional image.
So that's when like direct communication other than school assisted forms of communication began around this rehearsal process.
How long did you guys work on that project together?
I think we started rehearsal at the beginning of the school year, which would have been August, and the show went up around Halloween. So from like August to October-ish.
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Chapter 6: What are the dynamics of grooming behaviors in educational settings?
We always love doing pranks together. She just really makes everybody feel comfortable. She's silly. She's always down for a laugh, but she's also sensitive. She's so in tune with her emotions, everybody else's emotions, and she's just ready to encourage everybody that she comes across. I decided to study theater because it's what I had always done.
I was nine the first time I was in a professional production. It was just kind of a natural next step for me to study it in school. And I got a talent scholarship from Cato. I was recruited to the college. Cato and I met winter of my senior year of high school, and it was at a recruiting event in North Texas. He was there recruiting and my number was called.
I really wasn't interested in joining the program. And then I had a friend who was and she went on a tour. We drove up to the school one weekend and I liked it. It wasn't my top choice school by any means. But then we started talking about scholarships and he was willing to give me a talent scholarship. And so I decided to go for it.
What were your initial impressions of him and his personality?
Mostly it was positive. I mean, he really seemed like he wanted to invest in me. And when I got to the school for my tour, it very much felt that way. Like I could tell he wanted me there, that he wanted to help me grow and to give me all the tools that I needed to be a successful actress. So I felt like going there, it would really do me a lot of good.
He was very paternal to me in a lot of ways. Whenever we first met, it felt like he was a very strong mentor in my life.
Did you feel close to him even in the first semester of freshman year? Yes.
I did. We were very close from the second that I got there. We would have these majors meetings where all of the people in the department, we would come together. We would talk about stuff going on on campus, stuff happening in the department. At my first one, there was a senior that he loved, had a wonderful relationship with, and he had that senior approach me and begin to mentor me.
And that student and other students you were close to were like, you're Kato's new girl, meaning that I was gonna be like the kid that he cast and everything. I remember, I think it was that day, getting a text from Kato. He had either asked for my phone number or given me his, I don't remember. He had said something along the lines of, you know, I hope this is OK.
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