ANN ARBOR, Mich (CelebrityAccess) — Singer David Daniels, widely considered to be one of the world’s leading operatic countertenors, was arrested on Tuesday on charges of sexual assault.
According to the New York Times, Daniels, along with his husband Scott Walters, were arrested on Tuesday in Michigan in connection with an alleged sexual assault that occurred in 2010 in Houston, Texas.
The two men, who were being held in Washtenaw County Jail in Michigan on Wednesday while awaiting a hearing on bail and extradition, denied the accusations, the Times reported.
The two men were accused by singer Samuel Schultz who alleged in an interview in August that in 2010 as a graduate student at Rice University in Houston, he was drugged and assaulted after meeting Daniels and Walters while attending a cast party. Schultz alleges that after the party, he was invited to Mr. Daniels and Mr. Walters’s apartment where he was given a drink that rendered him unconscious and later awoke after being sexually assaulted.
A lawyer for the two accused men flatly denied the accusations. “David and Scott are innocent of any wrongdoing,” the attorney said in a statement per the Times. “Sam Schultz is not a victim. He never would have gotten this much attention from his singing, and he knows and resents that fact. He waited eight years to complain about adult, consensual sex to ride the #MeToo movement to unearned celebrity. We will fight this.”
In Augut, Schultz told the New York Daily News that he had initially been afraid to make the allegations against the two men public, over concern that it might damage his career and first went public with his claims anonymously last summer.
In a charging document reviewed by the Times, police in Houston said they found Schultz, who was identified by initials, to “credible and reliable” and noted that they had reviewed medical records from 2010 showing that Schultz sought medical attention for sexual assault.
In recent years, Daniels has served as a music professor at the University of Michigan, which granted him tenure earlier this year. This fall, he was placed on leave amid the accusations, the Times reported.
Daniels made his professional debut as Sesto in Handel’s Giulio Cesare at the Metropolitan Opera in 1999 and has also performed with the Lyric Opera in Chicago and the San Francisco Opera.
In November, the San Francisco opera announced that he had been removed from his role as Medoro in a production of Orlando after Andrew Lipian, a student at the University of Michigan, accused Daniels of sexual assault and filed a lawsuit against the University.
