A federal appeals court has reinstated a retaliation claim filed by a former Eastman School of Music doctoral candidate who allegedly failed to get any job interviews after he rejected his department chairman’s sexual advances.

Joseph Irrera was a graduate piano student at the prestigious Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester, New York, and pursuing a doctor of music arts degree when he allegedly rejected unwanted sexual advances from his teacher, Douglas Humphreys, who was the piano department chairman, according to Thursday’s ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York in Dr. Joseph Irrera v. Dr. Douglas Humphreys, individually, University of Rochester.

Following that, he received a failing grade at two piano recitals where Mr. Humphreys was one of the judges. According to the ruling, he told another teacher before the first recital that “it will not go well.”

A few months after the second recital, Mr. Irrera won the American Protégé International Competition and performed at Carnegie Hall for the second time. After he was assigned another member of the piano faculty as a teacher, he was successful on all his subsequent recitals and graduated with a doctor of musical arts degree in 2014.

Mr. Humphreys told Mr. Irrera in a recorded conversation he “would never get a university professor job” and threatened to “make his life a living hell” if he made any written report of sexual harassment. He did report the situation verbally, according to the ruling.

After receiving his degree from Eastman, Mr. Irrera applied to 28 colleges and universities for open teaching positions in their piano departments, but did not receive a single invitation for an interview, which he said was “extraordinarily rare” for an Eastman graduate.

Mr. Irrera filed suit in U.S. District Court in Rochester on charges including retaliation. The court dismissed his retaliation claim, concluding it was speculative because he had failed to make factual allegations about Mr. Humphreys or any professor at the school giving him a reference.

On appeal, a unanimous three-judge panel reinstated the retaliation claim. “Irrera is a graduate of one of the nation’s most highly regarded schools of music and the recipient of a prestigious honor,” said the ruling.

“Although it is not impossible that all 28 schools to which he applied for open teaching positions deemed his credentials insufficient to warrant an interview, it is plausible that these schools received negative references from the chairman of Eastman’s piano department, who had been Irrera’s teacher.

“It is also plausible that a teacher who warned his student that he would make his life a ‘living hell’ if he made a written report of the teacher’s sexual advances would give that student a negative reference, even if the student later complained to a school dean only orally.

“And it is also plausible, that since such a teacher is the chair of a department, he would be contacted by schools to which Irrera applied even though he was understandably not listed as a reference,” said the ruling.

“Although Irrera’s complaint makes no allegation that he is aware of a negative reference sent to any particular school, common experience indicates that schools and colleges rarely, if ever, disclose the content of the references they receive, in the absence of court-ordered discovery,” said the ruling, in remanding the case for further proceedings.