The allegations against Boren, 77, who was once the state’s governor and a U.S. senator, surfaced in November, and the university sought the help of the Atlanta law firm Jones Day to investigate, a university spokeswoman said.
Separately, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation was asked Thursday by the university police to help in the investigation of Boren and James Hall, a former vice president for development at the university, a bureau spokeswoman said Friday.
Boren could not be reached for comment Friday night. His lawyer said he denied the allegations. Hall could not be reached on Friday night; he has denied any wrongdoing.
The website nondoc on Tuesday reported extensively on the allegations involving the student, Jess Eddy, who was in his early 20s at the time of the episodes.
Eddy told the website he was subjected to harassment and unwanted sexual advances by Boren, who was then 69. The website also reported that Eddy said Hall engaged in one instance of inappropriate touching.
One of the episodes with Boren happened during a trip to Houston in 2010 while Eddy and the university president had drinks in a hotel room after meeting with alumni and potential donors, Eddy told the website.
The lawyer for Boren, Clark Brewster, said Friday that Eddy worked as a student assistant to the university president and also answered calls to a university complaint hotline. Boren advised Eddy when he sought guidance about entering politics and also wrote a letter on his behalf to a judge when Eddy faced vandalism charges, Brewster said. But he added that Boren did not have a close working relationship with the student.
“He would know him but not very well,” Brewster said.
In an interview with lawyers from Jones Day, Eddy said Boren had not engaged in any misbehavior, Brewster said, adding that when he learned about that interview, he asked Eddy to memorialize his comments in a letter, which he did in a letter dated March 14.
The letter signed by Eddy and provided by Brewster on Friday night said: “This is in connection with information you shared with me regarding allegations that have been made against David Boren. To the extent that any of these allegations are attributed to me, I would like to make perfectly clear that they are not true.”
Neither Jones Day nor Eddy could be reached on Friday night.
Sara Bana, executive director of Civic Services Community Advocacy, an outreach and civil rights group in Oklahoma serving as a spokeswoman for Eddy, said he had been manipulated into writing the letter “in an moment of crisis.”
Three days after the letter, Eddy called Boren and asked for compensation for his “pain and suffering,” a call that Eddy said he regretted because it could change the public perception of his account, the nondoc website reported.
Brewster said Boren paid no money to Eddy and said of the allegations, “This is the kind of thing that causes you to be gut sick.”
Brewster said his client had “an exemplary public life.” Boren, who became university president in 1994 and retired last year, served as governor from 1974 to 1978 and was a U.S. senator from 1979 to 1994.
Bana said Eddy had been “very transparent and truthful” about his call to Boren seeking money. “I understand that Brewster thinks he has something big, but it’s one piece of a very complex and long situation,” she said.
For now, she said, supporters of Eddy were focused on creating a safe space to allow him to “cope and process.”
There was no clear timetable for when Jones Day would conclude its investigation, a university spokeswoman said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.