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WW Norton & Company has stopped distributing a best-selling biography of Philip Roth after several women accused its author, Blake Bailey, of caring for them as high school students and then having sex with them at an early age. early adult. “These allegations are serious,” the editor said in a statement. “In light of this, we have decided to discontinue the delivery and promotion of ‘Philip Roth: Biography’ pending any additional information that may arise.” Bailey’s literary agency, The Story Factory, also dropped the author. Bailey told him Angels Times that “the allegations are completely false,” and his lawyer said in an email to NOLA.com that Bailey never acted inappropriately with any student, calling the site’s allegations “painful descriptions of adult conduct.” ”.
Before Bailey became known for his popular biographies of writers such as John Cheever, Richard Yates and Charles Jackson, he was an eighth-grade English teacher in the 1990s at Lusher Middle School in New Orleans, where a group of former students they claim it was inappropriate for them. In a NOLA.com report, three women described having sex with their former teacher in early adulthood, one accusing Bailey of raping her and telling her that he had wanted her since he was in eighth grade. As a teacher, he would engage in flirtatious games with his students, ask them about their love lives, and leave notes in the class diaries that made them feel special. One woman said she viewed him as a confidant who considered her mature enough to read books like Lolita, which presents a sexual relationship between a middle-aged literature teacher and his 12-year-old stepdaughter. Others claim that she frequently asked about the status of their virginity after leaving Lusher. TO Times quoted a former student, Eve Peyton, who described her behavior in a letter as “manual care” and “something secret.” “Even those of us wounded by him loved him to a certain degree,” she wrote. “She was supposed to be our mentor. In many ways, he was. And then he used our trust in him against us in the cruelest and most intimate way possible. “
The allegations against Bailey appeared in the comments section of an April 16 blog post by Ed Champion, which condemns Roth’s biography for being “full of accidental misogyny” (Champion has his own history of allegations of misogyny). Some critics thought Bailey was too sympathetic to Roth’s portrayal of women in his books and his treatment of women in real life. Bailey told Vulture in a previous interview that the two had never discussed the I too movement, although “they discussed exhaustively [Roth’s] controversial sex life. “According to New York TimesBailey once argued that an important reason Roth hired him was that he did not take “too primordial or too judgmental of a man who had this flourishing love life.” The now-paused biography was released on April 6 and debuted on The New York Times list of bestsellers.