Photo: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
WW Norton & Company paused distribution of a bestselling Philip Roth biography after several women accused the author, Blake Bailey, of grooming them as high school students and then pursuing sexual relations with them in their early adulthood. “These allegations are serious,” the publisher said in a statement. “In light of them, we have decided to pause the transmission and promotion of ‘Philip Roth: The Biography’ pending any further information.” Bailey’s literary agency, The Story Factory, has also dropped the author. Bailey told me The Angels Times that the “allegations are completely false,” and his attorney said in an email statement to NOLA.com that Bailey never acted inappropriately with a student, calling the site’s allegations “hurtful descriptions of adult behavior.”
Before Bailey was known for his popular biographies of writers such as John Cheever, Richard Yates and Charles Jackson, he was an eighth grade English teacher at Lusher Middle School in New Orleans in the 1990s, where a group of former students claim that he was. inappropriate with them. In a NOLA.com report, three women described sexual encounters with their former teacher in early adulthood, one of them accusing Bailey of raping her and telling her he’d wanted her since she was in eighth grade. As a teacher, he reportedly had flirty banter with his students, asking about their love lives, and leaving notes in class sheets that made them feel special. One woman said she considered him a confidant who considered them mature enough to read books Lolita, which features a sexual relationship between a middle-aged literature professor and his 12-year-old stepdaughter. Others claim that he made regular inquiries about their virginity status after they left Lusher. The LA Times quoted a former student, Eve Peyton, who described his behavior in a letter as “textbook care” and “something of an open secret.” “Even those of us who were hurt by him still loved him to some level,” she wrote. “He should have been our mentor. In many ways he was. And then he used our trust in him against us in the cruellest and most intimate way possible. “
The allegations against Bailey surfaced in the comments section of an April 16 blog post by Ed Champion condemning the Roth biography for being “drenched in casual misogyny” (Champion has his own history of misogyny allegations). Some critics felt that Bailey was too sympathetic to Roth’s portrayal of women in his books and the treatment of women in real life. Bailey told Vulture in an earlier interview that the two never discussed the Me Too movement, although they did [Roth’s] controversial sex life. According to New York Times, Bailey once claimed that a major reason Roth hired him was that he was not “too primitive or judgmental about a man who had this flowery love life.” The biography now on hiatus was released on April 6 and debuted in The New York Times bestseller list.