One of the most striking elements of the allegations against the celebrated literary biographer Blake Bailey was the speed and fervency of his denial. Over the course of recent weeks, Bailey, 57, whose biography of Philip Roth was published last month, has been accused of multiple acts of grooming and sexual assault. The allegations encompass a 20-year period, from the mid-1990s when Bailey started teaching an eighth-grade English class at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans, until 2015, when Valentina Rice, a publishing executive at Bloomsbury USA, claims that he raped her at the house of the New York Times book critic Dwight Garner. Bailey was immediately dropped by his agent, and his American publisher, WW Norton (which, it emerged, had previously been made aware of Rice’s account), halted a second printing of his book on Roth, which was a New York Times bestseller.
A statement from Bailey’s lawyer emphasised that Bailey had never “received any complaints about his time at Lusher”. In the post-#MeToo age, such a defence carries little weight; Bailey was in a position of power, and there have been a number of allegations of him engaging in overfamiliar behaviour in a school setting. Though he has dismissed all of the recent claims against him as false, Bailey has admitted in the past to having relations with former students.
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