prominent author's past sexual assaults surface

[Demovictory9]

Sexual Assault Allegations Against Biographer Halt Shipping of His Roth Book
W.W. Norton, citing the accusations that the author, Blake Bailey, faces, said it would stop shipping and promoting his new best-selling book.

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In June 2003, she was a graduate student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and engaged to be married. She and Mr. Bailey both happened to be visiting New Orleans at the same time and met for drinks. Afterward, he invited her back to the place he was staying, where he kissed her, initiated oral sex, and when she squirmed away, he pinned her to the bed and forcibly had sex with her, she said. He finally stopped when she told him she wasn’t using birth control, she recalled.

After he drove her to her father’s house, where she was staying, Mr. Bailey said he had “wanted her” since the day they met, when she was 12, Ms. Peyton said.

She told two friends about the assault shortly after it happened but didn’t go to the police, in part because she was overwhelmed and wanted to move on with her life, she said. She later began seeing a therapist with experience in sexual assault counseling.


One of her friends, Catherine Roach, who is now a professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University, remembers the call from Ms. Peyton that summer.

“She called me and told me that he raped her, that she told him no and he didn’t stop,” Ms. Roach said. “I remember that she told me that he held her down.”

In an email reviewed by the Times, Mr. Bailey apologized to Ms. Peyton for his behavior days after the encounter, and asked her not to speak to others about it. She last heard from him in the summer of 2020, when Mr. Bailey wrote her again, in a message also reviewed by the Times, in which he alluded to “the awfulness on that night 17 years ago” and said he was suffering from mental illness at the time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/books/philip-roth-blake-bailey.html

[Scrivener7]

1. Figures he would pick Roth as a subject.

[Demovictory9]

2. his role model