A “exhaustive” independent review of the allegations of sexual misconduct made against the novelist Junot Díaz has found no evidence requiring his removal from the board of the Pulitzer prize.
The Dominican American novelist was accused in May of forcibly kissing the writer Zinzi Clemmons, as well as behaving inappropriately towards two other female writers. He subsequently voluntarily stepped down as chairman of the Pulitzer board, as the organisation launched a review of the allegations.
The board has now announced the conclusion of the five-month investigation carried out by the Washington DC law firm Williams & Connolly, which “involved interviews with dozens of witnesses and analysis of hundreds of pages of documents (as well as audiotapes, where available)”. The review “did not find evidence warranting removal of Professor Diaz” and “after full discussion and consideration by the members”, he will be “welcomed” to resume his duties on the board, until the conclusion of his term in April 2019.
In a statement to the New York Times, Díaz said that he “welcomed the independent investigation and was heartened by its thoroughness and determination to run down every detail … I am grateful the investigation found the truth. I look forward to returning to the Pulitzer’s important work.”
In June, an investigation by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the author is a faculty member, looked into Díaz’s behaviour towards female staff and students. It said it had “not found or received information that would lead us to take any action to restrict Prof Díaz in his role as an MIT faculty member. We expect him to teach next academic year, as scheduled.” The novelist was also retained as fiction editor at the Boston Review, with the magazine saying that it had conducted its own investigation and found no pattern of abuse.
The first accusations of sexual misconduct came shortly after the Pulitzer-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao had revealed in an essay that he had been raped as a child. “I take responsibility for my past,” he said in a statement after the allegations were made. “That is the reason I made the decision to tell the truth of my rape and its damaging aftermath. This conversation is important and must continue. I am listening to and learning from women’s stories in this essential and overdue cultural movement. We must continue to teach all men about consent and boundaries.”
But in an interview in July, Díaz categorically denied Clemmons’s accusations. “It didn’t happen,” he said, adding that he hadn’t initially denied the kiss because “I didn’t feel like anyone would listen to me. I felt like people had already moved on to the punishment phase.”
Novelist Monica Byrne had added her voice to Clemmons’s in May, saying that she had experienced a “verbal sexual assault” by Díaz in 2014, and that she had “never experienced such virulent misogyny in my adult life”. Following the Pulitzer review’s conclusions, she tweeted that she was “speechless”.
