My #MeToo Moment

On May 4, 2018, Junot Díaz was trending on Twitter. The celebrated novelist and MIT professor had been on a panel that day at a writers’ conference in Sydney, Australia. Weeks earlier he had stunned readers with an essay in The New Yorker — revealing his rape at age 8, his struggles with suicidal depression, his regrets for cheating on girlfriends and hurting them with “my lies” and “my choices,” and his efforts to do better.

During the Q&A in Sydney, another novelist, Zinzi Clemmons, stood up and suggested that Díaz’s essay was intended to pre-empt accusations of sexual misconduct. According to a member of the audience, Clemmons asked him “why you treated me that way” after a workshop six years earlier, when she was a 26-year-old graduate student at Columbia University. Clemmons then dropped the microphone; Díaz asked her to stay for his answer, but she called his response “bullshit” as she left the room. A few hours later, Clemmons wrote on Twitter that Díaz used the workshop she had invited him to “as an opportunity to corner and forcibly kiss” her. She said she had “receipts” — emails he had sent her afterward — and asserted that she was “far from the only one he’s done this” to.

Díaz withdrew from the conference. Since 2003 he had been fiction editor at Boston Review, the literary and political magazine I have co-edited for two decades with the political philosopher Joshua Cohen. Díaz texted me from the airport and offered to resign. I suggested he wait; I wanted to understand what was happening. “I’m innocent,” he texted back. I had followed the many #MeToo cases against prominent men in recent months, from Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K. and Aziz Ansari, but this time I would not simply be an observer. I didn’t sleep that night.

On social media, accusations from two other women writers quickly followed Clemmons’s. Carmen Maria Machado tweeted that Díaz “went off on her” and subjected her to an “enraged” 20-minute rant at a 2012 event at the University of Iowa, where she had recently completed a graduate program. She called Díaz a “beloved misogynist” whose books were “misogynist trash” and asserted that he had “treated women horrifically in every way possible.” Monica Byrne stated on Facebook and Twitter that Díaz yelled “rape” in her face, talked over her, and subjected her to “virulent misogyny” at a dinner party in 2014; she said the incident was “violent” and characterized the encounter as “verbal sexual assault.” The same day, the writer Alisa Valdes posted a since-deleted essay, “I Tried to Warn You about Junot Díaz,” on her blog, revisiting a sexual relationship she said she had with Díaz in the mid-1990s while she was a reporter at The Boston Globe. Citing a decade-old blog post in which she claimed to have discussed her “painful” experience with him, she wrote that he hadn’t told her he had a girlfriend, that he’d asked her to clean his kitchen, and, years later, that he’d insulted her writing by telling her that the girls in his classes liked her books.

BuzzFeed reported the story the day these allegations appeared, describing the confrontation in Sydney and repeating the charges from Machado and Byrne. Through his agent, Nicole Aragi, Díaz issued an ambiguous statement that appeared in an article in the books section of The New York Times, acknowledging the importance of #MeToo, taking “responsibility” for his “past,” and claiming to be learning from women’s stories. Within days many major news organizations — including The Washington Post, NPR, Vox, and CNN — published their own versions, with no new information or investigation beyond the social-media posts cited by BuzzFeed and the Times. Meanwhile, Clemmons, in a statement to WGBH, said she didn’t want other women to go through the same experience she did.

Other accusations followed. On May 12, in the online literary magazine The Rumpus, the poet Shreerekha Subramanian, whom Díaz had referred to by her first initial in his New Yorker essay, offered her own account of a relationship she had as a graduate student with a faculty member in her department in the 1990s. (She did not name Díaz explicitly, but the details pointed to him.) On May 15, also in The Rumpus, Alisa Rivera, who says Díaz reached out to her on a dating site, described a lunch meeting in the early 2000s at an outdoor restaurant where she and Díaz had planned to talk about writing. Díaz, she said, insulted her after she complained that she was bullied as a child for being bookish and socially awkward. According to her account, he said, “you have the face of the oppressor” and told her she had to “darken up.” When she started to cry, Rivera wrote, he pulled her onto his lap. On Twitter, a man who participated in a writing workshop at Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA), which Díaz co-founded in 1999, described being devastated by Díaz’s harsh critique of his work, suggesting he was targeted because he was the only queer, disabled writer in the room.

Though none of Díaz’s accusers made explicit demands, a wave of reaction followed on social media. Many called for “canceling” Díaz, dropping his books from reading lists and replacing them with books by women writers instead, disinviting him from reading and teaching gigs, rescinding the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and removing his books from bookstores. Some booksellers said they would do so. Clemmons’s husband, André Naffis-Sahely, wrote in a since-deleted tweet, “Anyone looking for a fiction editor post? @Boston Review should be hiring fairly soon, as least as soon as @DebChasman & @jcohen570 catch up with the news. . . Same goes for @MIT.” In the Dominican Republic, where Díaz was born, the allegations were widely publicized in the press. (Díaz had been a target of nativist scorn ever since his condemnation of the government’s 2014 attempt to denationalize Dominicans of Haitian descent.)

I was disturbed by the stories of Díaz’s conduct. He was a colleague of 15 years, and I considered him a friend. He’d been a generous and collaborative fiction editor who, despite his celebrity, helped launch the careers of many young writers of color at our small nonprofit magazine. While we had never received any complaints about him — from our staff, writers we published, or anyone else — Josh and I didn’t want to condone or enable abuse. We knew #MeToo was changing the way we thought about abuses of power, and we wanted to do the right thing. We would have to make a decision about our magazine’s association with Díaz, and we would have to do it under quickly intensifying public pressure.

Thinking through the case was the most difficult thing I’ve done in decades in publishing — as an editor, a feminist, a colleague, and an employer. It would prove to be as complicated as it was confusing. It raised hard questions: about the role of journalists and social media in movements for justice; about the nature of public decision-making when there are no established guidelines for judgment, and when what is at stake stretches well beyond civil and criminal legal standards to a vision of social transformation; and even about what stories are for — how narratives of harm can create social change, and what kind.

Long after Josh and I made a public decision not to fire Díaz, I continued to struggle to make sense of the case. I knew I didn’t fully understand it, or my own feelings about it; five years later, I still think about it often, though I’m less defensive now about what I got wrong. This is an account of my experience, of how I tried to navigate the conflict between wanting to support the #MeToo movement and resisting what it seemed to call for. As the writer and activist adrienne maree brown has written: “I am not perfect. I will keep learning.” Five years later I’m still hopeful that, as she argues, critique and conversation can move us toward justice, collectively.

As Josh and I considered what to do, a broader public response was emerging. A group of primarily Latina scholars questioned whether Díaz’s alleged misbehavior merited the level of public vitriol directed at him, and they called for attentiveness to his own experience as a child of poverty, a man of color, an immigrant, and a victim of sexual violence himself. In an open letter published in The Chronicle on May 14, they expressed concern about a “full-blown media-harassment campaign” that had characterized Díaz “as a bizarre person, a sexual predator, a virulent misogynist, an abuser, and an aggressor.” They worried that the portrait of Díaz as a “sexual predator from whom all women must be protected reinforces racist stereotypes that cast Blacks and Latinxs as having an animalistic sexual ‘nature.’”

The letter continued:

The issue at hand is not whether or not one believes Díaz, or his accusers, but whether one approves the use of media to violently make a spectacle out of a single person while at the same time cancelling out the possibility of disagreement about the facts at hand, or erasing a sustained attention to how the violence of racial hatred, structural poverty, and histories of colonialism extend into the most intimate spaces.

Two days later one of the signatories, the philosopher Linda Alcoff, published a New York Times op-ed that revealed her own rape and expressed similar concerns about the pitch of the accusations against Díaz, which she suggested unfairly dismissed the importance of repentance — in particular, Díaz’s statement that he took responsibility for his behavior. She also worried about the “blanket acceptance of all accusations.”

In response, another group of scholars of color published a letter on May 23, taking the signatories of the first letter to task for undermining the large risks that women of color were taking to tell their stories. “We are concerned,” they wrote, “that the open letter published last week has sent the message that these highly respected members of the academic community prefer silence when the accused belongs to our communities.” They called for “signatories, the media, and others invested in this debate to consider what care they are offering survivors.” In a now-deleted tweet, Clemmons raised concerns about Díaz mentoring the “most vulnerable women in literature.”

Josh and I assumed that the accounts were true, but given that none of the charges directly involved his work at Boston Review, we weren’t sure how to think about the scope of our task. Taking the accusations seriously was a given, so we talked about what due process might look like. It didn’t help that nearly two weeks after the initial accusations, the news media had merely amplified rather than investigated them. We noted that in other cases of high-profile figures accused of sexual misconduct, investigative reports had typically accompanied or quickly followed allegations. Moreover, no one had reached out to us in advance of the public accusations.

Nor did the allegations seem comparable to those in other #MeToo cases; they seemed unprecedented in some ways, even for cases that had already expanded the range of behaviors for which men received public censure. There were many different kinds of allegations — from verbal insults and bad-boyfriend behavior to physical force. And the accusations that stemmed from two sexual relationships did not allege intimate sexual violence.

We agreed that we would have to do our own due diligence, and we initially took our cues from sexual-harassment law, which calls for the identification of a pattern. We didn’t see a pattern of sexual abuse, but we thought the standard wasn’t expansive enough. Machado’s and Byrne’s accusations didn’t seem to us to constitute “sexual misconduct,” the phrase that news articles were using to describe the array of charges against Díaz, but we wanted to know more about his public behavior. We were most concerned by Clemmons’s charge of a “forcible kiss.” And, given Díaz’s job as a contract fiction editor for Boston Review, I was worried that allegations of quid pro quo — exchanging sex for the promise of publication — might materialize. We wanted to know whether something had happened on our watch. Perhaps some of the eight-dozen authors, mostly women, whom Díaz had published in Boston Review could speak to the charge that he had a pattern of abusing the women he mentored. While the work of the vast majority of fiction writers we published came in over the transom, for a much smaller group, Díaz had edited their work, drawn agents’ interest in them, and helped launch their careers. In fact, he had agreed to be the fiction editor of Boston Review with our understanding that he would “put a thumb on the scale for women writers and writers of color.”

We started off by inviting phone calls. I reached out to some of our own writers and to others outside our network. I would also do my best to find out what other institutions knew about Díaz: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he teaches writing; and VONA, where he taught almost every summer.

I started with the women writers I guessed he’d had the most contact with during the range of years the allegations covered, from the mid-1990s to 2014. I sent them a note inviting conversation or correspondence about their experiences with him, under the condition of confidentiality. To my surprise, I got instant responses — many of the women wanted to talk. I took a deep breath before making my first call. Given the insinuation of Díaz’s consistently predatory behavior, I was not eager to hear what awful things a longtime colleague might have done.

The calls did not go as I expected they would. None of the women I spoke to said he had done anything inappropriate with them, nor had they heard of any wrongdoing. Some said they were afraid to speak out publicly against what they saw as viral character assassination. A few expressed relief that I had reached out. In an email, the writer Shivani Manghnani, whom Díaz edited for Boston Review, wrote, “I can’t say enough about how his work and teaching changed my life. Saved my life.” She added, “It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I have never been able to rely on a mentor as I have on Junot.” I understood these comments did not invalidate the allegations, but they did undermine the public portrait of a serial predator whose mentoring was a front to give him access to young women.

As I made calls to people who had worked with Díaz, three further pieces of evidence came to light. First, I listened to audio of the event where Díaz had allegedly ranted at Machado. (Machado made reference to the recording in her accusation.) During the Q&A, she had asked him about how he could write a character — Yunior, the protagonist of his 2012 collection This Is How You Lose Her — with “borderline sociopathic disregard for everyone he fucks.” Machado presses him, and Díaz defends his work. He never raises his voice, and he seems to take pains to answer the question, even if defensively. He suggests that Yunior’s constant testifying to what he’s done wrong in relationships complicates his character, but he repeatedly acknowledges the possibility of disagreement. I understood how his response to Machado could be construed as patronizing, but it hardly seemed “a blast of misogynist rage and public humiliation.”

Second, I read a letter from the host of the party that Byrne attended. While he believed that Díaz and Byrne could have argued, neither he nor any of the other guests he spoke to recalled any shouting.

Finally, I was informed of a story on the Latino news and culture site Guanabee about Valdes’s decade-old blog posts about her relationship with Díaz — the posts she presumably referred to in her now-deleted essay following Clemmons’s allegation. On April 11, 2008, Guanabee reported that Valdes had posted a negative review of Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on her blog in December 2007 but deleted it within about 12 hours. Five months later, following the announcement that Díaz had won a Pulitzer for the novel, Valdes wrote lightly of their relationship in the mid-’90s, congratulated him, said the prize was “well-deserved,” and credited him for helping to launch her writing career. “Turned out he was not quite right as a boyfriend, seeing as he already had a girlfriend I knew nothing about, but he was so utterly right as a writer and mentor. It was Junot who first encouraged me to write novels, and I will never forget it. Never.”

Though I knew that Valdes’s feelings about her experience with Díaz certainly could have changed in the intervening decade, I found her representation of the content of her old posts troubling. More troubling still, any journalist could have found the audio of Díaz’s interaction with Machado online; I’d found it after my first few phone calls. I was baffled that the allegations hadn’t drawn the most basic scrutiny — and that dozens of outlets, including legacy news media, had amplified the broad charge of serial sexual misconduct or abuse with no investigation.

Another writer I called pointed to an interview Clemmons gave on May 10 in which she claimed that journalists had been investigating allegations against Díaz for a year and suggested, in the interviewer’s paraphrase, that “more women will come forward.” Clemmons gave no further details about the incident at Columbia, either online or in interviews, and Díaz denied it. During my investigation, Díaz’s agent showed me an email Clemmons sent him after the event. She initiated the exchange, and in a remarkably grateful and kind message thanked him effusively for coming to talk to her class. She also requested his permission to elaborate on it for a New Yorker blog. I knew Clemmons’s email did not prove he hadn’t assaulted her, but it surprised me, and I considered it essential context that had not been reported.

After what seemed like endless discussion about what might have happened, Josh and I concluded that the kiss must have been unwanted but not an assault. Of course, we should have called Clemmons. We did not, frustrated that the news media had not done the work and assumed that if she hadn’t told reporters she would not tell us. I still regret that choice. (Clemmons declined to comment for this article.)

As for other institutions affiliated with Díaz, I called Elmaz Abinader, a co-founder and then program director of VONA. She told me that Díaz was known as a rigorous and supportive teacher there and that no one had ever filed a complaint about him, but the allegations had sparked a broader institutional crisis and prompted a now-deleted letter from VONA alumni calling for change and cutting all ties with Díaz. The letter did not include any specific allegations, but it charged that the program failed to live up to its mission to empower writers of color and looked “the other way while a number of its fellows are subject to sexual, emotional, and verbal abuse and even assault by Junot Díaz and other faculty.” In the original design of the workshop, Abinader said, the founders wanted to dismantle the hierarchy of traditional writing programs; the students and faculty mingled socially. “Now the students feel unsafe,” she told me. Abinader left the program, and the new administration was working with consultants to make fundamental changes to the workshop’s culture. Other than the man who wrote about Díaz’s harsh criticism of his work, no one else made a public accusation or has written to me since about Díaz’s behavior at VONA.

I also spoke to someone involved in MIT’s investigation. I learned that officials had reached out to students who had enrolled in Díaz’s MIT classes — including those who had dropped his class — as well as staff and faculty and had reviewed all his student evaluations. The investigation did not turn up any allegations of sexual misconduct nor hostile behavior toward students. (MIT would later announce that his student evaluations averaged a 6.82 on a scale of 7.)

After many calls and email correspondence with about a dozen women, I’d heard nothing like what Clemmons reported: forcible kissing. Beyond the cheating he had already confessed to, I heard he was a cheek-kisser (I knew this from personal experience) — a common practice in the Dominican Republic. One person heard he was someone who took over conversations at dinner parties.

I found the difference between the public accounts of Díaz’s behavior and the conversations I was having dizzying. The public allegations insinuated that Díaz’s persistent activism in the publishing world on behalf of women writers and writers of color was thoroughly fraudulent, masking his misogyny and cruelty. In the week following the initial accusations, Clemmons tweeted, “What part of [his] activism was genuine and what part was selfish we will never know.” Machado questioned his reputation as an activist, tweeting that what “struck me was how quickly his veneer of progressivism and geniality fell away.” Rivera speculated in her Rumpus essay that he took sadistic pleasure in holding her when she started crying: “I think what he really wanted to feel was my pain, to envelop himself in the grief, shock, and shame he’d inflicted on me.” On social media many pronouncements used language from his vulnerable New Yorker essay — “the hurt” he “caused” by sleeping around in a particularly difficult period of his life before seeking treatment — to discredit his work and reputation.

Everything seemed to be run together, blurring the distinctions we usually draw between hurtful behavior and sexual violence, between jerks and abusers, between authors and their work. I started to think about the totality of the charges as a “Bad Man” complaint: that Díaz is a misogynist who writes misogynist books, someone who — as he himself acknowledged — “hurt” women, someone who doesn’t deserve the rewards he gained as an acclaimed writer and who has participated in a culture that blocks women’s access to power and recognition.

I struggled with the suggestion that he was a misogynist hiding in plain sight, that his work was a mask cynically adopted to prey on women. I understood that he had harmed women close to him, but he confessed his personal failings and described his long effort to correct them. He had also openly discussed the theme of misogyny in his work: his portrayal of the pervasive harm of Dominican rape culture, its cost to his male characters and the women close to them, and the consequences of the failure to come to terms with the generational violence perpetrated on women and men of color alike.

Almost a month had gone by since Clemmons’s initial accusation. The intense public pressure to take a stance on the situation was consuming all my time and attention. In light of what we had learned — we found no evidence that he had abused his position at Boston Review — Josh and I were leaning toward retaining Díaz as our fiction editor. I was still worried, though, that a decision in his favor might harm the #MeToo movement or victims of sexual violence. I called two friends, a historian of radical social movements and a therapist who for decades had worked with victims of violence, to talk through our investigation and my concerns: They assured me that social movements should and could withstand critique.

As we prepared to announce our decision, Josh and I knew we had an ethical obligation to explain our reasoning. We certainly didn’t want to deny that Díaz had hurt women — by his own account, he had acted badly at times over the years — but we felt it was necessary to define behaviors for which we thought people should be fired and those we did not.

There were alternatives. We could have said nothing. We could have said simply that we were aware of the allegations but would wait for a more thorough investigation. Or we could have fired him. But we edit a magazine of public reason, committed for the last 30 years to the idea that democracy depends on public discussion and that people of good will can disagree. Either giving in to pressure or ignoring the allegations — doing nothing and letting it blow over, as some had advised us to — would have been profoundly at odds with our mission.

One employee expressed concern: “It’s not that I think he should be fired for Twitter allegations. I just don’t want to die on this hill.” I understood that; I didn’t either.

Josh drafted a statement, and we went through two dozen versions in an effort to be precise and transparent. We emphasized that, given what we knew after doing due diligence, we didn’t see a compelling reason to sever our relationship with Díaz. We also made clear that we understood that the allegations raised important issues of power imbalances — to the extent that authors trade on their celebrity in consensual relationships — but that we saw those issues as a subject for discussion, not professional termination. And we were explicit that we were open to re-evaluating our position as more information came to light.

We were nervous about the statement. I told Josh I thought we’d be blamed for being clueless about #MeToo.

Our poetry editors — Timothy Donnelly, Barbara Fischer, and Stefania Heim — had warned us about trying to adjudicate the movement. “The nature of the allegations isn’t the salient concern here,” Fischer wrote in an email. Josh bristled at that. “We have to make a decision,” he said to me. “We cannot evade responsibility. If you have to make a decision, you have to explain it, and to explain it we need to draw a line — to say what counts as behavior over the line.” He added that everyone had to make similar decisions. “If we are adjudicating, then everyone is adjudicating.”

In the end, we added a paragraph explaining that we recognized that #MeToo raised important, complex questions about abuses of power that went beyond conventional understandings of sexual harassment and that others might reasonably disagree with us. Anticipating the response of our own poetry editors, we added, “not everyone associated with the Boston Review agrees with everything we say in this letter.”

I also wanted to acknowledge in our statement the genuine and forbidding obstacles for women of color in the publishing world. I knew the book industry was not the focus of the allegations, but there were plenty of comments online about how much the media loves Díaz — and how much his celebrity crowds out opportunities for Latina writers. Just months earlier, Díaz had published his first children’s book, Islandborn, to enormous media attention and acclaim. Having worked in book publishing for more than a decade, I had no doubt in my mind about the industry’s biases. At the same time, Díaz was not responsible for the tokenism of the white literary establishment, even if he benefited from it. And he had done far more than most people to dismantle barriers for writers of color.

We showed the statement to our poetry editors, hoping they would be relieved that we acknowledged the different views they had offered. They seemed to be agnostic about the merits of the allegations — they never called for us to fire Díaz — but they were worried about the message that the statement would send about the #MeToo movement. They preferred that we put Díaz on leave and just wait to see how things played out. Josh and I agreed that we would reconsider if new information emerged.

We posted the letter on the afternoon of June 5, 2018. Explaining our decision, we wrote:

These are complex issues. Reasonable people — who share our commitment to gender equality and are also fighting against biases in the publishing industry that marginalize women of color in particular — will come to different conclusions. Our obligation is to give this serious issue thoughtful consideration, listen carefully, consider the substance of the allegations, weigh the different things we have heard, acknowledge our own predispositions and potential biases, and make our best judgment. We take this obligation seriously and hope we have discharged it properly.

The response was slow at first. By the evening, social-media outrage started pouring in. With hundreds of retweets and comments on our statement, only a tiny handful were supportive. “So sorry that these women weren’t assaulted ‘enough’ to count in your eyes,” one said. Another called our statement “shameful.” As the outcry built, one of the writers I had called during my investigation, who had seen our statement before we posted it, emailed me, worried for our sake. She asked if we regretted it. No, I replied. It was terrifying: We didn’t know what the consequences would be, but changing our minds under pressure also seemed wrong.

That evening, the poetry editors emailed us; they said they needed to part ways. I asked them to wait until the morning so we could discuss it, and I suggested that they listen to the audio of the Q&A. Fischer told me that it didn’t matter whether Díaz did what Machado said. And, besides, she said, he hadn’t denied a single thing. “For the record,” I told her, “he has not admitted to the allegations. He denies them.” I was angry at the implication that my effort to understand the accusations was irrelevant. But I also understood that she was saying something important about #MeToo and the emotional truth of women’s experiences.

The outrage on social media continued. People accused us of thinking abuse was okay, of protecting Díaz, of letting him get away with it — even of facilitating further abuse. Our former poetry editors criticized us for trying to limit #MeToo. In a joint resignation on Facebook, they wrote, “What most distresses us are the letter’s apparent arbitration of what constitutes inclusion in the #MeToo movement, and its lack of attentiveness to power dynamics in a star-driven media and publishing landscape.” The leaders of VIDA, an organization that advocates for women in publishing, put out their own statement, describing ours as “a template for rationalizing inaction, laying out point by point the logic our culture uses in its continued failure to prioritize the safety of women and non-binary people.” “By keeping known, active predators on a journal’s masthead,” the statement continued, “it hands these bad actors cultural capital with which to lure and harm more victims. By giving an abuser a platform, Boston Review is widening a dangerous net.”

The public rebuke was overwhelming. As countless people have testified, mass online shaming is emotionally, mentally, and physically devastating. Unable to sleep for days, I feared I’d missed something — that I had harmed survivors, that I had damaged our magazine, that I had compromised my own feminist convictions, that I had stood in the movement’s way, hurting all of us.

On June 14, almost two weeks after our statement, New York magazine’s Vulture section published a wide-ranging essay by Lila Shapiro on Machado’s work that described her “knack for capturing the mundane horrors of female existence.” About two-thirds of the way through, Shapiro mentioned the audio of the Iowa Q&A:

I asked Machado whether she thought that “enraged” was the right word to describe Díaz’s behavior. She said she did. I told her I’d played it for some of my colleagues who thought Díaz sounded perfectly polite; didactic, but appropriately so, for a lecture. “Stop lecturing!” she said. “That’s what’s so fucking weird. The level of condescension.” She took a sip of wine and a deep breath. “It still makes me mad to think about it.” She told me that the intent of the tweets was to offer a signal boost to Zinzi Clemmons. Machado had wanted Clemmons to know that she believed her story, and to share context she thought to be important. “It wasn’t about me,” she said. “I’m not a victim of Junot Díaz. I’m a female writer who had a weird interaction with him.”

Machado, who had accused Díaz of subjecting her to “bullying and misogyny,” now disputed the narrative that had been circulating in social and national news media for more than a month: that she was a victim, and that her story was a key part of an emerging #MeToo case against Díaz. But her comments had little effect on the prevailing narrative of Díaz’s behavior.

#MeToo’s moral center is an effort to create a new consensus around the truth of women’s lives. That is the movement’s astounding accomplishment. It’s a powerful and necessary corrective to the systematic erasure of sexual violence and sexual harassment. It’s an intervention in truth-telling from the bottom up that has forced those with power to acknowledge the harmful status quo they have long conspired to obscure. It even transformed the law: Companies can no longer settle sexual-harassment cases with nondisclosure agreements. But at the same time, social media has reinforced side-taking and rushing to judgment at the expense of a common effort to understand — and to repair.

A few days after the Vulture article, MIT officials posted a brief statement that their investigation had neither “found or received” anything that would prevent Díaz from returning to teach in the fall. (As typical for universities, the scope of MIT’s investigation was its own community.)

Then, on June 30, The Boston Globe published an investigative report by Mark Shanahan and Stephanie Ebbert, “Junot Díaz Case May Be a #MeToo Turning Point.” The story seemed to support our understanding that no sexual assault had occurred:

So far, Díaz has been spared, largely because the deluge of #MeToo stories his accusers predicted hasn’t come. Also, some of the allegations have withered under scrutiny: An exchange recalled by one woman as “a blast of misogynist rage and public humiliation” sounded, to others, like an author being defensive about his work. And Clemmons, who accused Díaz of forcibly kissing her in a stairwell, has refused to say whether it was on the lips.

Machado told the Globe, “The reporting that happened after I tweeted was so irresponsible, it was actually sort of astonishing to me.” The article also discusses the claim from the man who tweeted about Díaz’s harsh feedback at a writing workshop. “Asked whether such an account from a writing workshop describes a sexual abuser or a jerk,” the Globe reporters write, “Byrne responded: ‘What is the difference?’”

In the fall of 2018, almost six months after the accusations surfaced, I reached out to a woman who had signed the rebuttal to The Chronicle letter, written in solidarity with Díaz’s accusers. I knew she probably didn’t agree with the statement Josh and I released. I was hoping we could find some common ground, or at least, that our talk could be constructive. I even wondered if it might be possible to think through with her the possibility of organizing some kind of reparative conversation among Díaz and his accusers.

I met her for lunch on November 19, 2018. Three days earlier, the Pulitzer Prize Board had released a statement that its members had voted to welcome Díaz back to finish his term as a board chair. (They would later write in a letter to The New York Times that the decision was unanimous.) The board reported that the law firm Williams & Connolly had “conducted an exhaustive review that lasted five months, involved interviews with dozens of witnesses and analysis of hundreds of pages of documents (as well as audiotapes, where available), and examined the steps taken by other relevant institutions to investigate this matter. The review did not find evidence warranting removal of Professor Díaz from the Board.” While Byrne and others have suggested the process was a sham, one board member told me that the board had given a clear mandate to follow the evidence wherever it led and had spent nearly $500,000 on the investigation.

I sat down for lunch with the woman who had signed the letter. I was grateful she had come, and we both tried hard to be open and generous. I clearly felt defensive, though, as I immediately reported the news of the Pulitzer board’s decision; I was looking for support that I had done the right thing. She did not seem moved. I asked her what she thought about the case against Díaz. She said she’d met him a few times, that their interactions were friendly and professional. But she was concerned about the allegations and pointed particularly to Rivera’s story: the allegation that he’d insulted her at lunch and pulled her onto his lap when she cried.

“Really?” I asked. “Twenty years ago?” While the incident indeed sounded like an awful experience for Rivera, he was not acting in his capacity as a teacher or on behalf of a publisher when they met. And in the Globe article, Díaz had denied any coercion.

“So what if it’s 20 years ago?” She pushed back. I realized I had asked the wrong question. Was I falling into the trap of dismissing bad behavior as not “that bad” because it happened so long ago? The story disturbed her, she explained, because she thought it reflected the behavior of a classic abuser: It was negging — undermining Rivera’s self-esteem to get her to submit to sexual advances. I didn’t know what to say. I imagined that she could have been right. But if it was a seduction, it didn’t go any further: In Rivera’s account, they left the restaurant, and he walked her to her car. I resisted the leap to reductive characterizations of his behavior. Having seen Díaz playfully tease others about light skin privilege, it was hard for me not to see Rivera’s story as the result of a misunderstanding. That is obviously not how Rivera experienced it.

“Anything else?” I asked her.

“I heard rumors about creepy behavior,” she said. “I try to remember women have largely been left with no other resource than a whisper network to warn each other away from men’s bad behavior. If there was more trust that institutions would act in good faith in cases like this, passed around stories would be less important, but given how accusers are treated, I’ve learned to take whispers seriously.”

I blurted out, “Is that any reason to ruin his life?” I regretted it as soon as I said it. I was embarrassed that I sounded like the judge’s call for mercy in the case of Brock Turner — the Stanford athlete convicted of raping an unconscious woman — because his life was so promising.

“No one called for ruining his life,” she told me. “The letter I signed embraces restorative justice and says we hope he will act to repair things. But there should be no limits to public anger, especially for women of color, especially for their right to speak out against men in the community, something that has been taboo for so long.”

I certainly agree that women of color have for too long been disempowered to speak about sexual abuse. But as far as I knew, we weren’t talking about sexual abuse in Díaz’s case. Moreover, I didn’t doubt that they were harmed, and I didn’t think that anyone should be silenced. I had no reason to doubt that Byrne and Rivera were harmed — disrespected, hurt — after their interactions with him. But I thought it was essential to draw a distinction between those experiences — no doubt inflected by the pervasive misogyny, sexism, and male privilege that women, including myself, experience daily — and something that required punishment, mass public shaming, or the termination of a professional relationship.

I left the lunch regretting that I hadn’t asked her this question: What about Díaz’s accusers and their supporters on social media who were calling to ruin his life? Where was the invitation to — or possibility of — reparative justice in that? Machado, Clemmons, Byrne, and their supporters online explicitly called for things to be taken away from him: his sense of accomplishment, his public, his work, his income. They shamed me and my colleagues online — for enabling an abuser, for silencing women — when we didn’t fire him. I remember wondering at the time if reparative justice was even possible against a background of online condemnation.

In the summer of 2020, I reached out to Shreerekha Subramanian, Díaz’s ex-girlfriend who had written about the shame she had experienced around their relationship. She emphasized her wish to separate stories of harm from punitive structures: “The desire to ‘take him down’ is not part of what inspired me to write. I never signed on with the movement that rose up against him, which conflicts with a feminist movement that I believe in and find valuable.” She added, “I never wished for him to lose any of his positions at your review, or the Pulitzer board, or MIT. I have also never advocated for the removal of his books from any shelves or course lists. I just wanted to be able to tell my story as he told his. I wrote because I wanted to share my humanity which got erased in his confessional. I wrote to exorcise the ghost of my complicity in enabling one kind of injustice to be spoken, whilst silencing another.”

In an exchange I had with Fischer — one of Boston Review’s former poetry editors — she, too, emphasized the desire to make space for women’s stories. She explained why she wanted us to wait to make a decision, and why the specific nature of the allegations seemed less important to her: “Knowing we live in a society where there are ever-present conditions that predispose us to disbelieve women, I thought that what did matter was sending a message to women (our readers, our writers) that it was safe to come forward, about Junot or anyone associated with us, then or ever. I was in a position to listen and I wanted to amplify that that was our stance.” She added, “I also understand that your position as head of the magazine was different — I am sure you had compelling reasons not to wait. We wanted to take a position that honors an uncertainty.”

As past feminist movements have done, #MeToo centers women’s experiences, demands our full humanity, exposes the vast range of harms we suffer in a misogynist culture. In a 2018 essay, the legal scholar Robin West calls for the “full exposition” of those gendered harms — especially those beyond the reach of criminal and sexual-harassment law. As she points out, the law turns on a claim of discrimination; it rightly recognizes, but can’t account for, harms “off the clock.” Such an accounting would be a major accomplishment, even if the social change it demands remains unfinished.

In the meantime, we are tasked with another challenge: How do we act on stories of harm in our personal and professional lives without inviting more punitive regimes? How do we work simultaneously to advance accountability and justice? In her book Sexual Justice (2021), the civil-rights lawyer Alexandra Brodsky shows that stories can — and must — play a role in a “fair process” for vetting allegations outside the courts. We need those stories, as Brodsky puts it, to “write our collective future.”

On November 28, 2022, the media reporter Ben Smith published an account of the allegations against Díaz in Semafor. After speaking to four 2018 Pulitzer board members, he reported that their lawyers confirmed that Díaz’s “forcible” kiss was a kiss on Clemmons’s cheek. One of the board members, Eugene Robinson, said that their lawyers were not only “unable to verify allegations of sexual misconduct. They didn’t identify allegations that board members considered allegations of sexual misconduct at all.” Meanwhile, Clemmons told Smith: “Society has once again taken the side of a rich and famous man and proven that the trauma of young women of color does not matter.” She added that “the backlash and slander that followed was one of the worst things that has happened to me.”

Smith reports that Díaz has stayed out of public view since the allegations, largely because of depression. His second children’s book remains in limbo at the Random House imprint Dial Press. He hasn’t published any fiction.

Byrne responded to the article with tweets claiming knowledge of dozens of allegations that have still not been investigated, even though Smith wrote that two of the accusers “provided to me (as they have to other journalists) what they view as leads about Díaz, which reporters (including me) and investigators have been unable to stand up.” On social media, many readers complained that Smith was deaf to the nuances of the case.

Smith’s piece also reports that the essay you are now reading was previously scheduled for publication — and later dropped — at two other magazines, The New York Times Magazine and The New Republic. In Smith’s story, one of Díaz’s accusers takes credit for my editors’ changes of heart. That’s not what I was told. I believe their decisions came down to a matter of judgment. I understand that. Any editor acting in good faith will share the fear I continue to experience: not simply the fear of public rebuke or losing a job, but above all of getting it wrong, of making a mistake, of hurting people, of violating a deeply held commitment to justice.

I still think we did the right thing at Boston Review, although I regret that we didn’t put Díaz on leave during our investigation. Doing so would have bought us time to make a decision. I also wish I had called Clemmons. Taking those steps before issuing our statement probably would not have changed it, but it would have better reflected a commitment to examine the workings of power in all its forms. We have restructured how we work with outside editors as a result of this case. We no longer appoint long-term contract editors; instead we work with a team of contributing editors with two-year, renewable terms. Díaz was one of them until he rotated off in December 2020 under this new structure.

I wish I’d had adrienne maree brown’s recent book, We Will Not Cancel Us, when I first faced the allegations against Díaz. She makes careful distinctions between harm, abuse, mistakes, misunderstandings, and critiques. Proposing a vision for “principled struggle,” she maps criteria for working through call-out cases. Power differentials are important, but so are other things. Can questions be asked? Have private efforts been made? Is the accused continuing to do harm? Have they acknowledged what they’ve done and stopped? Is the call out “precise”?

As Josh and I made clear in our original statement, we remain open to revisiting our actions if new allegations come to light. I am aware that rumors about Díaz’s behavior continue to circulate online. I am also aware that women face all sorts of obstacles to speaking up about their experiences, but I recoil from the possibility of setting some kind of precedent of firing people over hearsay. If I had to make the decision to fire Díaz today, with the information that is both verifiable and at my disposal, I couldn’t do it.