Many women have come forward with stories of alleged verbal abuse and misogyny by Diaz.
The novelist Junot Díaz was in a relaxed and playful mood on a panel at a writers festival in Australia on Friday, until he received an unexpected question near the end of the session.
The writer Zinzi Clemmons stood up. Without identifying herself by name, she asked Díaz about a recent essay he had published in The New Yorker detailing the sexual assault he experienced as an 8-year-old boy. She then asked why he had treated her the way he had six years before, when she was a graduate student at Columbia.
An uncomfortable murmur arose from the audience at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, according to attendees.
Hours later, the confrontation erupted into a major scandal in the literary world, when Clemmons repeated her accusations in front of a wider audience, on Twitter. Clemmons, who teaches writing at Occidental College in Los Angeles, said in a tweet that when she was a graduate student, Díaz had forcibly kissed her. Her claims swiftly set off other accusations of abusive and inappropriate behavior by Díaz.
“As a grad student, I invited Junot Díaz to speak to a workshop on issues of representation in literature,” she wrote on Twitter. “I was an unknown wide-eyed 26-year-old, and he used it as an opportunity to corner and forcibly kiss me. I’m far from the only one he’s done this to, I refuse to be silent anymore.”
Clemmons said she believed Díaz had tried to pre-empt accusations like hers by writing the autobiographical essay in The New Yorker last month in which he said he had been raped as a child by an adult he trusted. In the essay, Díaz said that after the assault, he began to suffer from depression and “uncontrollable rage,” and later had troubled relationships with women and problems with fidelity.
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