“Sex Abuse Scandal’s Latest Casualty: The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature”, The New York Times
By Christina Anderson and Richard Pérez-Peña, May 4, 2018
STOCKHOLM — A cultural impresario, accused of using his influence to coerce women into having sex. Powerful associates who are said to have covered for him, playing down his misconduct or looking the other way. Newly emboldened victims, who have come forward with accounts of his misbehavior.
These elements of scandal, by now familiar in the #MeToo era, claimed an unusual casualty on Friday: The Nobel Prize in Literature, the world’s most prestigious accolade for writing.
The Swedish Academy, the 232-year-old panel of writers and scholars that has conferred the prize since 1901, announced that it would take the extraordinary step of postponing this year’s award until next year, when it will name two winners — something it has not done since delaying the 1949 prize, bestowed on William Faulkner in 1950.
The academy said it would focus on rebuilding public trust, on restoring a reputation tarnished by a wide-ranging scandal that has divided Sweden’s normally consensual society and even drawn in the royal family as unwitting players. The academy is involved only in the literature award, so other Nobel Prizes are not affected.
At the center of the scandal is Jean-Claude Arnault, a 71-year-old photographer with close ties to the academy stretching over three decades. Mr. Arnault is married to a member of the academy, the poet Katarina Frostenson, and is a close friend of other members. The couple owns the Forum, a well-known cultural center in Stockholm that received funding from the academy.
In November, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported that he had groped, harassed or assaulted at least 18 women over the years.
Accusers said that Mr. Arnault used his sway in the arts world, including his connections to the academy, to pressure young women into sex, and that some of his offenses took place at academy-owned properties in Stockholm and Paris.
One woman, the artist Anna-Karin Bylund, says she complained about to the academy in 1996 that Mr. Arnault had assaulted her, only to be rebuffed. Another woman, the novelist Gabriella Hakansson, says Mr. Arnault assaulted her in 2007. Just this week, it was reported that Mr. Arnault had groped Crown Princess Victoria, heir to Sweden’s throne.
The police have opened an investigation; through his lawyer, Mr. Arnault has denied any wrongdoing.
Sara Danius, the first woman to be chosen as the academy’s permanent secretary (essentially, its chief administrator), severed the group’s ties with Mr. Arnault and Forum, and commissioned an investigation by a law firm. Along with sexual misconduct, Mr. Arnault has also been accused of leaking information about prize winners on numerous occasions, potentially profiting bookmakers who wage money on who will win.
Ms. Danius was not rewarded for her efforts at accountability. Several members of the academy, including some of Ms Danius’s allies, resigned in disgust over the allegations, and Ms. Danius was herself forced out from the top post, although she remains a member of the academy. (On the same day, Ms. Frostenson also stepped down.)
Ms. Danius’s demotion prompted mass protests by critics who said that a woman had been scapegoated for the sexual misconduct of a man, and that Ms. Danius had been punished for trying to introduce openness and accountability to a group that preferred to close ranks.
[Read more about the Swedish Academy’s crisis here.]
With the academy depleted by resignations, and its secretive workings exposed to unflattering scrutiny, the Nobel Foundation, which manages the industrialist Alfred Nobel’s legacy and oversees all of the awards, stepped in to warn that the scandal risked tarnishing the prizes as a whole.
“The crisis in the Swedish Academy has adversely affected the Nobel Prize,” Carl-Henrik Heldin, chairman of the Nobel Foundation, said in a statement early Friday. He said that while the award was intended to be awarded yearly, it should be postponed when the group choosing winners had a problem “so serious that a prize decision will not be perceived as credible.”
Until Friday, the academy had insisted that it was sticking to its usual schedule, winnowing potential laureates to a shortlist by summer and anointing a prize winner in October. “But confidence in the academy from the world around us has sunk drastically in the past half year,” the acting permanent secretary, the literary scholar Anders Olsson, told Swedish Radio on Friday, “and that is the decisive reason that we are postponing the prize.”
Another member, the historian Peter Englund, wrote in an email: “I think this was a wise decision, considering both the inner turmoil of the Academy and the subsequent bloodletting of people and competence, and the general standing of the prize. Who would really care to accept this award under the current circumstances?”
Mats Svegfors, a well-known editor and publisher, now retired, said the affair threatened to damage Sweden as a whole.
“When institutions fail that means that gradually we will lose trust, and that means that we lose confidence in our society,” he said. “When we realized that the Swedish Academy, that the institution doesn’t work, it hurts our self-perception.”
Inga-Britt Ahlenius, a former high-level official in the Swedish government and at the United Nations, whose name was floated as someone who could lead an investigation into the scandal, said the academy had “no administrative management, which makes it hard to change or evolve.” She likened the academy to a train “without the locomotive.”
The resignations have left the academy with only 10 active members — too few, under its rules, to elect new ones.
Academy appointments are for life, and until this week, the organization’s rules did not provide for resignations; members who quit were treated as merely inactive, but could not be replaced.
On Wednesday, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, the academy’s patron, who said he had followed the matter “with great concern,” announced that he had changed the rules to allow resignations, and to allow the panel to replace any member who had been inactive for two years. It was a rare intervention by the monarch, whose role is mostly ceremonial.
“We are bringing in legal expertise and we are going to get better at what we do,” said Mr. Olsson, the new acting permanent secretary. “We must vote in new members, and fast.” He promised increased transparency, and “more and better dialogue” internally and with both the monarchy and the Nobel Foundation.
The academy also promised on Friday that “routines will be tightened regarding conflict-of-interest issues and the management of information classified as secret,” and that “internal work arrangements and external communication will be refreshed.”
That was not enough to quell the furor. Kjell Espmark, a historian and one of the academy members who resigned, said he would not return because a more complete purge was needed.
Events have exposed “the rot that has taken hold within the academy,” he said. “Its high-minded goals have given way to nepotism, attempts to whitewash serious infractions, broken conflict of interest rules, musty macho values and arrogant bullying.”
After meeting on Thursday, members of the academy had voiced optimism that the prize could be awarded in October, as usual. The news that the prize would, instead, be postponed prompted speculation that the academy had bowed to pressure from the Nobel Foundation.
“The Nobel Foundation presumes that the Swedish Academy will now put all its efforts into the task of restoring its credibility as a prize-awarding institution,” Mr. Heldin, the foundation’s chairman said, “and that the academy will report the concrete actions that are undertaken.”
The academy was founded in 1786 as the arbiter of Swedish language and letters, and was designated by Nobel, in his will, to award the literature prize in his name. It began choosing winners in 1901, and for almost as long, some of its choices have been assailed as politicized, parochial or just misguided.
The list of prize winners has been heavy on authors, many of them Scandinavian, who are not well-remembered generations later, while the academy has passed over writers like Twain, Tolstoy, Proust and Joyce. In one notorious selection, it bestowed the 1974 prize on two of the academy’s own members, Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, snubbing candidates like Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene, none of whom ever got the nod.
The decision to award the Nobel to Bob Dylan in 2016 — the first American to be so recognized since the novelist Toni Morrison, in 1993 — was one of the most-debated arts awards in recent memory.
Christina Anderson reported from Stockholm, and Richard Pérez-Peña from London.