The Nobel Foundation and even the king of Sweden have said that the scandal threatened to sully the reputation of the Nobel Prizes as a whole.
After the allegations became public, the academy ended the group’s work with Mr. Arnault and hired a law firm to conduct an investigation. The academy did not make the firm’s report public, but described some of its findings on Friday.
Perhaps most damaging, the investigation showed that a woman wrote to the academy in 1996 to complain of Mr. Arnault’s conduct, but the matter was not pursued.
“The Swedish Academy is deeply sorry that the contents of the letter was put aside,” the statement said.
The author of the letter, Anna-Karin Bylund, has said that Mr. Arnault had raped her in his apartment in the early 1990s, when she was preparing for an exhibit of her artwork at Forum. But in her 1996 letter, she did not describe the incident as rape.
In addition, the investigation found that the academy had violated its own rules by providing financial support to Forum, co-owned by one of its members, and it confirmed that Mr. Arnault had repeatedly leaked the names of literature prize winners, usually a closely held secret. It said he did not have any influence on Nobel Prize decisions.
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Pool photo by Jonas Ekstromer
The investigation sought to discover what members of the academy knew about the accusations of misconduct by Mr. Arnault. The group said that Mr. Arnault’s activities were “not generally known in the academy,” and that members were not aware of anything that could be considered criminal.
This month, three members of the academy resigned when the panel refused to oust Ms. Frostenson.
Instead, last week, the academy removed Sara Danius — who had commissioned the law firm’s investigation and tried to bring more transparency to the panel’s work — from her position as permanent secretary. Ms. Danius, 56, the first woman to serve as the academy’s chief officer since it was created in 1786, remained a member of the academy. But she decided to end her association with the academy altogether. Ms. Frostenson also agreed to end her work with the academy.
Elise Karlsson, a writer and one of the 18 women who spoke out in the Dagens Nyheter exposé, said Friday that the academy was not doing nearly enough to repair the situation.
“On the one hand, this press statement says that they take sexual harassment very seriously, and on the other hand they don’t seem to want to take any measures to discourage the things that have come to light,” Ms. Karlsson said.
The ouster of Ms. Danius prompted a deluge of protest and support for her. Last Friday, many Swedish women — and some men — around Sweden wore pussy-bow blouses, Ms. Danius’s signature garb, or scarves and posted selfies on social media platforms.
On Thursday, hundreds of people in such blouses demonstrated outside the building where the academy holds its weekly sessions.
“Resign, all of you!” demonstrators yelled. They waved signs that read “The sisterhood sees you!” and “Crush the patriarchy. Together we make a difference.”
Cecilia Ohman, 50, said the dismissal of Ms. Danius amounted to a woman taking the fall for a man’s bad behavior. “The question isn’t any bigger than that,” she said. “We have had enough, quite simply.”
James Wood, a famous literary critic, also expressed his support for Ms. Danius, telling Dagens Nyheter that her removal was “a backlash from the trenches of male privilege.”
“Who wants to accept this year’s prize from a reduced, badly wounded and ill-famed group?” he asked.
One problem faced by the academy that is now being addressed by Sweden’s king is that its appointments are for life, and it has no mechanism for allowing people to leave or replacing them.
It has 18 seats in all, but after the recent resignations, it has only 11 active members, eight men and three women. That is one short of the 12-member quorum needed to elect new members.
King Carl XVI Gustaf has said that he would amend the Swedish Academy’s rules to make it possible for members to leave voluntarily.
Source : Nytimes
