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At the start of her eighth grade year, Heather was struggling. She was insecure, and lonely, and she wasn’t getting along with her mom. She worried that she wasn’t popular enough, or attractive enough, and that she’d never have a boyfriend. These insecurities were hard to talk about. The one place she felt comfortable expressing them was in Mr. Bailey’s English class.
By 1998, when Heather entered eighth grade, the 35-year-old Blake Bailey was already a legend at Lusher Extension, a magnet middle school in New Orleans. A published author, he was funny, charismatic, and academically demanding. In his yearbook photo, he looked like an eager preppy, with dark hair parted to the side and a loosely knotted tie. In 2000, he’d be named Louisiana’s Humanities Teacher of the Year.
Blake Bailey with an account from
Valentina Rice, a 47-year-old publishing executive who alleges Bailey raped her in 2015 while they were both staying at the home of
Times book critic
Dwight Garner. The story raised eyebrows, and not just because W.W. Norton, Baileyâs publisher, had halted the shipping of the long-awaited book in response to the allegations leveled against the author by Rice and several former students (Bailey denies any wrongdoing).
It was particularly striking that one of the alleged sexual assaults took place at the home of one of the most prominent book critics in America, one employed by the very paper disclosing the previously unreported accusation. All of which came after weeks of its copiousâand often, though not always, glowingâcoverageleading up to Baileyâs release. The