Walcott Nemesis Resigns; Admits Guilt

 

After initially denying involvement in a sexual smear campaign targeting St Lucian Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott, the British poet Ruth Padel has admitted her role and resigned from the job which she denied to Walcott.

Here’s the story as reported by the New York Time:

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CAMBRIDGE, England — A historic month for women in British poetry turned sour on Monday when the first woman in 301 years elected to Oxford University’s prestigious chair in poetry resigned and admitted what she had previously denied — that she had played a part in a covert effort to taint her main rival for the post with old allegations of sexual impropriety.

Ruth Padel, 63, was chosen only 10 days ago for the Oxford post, which is regarded as second only to poet laureate among the formal distinctions for poets in Britain.

Two weeks earlier, Carol Ann Duffy, 53, became Britain’s first female poet laureate, a post formally created in 1668.

Ms. Padel’s admission that she sent e-mail messages to two reporters last month alerting them to allegations of sexual harassment against her main rival for the Oxford post, the Nobel literature laureate Derek Walcott, was a stunning turn in a saga of skullduggery that had opened a bitter schism within Britain’s literary world. Just as much, it has scandalized the ivy-walled cloisters of Oxford, exposing a culture of jealousy and mean-spirited connivance at sharp odds with the university’s public posture of academic tolerance and reason.

In a statement released to the news media on Monday, Ms. Padel said that she had acted “as a result of student concern” about the allegations of sexual improprieties, and that the information she cited was already in the public domain. “I acted in complete good faith and would have been happy to lose to Derek,” the statement said.

The battle for the post was a matter of prestige, not money. Ms. Padel’s predecessors have included literary giants like W. H. Auden and Robert Graves.

But the chair draws a salary of barely $11,000 a year and requires nothing more of the holder than three public lectures a year.

During the campaign for the post and after her election, Ms. Padel, a great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, insistently condemned the smear tactics that led Mr. Walcott, 79, to withdraw from a contest he had been favoured to win. Mr. Walcott, born in St. Lucia, has spent much of the past 30 years commuting between his home on Trinidad and his teaching duties in the United States, and it was those duties that led to the allegations of sexual misconduct.

Ms. Padel’s resignation came the day after two national newspapers, The Sunday Times and The Sunday Telegraph, published articles detailing the e-mail messages.

In their accounts of the messages, the two papers said that Ms. Padel had noted Mr. Walcott’s age, claimed that he was in poor health and pointed out that he lived in the Caribbean, not Britain. The Sunday Times quoted her as having gone on to say that “what he does for students can be found in a book called ‘The Lecherous Professor,’ recording one of his two reported cases of sexual harassment.”

 

taken from the New York Times