The Swedish Academy stops collaboration with harasser

2017-11-24 | Felicia Mulinari padlock

INTERNATIONAL

18 women accuse a central figure in the literary sphere in Sweden of sexual assault and harassment. He is the artistic director of a club in central Stockholm, and has been supported financially by the Swedish Academy, which every year choses the laureate for the Nobel Prize in literature. Now they stop all collaboration with the accused man and also admit that he has assaulted women within the academy as well as family members.

”At a meeting this evening, the Swedish Academy has unanimously taken the decision to cancel all contact and all further funding of all activities conducted by the person known in the media as ”the cultural profile”, the Swedish Academy writes in a pressrelease after their crisis meeting on Thursday evening.

On November 21, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter published an article where 18 women testify to abuse and harassment from a cultural profile between 1996 and 2017. The literary club that the cultural profile has been behind receives financial support from, among others, the Swedish Academy.

It all began in October with the hashtag #metoo. After the revelation that a lot of women had been raped and abused by the moviedirector Harvey Weinstein the hashtag #metoo went viral when the actress Alyssa Milano used it in a tweet encouraging all women to break the silence. In Sweden the hashtag has given a lot of consequences; one of them the different workrelated statements, that started with actors testifying about their patriarcal work envirorment.

The day after the article about the accused man was published, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius announced that she wants to cut the Academy’s financial support to the literary club, managed by the profile, and banned him from the Nobel Peace Prize festivities, writes Dagens Nyheter.

Sweden’s minister of culture, Alice Bah Kuhnke, announced on Thursday morning that she wants to relinquish a medal she had given to the cultural profile. Bah Kuhnke’s staff had knowledge about the accusations, but chosed to not tell her. During Thursday evening, the Swedish Academy held a crisis meeting and decided to suspend all contact and all further funding of enterprises involving the accused man. They base the decision on Dagens Nyheter’s scrutiny, but also on the testimonies of harassment that emerged at the meeting, about the man having exposed members, members’ daughters, wives and Academy staff to ”unwanted intimacy”.