When you Google Díaz, one of the first suggestions is “Junot Díaz canceled.” Vox includes him on its stark, white-on-black index of 262 people “accused of sexual misconduct.”
His story embodies some of the unresolved questions of the last decade — in particular, how writers, readers, and citizens should react to unproven allegations.
“I had this fantasy, and I think it was a delusion, that everything would be looked at and everything would be sorted out very quickly, in detail,” Díaz said last week.
Díaz hasn’t been cast out of public life. In fact, he has returned to writing reviews for the New York Times Book Review, as clear a symbol as any that he’s retained his status as a major writer.
But the cloud remains, and there’s no real method for dispelling it.
“In our absurdly polarized media ecosystem, I think there’s an enormous pressure to take sides that keeps publications from following the truth wherever it leads,” said Deborah Chasman, the editor of the Boston Review, who resisted pressure to force Díaz off her masthead after looking into the allegations in 2018.
The publishing industry continues to tiptoe around Díaz. His longtime publisher, Penguin Random House, which reached an agreement with him in late April of 2018 to publish a children’s book, Brujita, under its Dial Books for Young Readers imprint, never sent a final contract, his agent Nicole Aragi said, and never published it.
A spokeswoman for Penguin Random House (which is also my publisher) wouldn’t respond directly to questions about that book, but said they “remain committed to publishing any future books when he is ready.”
Another fiction writer got a sense of the climate when Díaz offered to blurb his book last year. His editor replied that the blurb had “potential to do more harm than good for you and your book,” according to emails the writer read me. The editor suggested “we should sit on it and revisit should things change down the line.”
Media outlets have also treated the story as a bit too hot to revisit. In 2019, The New York Times considered publishing an essay by Chasman about the affair.
The Times accepted the piece but then, in September 2020, Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein emailed Chasman to raise “late concerns.”
Silverstein wrote that Times editors were worried about “a first-person essay from a participant in the episode.” A particular problem, he wrote, was that “some of the story's subjects refuse to participate in the reporting or fact-checking process.”
Silverstein told me that sources’ refusal to talk to the Times didn’t contribute to killing the piece. He and other editors were “leery of steering into a contentious case with a first-person account from a writer who was on one side of it,” he said.