Blake Bailey was an ODU star. Faculty and students say he abused and harassed women for years.

Before Blake Bailey released an acclaimed biography of Philip Roth and before his world came crashing down over allegations of rape and sexual misconduct, he taught at Old Dominion University.

More than a dozen people say he sexually harassed and abused four women during his time there. And they say when they voiced concerns to administrators, it went nowhere.

Bailey, a once-renowned biographer, had written a book on author John Cheever that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2010. That same year he started teaching at ODU where, to the creative writing program, he was a star.

But Bridget Anderson, an ODU linguistics professor, says he tormented her.

He cornered her in a mailroom in the ODU English department in the spring of 2012, she says. By then he had sexually harassed her for two years — grabbing her crotch in a hot tub, forcibly trying to kiss her on campus, threatening to rape her.

Anderson and current and former ODU faculty and staff say she had already raised the alarm about Bailey again and again but nothing was done, an allegation the university denies.

“I thought we had a predator on our hands,” she said.

The situation had gotten so desperate for her that she’d prepared for a moment like the one in the mailroom.

Anderson says she pulled a knife with 3-inch blade and held it to Bailey’s throat.

“I wanted to scare him,” she said. “That was my only goal. And I mean, it worked.”

After that, Anderson says, his tormenting stopped.

Bailey, through his lawyer, denied the incident happened.

ODU administrators made her go to counseling, Anderson says, because she pulled the knife. She doesn’t believe they did anything to Bailey, who taught at the school from 2010 through the spring of 2016. (He was a writer in residence at William & Mary in 2009-10.)

She and other women say during his time at ODU, Bailey acted with impunity. He allegedly sexually groomed a young graduate student with mental health problems and grabbed both a visiting writer and another graduate student.

Anderson documented Bailey’s yearslong history of harassment in her personal journals. She allowed The Virginian-Pilot to review dated excerpts from nine sketchbook-sized volumes.

The Pilot also interviewed 13 other women and one man who were either graduate students or faculty at the time.

Five women said they told ODU administrators that Bailey had accosted them or that they had seen or heard of him abusing others. When ODU did act, it only warned him, Anderson said, and allowed him to stay for four more years. She and many of the women interviewed for this story say they regret not doing more to force the university into action.

Such guilt is common, said Dr. Sheri Vanino, a Colorado psychologist and national expert who has spent much of her career working with victims of violence and sexual abuse. More than 80% of sexual assaults are never reported to police because victims are afraid they’ll be blamed, won’t be believed or because their victimizer has power over them in their community. And, she says, they have a reason to be afraid because institutions often support accusers.

“We live in a culture that protects people who abuse power and abuse power sexually,” Vanino said. “I think our culture is getting better in standing up against this but there is so much risk.”

Women can lose friendships, social standing and even their jobs when they speak out, she said.

Bailey’s lawyer, Billy Gibbens, said the allegations are false and not worthy of publication. He said Bailey, who served as the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing, was never asked to leave the university.

In a statement from ODU lawyer John M. Bredehoft, of the law firm Kaufman & Canoles, university officials said they’d read the recent news reports about Bailey with “shock, dismay, and disgust” and that had they known of the allegations of assault and abuse elsewhere, he never would have set foot on campus.

“But our investigation … has found no basis to believe that Mr. Bailey engaged in similar conduct at ODU,” Bredehoft wrote. “No report of any assault, attempted assault, or any other kind of sexual harassment was ever made by any of the people who are now making accusations a decade later.”

All of the victims and witnesses contacted by The Pilot for this story say they were never contacted by the law firm.

The statement goes on to claim that a number of the accusations, which were provided in detail to ODU by The Pilot, are false and that only one of the accounts in this story was reported to ODU’s Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity, as required.

“True, ODU heard some concerns from faculty and staff about Mr. Bailey while he was here — concerns about his teaching style, word choice, tenor, personality, even that he was a ‘creep.’”

ODU President John Broderick did not respond to a request for comment.

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Impunity

Soon after Bailey’s authorized biography of Philip Roth was published in April, accusations against him began to surface. In stories published on Nola.com, some of his former eighth-grade students from the 1990s in New Orleans said he had groomed them for later sexual encounters. One has accused him of rape and another of attempted rape.

He’s also accused of raping a publishing executive in the home of a New York Times book critic in 2015. At the time he was an ODU faculty member.

In April, Bailey’s agent dropped him, and his publisher canceled his promotional events, took the book out of print and removed its digital editions. He has since found a new publisher.

Several of the women interviewed for this story said they felt ODU administrators should and could have done more to protect them.

But what mattered most to university officials, they said, was Bailey’s fame and the prestige he brought to the creative writing program.

“It was ODU’s quest to get a name. They saw Blake Bailey as being another feather to put in their cap,” said Valarie Clark, a graduate student during Bailey’s time at ODU.

The university, Clark said, wanted to keep him as long as it could.

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The retreat

In April of 2010, professors and graduate students drank and grilled at the creative writers’ annual retreat in Sandbridge. Anderson, who is fiercely proud of her Appalachian heritage, sang folk ballads.

It was then that she caught Bailey, whom she’d never met, staring intently at her.

Anderson is an award-winning professor. She was on ODU’s Sexual Harassment Committee from 2007 to 2014, helping to form the university’s policy. She saw the English department as a family. Several current and former faculty members say she was an engaging professor who went out of her way to help students and faculty if they were having problems.

When she finished singing at the retreat, a friend tried to introduce Anderson to Bailey, but she avoided him. Bailey had made her uneasy.

Later that night, after the grad students had left, Anderson says her wariness was validated.

At about 11 p.m., Anderson got into the hot tub with two creative writing professors, her friends Kevin Moberly and John McManus. As others had been the night before, Moberly and Anderson say, the three of them were naked.

They thought they were alone, but Bailey came out and stepped into the hot tub, too. Anderson says he sat next to her in the water, then quickly assaulted her.

“Out of the blue, with no warning whatsoever, he grabbed right on my vagina, in one fluid motion,” she said. “I screamed.”

Anderson jumped up, but Bailey grabbed her and pulled her back.

“I had to struggle to get out of his lap,” she said.

Moberly says he pushed Bailey and separated him from Anderson.

In a response to this story, ODU officials said the encounter was “consensual” and “sought-after” by Anderson.

“And it beggars belief that an attempted rape of a faculty member by another faculty member would remain unreported for more than half a decade,” the statement from ODU reads.

Once Anderson was free of Bailey’s grip, she says, she demanded to know why he’d grabbed her.

“He said, ‘It’s because of your ballad singing and hip-to-breast ratio,’” Anderson said. Moberly confirmed the details of her story to The Pilot. McManus, the third professor in the hot tub and now the creative writing graduate program director, did not respond to requests for comment.

After the hot tub incident, Anderson had Moberly stay in her room that night, afraid Bailey would come after her.

In an email, ODU officials claim Anderson bragged about the incident.

“Professor Anderson remained in the hot tub with Mr. Bailey for about another two hours — after which they left for the beach together,” Bredehoft wrote.

Anderson and Moberly vehemently deny ODU’s account of the evening.

By the time Bailey started teaching in the fall of 2010, Anderson told many in the department what had happened, including the department chair, Jeff Richards, who has since died.

“Jeff was upset,” she said. “And I don’t know exactly what kind of conversation they had … but it was my impression that nobody ever considered doing anything about Blake Bailey starting his job.”

She says Richards told her he would talk to the incoming dean of the College of Arts and Letters, Charles Wilson, who was starting in late July. Wilson is no longer in that position but remains an English department faculty member.

Anderson says she eventually talked to both Wilson and Richards’ successor as English department chair about the incident. She wanted to alert the close-knit English department community and make sure that if Bailey grabbed other women, or worse, a pattern could be established.

In the university’s emailed response, Wilson denied having ever heard Anderson complain about Bailey’s conduct or having ever received a complaint about him from a student. Wilson did not respond to phone calls and an email from The Pilot requesting comment.

Anderson says Wilson told her that Bailey grabbing her in the hot tub “was probably an isolated incident, that it didn’t happen at work and that probably everything would be fine.”

She soon gave Bailey a nickname, one she used whenever students weren’t around — a rural Southern slang term for a woman’s vagina followed by the word “grabber.” Mocking him was her way of taking some control of the situation. Bailey told her the nickname was crass and asked her to stop, but she refused.

“That was my own form of accountability,” she said. “If he was still going to roll into ODU like he was God’s gift and be treated like a literary star, and be as arrogant as he was, at the very least he was going to be known by his true and accurate nickname.”

In recent interviews with The Pilot, three former ODU faculty members say she told them years ago about what happened.

Anderson believes her resistance to his advances provoked Bailey.

On Sept. 15, 2010, she wrote in her journal about another encounter. Bailey showed up at the bar where she, McManus and another writing professor, Michael Pearson, were grabbing a drink.

“He said if I would just give in and have sex w/ (with) him that he would leave me alone,” she wrote. “But that he would not stop until he gets what he wants. Predator!”

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The first grad student

Several weeks into the fall semester, a graduate student and adjunct instructor says, she had a threatening encounter with Bailey when he approached her at a bar.

Clark, who was also a graduate student, watched what happened that October night.

“I saw him getting what we would term as ‘handsy,’” she said. “He was kind of all over her. She got up to leave, he didn’t want to let her leave.”

The grad student was scared but didn’t want to make a scene.

“I tried to slip away,” she said. The Pilot is not naming her because the advances were unwanted. “His grip tightened on my arms.”

Finally she used a self-defense technique, dropping her weight while turning to rip herself from his grip. She hurried to the women’s restroom to compose herself and figure out what to do.

When she opened the door to leave the restroom, she says, Bailey was waiting for her just outside.

“I was scared, so I told him, ‘You’re making me uncomfortable,’” she said.

Bailey told her he was sorry that she had misinterpreted his behavior. She found others from the English department to talk to until he was distracted; then she left.

“I was upset about what happened and I went and talked to a colleague about it to try to figure out if I should do something,” she said. “I was just afraid of — what if he does this to someone else or worse?”

The colleague she confided in was another adjunct. The grad student was already dealing with a stalker and she wasn’t sure if she’d misinterpreted what Bailey had done.

“And I was like, ‘No, because I know that he already did something way worse,’” said the adjunct, who has since left ODU and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation at her new university.

She’d already heard about Bailey grabbing Anderson’s crotch.

“It’s one thing when it’s happened to a faculty member and it’s another thing when it’s a graduate student,” the then-adjunct professor said. “You don’t abuse power like that.”

The graduate student provided copies of text messages from October 2010 in which she and her colleague discussed the situation. Luisa Igloria, the chair of the master’s program at the time, had heard about the incident and called to make sure she was OK, according to the text messages. The grad student said she downplayed the incident to Igloria.

One current and one former ODU faculty member, who both asked not be identified for fear of retaliation by the university, confirmed to The Pilot that they heard at the time about Bailey accosting the grad student.

The adjunct advised the grad student to take it to Dana Heller, the new chair of the English department.

Heller was herself a star at ODU. Her research in gender, culture and media was widely acclaimed. She’d been at the university since 1990 and was director of ODU’s Humanities Institute and Graduate Programs for more than 10 years. She is now the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Eastern Michigan University.

Heller did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

According to the university’s emailed response, Heller became aware of the hot tub incident with Anderson and “of some concern voiced by a woman who believed she had been harassed by Mr. Bailey at a bar off campus.”

Heller “called Mr. Bailey on the carpet; reminded him that he lacked tenure and assured him he could be terminated,” according to the statement. “Mr. Bailey swore his innocence, although he also apologized for any awkwardness caused by the situation.”

But, according to ODU’s statement, Heller never heard directly from the grad student about the incident.

The statement contradicts an exchange of text messages between the graduate student and the adjunct at the time.

The graduate student says she emailed Heller asking for an informal meeting. The two met a few days later and Heller said she would look into what had happened. Heller told her it was good that the incident was so public because that meant she wouldn’t have to tell Bailey that the graduate student was the one who reported it. She could simply ask, “Why the hell are you putting your hands on our grad students?”

The grad student says she didn’t hear anything else from Heller.

Bailey later approached her and asked her to stop talking about it. She says he told her that he had a family and “a rumor like this could destroy them.”

She now regrets not pushing the university to do more to protect women from Bailey.

At the time, everyone thought Bailey would simply not be hired back after the 2010-11 school year, the colleague said. He was on a one-year contract and the endowed chair was meant to be a rotating position.

But the next school year Bailey would still be there while the graduate student, wanting to be rid of both Bailey and the student who’d been stalking her, would be gone. She left without finishing her degree.

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‘A dang talking-to’

In the spring of 2011, the creative writers once again had their retreat. Anderson got to the house in Sandbridge a day early with her friend John McManus, the creative writing professor.

Bailey also showed up early.

“I obviously would not have gone had I known he was going to be there,” she said. “We had very intense interactions that whole weekend.”

In her journals, she documented what happened. Bailey was mad that she’d talked for the past year about how he’d grabbed her.

He told her he would rape her if he could get away with it, but that she was so vocal that doing so would be difficult. She angrily recited her address and said if he had a suicide wish, he could try and make good on his threat. Bailey, through his lawyer, denied the allegation.

She avoided Bailey the next day and left early.

The following week, Anderson and other professors were talking about Bailey’s rape threat. Two former ODU professors said she told them years ago about the threat.

“It was disturbing, to put it mildly,” said Maura Hametz, who now heads the history department at James Madison University.

One day in the summer of 2011, Anderson was moving into a new office when Bailey “ran in my office and before I could even think or react he grabbed me up and tried to pry my mouth open.”

She clamped her jaw shut as Bailey worked her face with his hands, trying to kiss her. She pushed him away and he ran off.

“It was just like the initial incident. It happened so fast,” she said. “Out of the blue he comes.”

Anderson said she again talked about the incident with Heller, the department chair, and then Wilson, the dean.

This time both administrators said they’d get Pearson, a senior faculty member in creative writing who has since retired, to talk to Bailey about his harassment of Anderson.

In an email, ODU officials claim that, although Anderson spoke to Pearson often and “used her frequent visits to complain loudly and at length on a number of topics, never did she so much as mention to Professor Pearson any issue she may have had with Mr. Bailey, be it hot tub ... or misogyny in general.”

Pearson, who reviewed Bailey’s biography of Roth for The Pilot and Daily Press, said in an email that Anderson’s statement is inaccurate. No administrator asked him to speak with Bailey, he wrote.

Anderson assumes Pearson talked to Bailey, but no one reported back.

“That’s in the mojo of how ODU deals with stuff,” Anderson said. “All anyone ever gets is a dang talking-to, no matter what they do. … It was becoming clear to me that nobody had the will to stop him.”

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The visiting author

When a female author visited ODU in October 2011, Valarie Clark and her friend and fellow graduate student Tara Burke were thrilled. They took advantage of every opportunity to learn and listen to the writer, whom The Pilot is not identifying because her encounter with Bailey was unwanted. She did not return requests for comment for this story.

Clark and Burke say the nonfiction program, especially since Bailey had been hired, was geared more toward men. This was a rare chance to learn from a woman who better understood their experiences, they said.

Bailey held a party at his house, with the writer, Burke and Clark in attendance.

He and the other men in the program circled around the visiting writer. Clark and Burke say he was “aggressively flirting” with her.

“It was fine for a little while,” Burke said. “But Blake’s wife was there and she was very quiet and uncomfortable. And we were just having a very strange experience witnessing it.”

Then, Burke and Clark say, the writer broke free.

“She came to us and directly said, ‘I’m very uncomfortable. This is getting out of hand,’” Burke recalled.

She asked the two to take her back to her hotel. The writer said she was a little drunk and just needed to be removed from the situation.

Burke said she, Clark and the writer said their goodbyes and stepped outside.

“I wasn’t thinking it was that serious,” Burke said.

Then Bailey came out of the house and grabbed the visiting writer, playfully but forcefully dragging her down the street with him. She was clearly uncomfortable but, Burke says, was trying to manage the incident without making it worse.

“It was such a bizarre situation that as an adult, you’re like, that would happen in high school and middle school,” Clark said.

Eventually Burke and Clark pulled the writer away from Bailey and got her into a car. Back at her hotel, the writer told Clark that Bailey had forced a kiss on her. She was married, it was a kiss she did not want.

“She started second-guessing herself,” Clark said.

The writer wondered if she’d done something to encourage him, if it was her fault.

The next day, Burke and Clark talked about the incident and agreed to discuss it with Igloria individually.

Clark provided The Pilot a copy of an email exchange between her and Burke from Oct. 12, 2011, in which they discuss the incident. They tell each other about their talks with Igloria, who is currently the poet laureate of Virginia and remains an ODU professor.

“I told her a few things without saying too much or being specific and also emphasizing that the author requested her story kept quiet, and Luisa wanted more but I told her I’d honor that,” Burke wrote in her email. “I think everyone wants Blake gone.”

In an interview with The Pilot, Igloria did not discuss specific concerns brought to her about Bailey. She did say that when students bring her their problems she listens and tries to help them — and if it’s serious she tells them to take their issues to higher-level administrators who have the power to help.

“The advice we always hear is to consult upper administration,” she said. “That’s not to say we are not sympathetic with students and that we don’t listen to them, but at a certain point our hands are tied and they have to seek help at a higher level.”

In its statement to The Pilot, ODU claims Igloria never received any specific complaint about Bailey but did receive “non-specific concerns” that didn’t rise to the level of a reportable incident.

Burke and Clark say they regret not pressuring the school further on the issue.

“We were dismissed at every turn,” Burke said of the response from the department. “The most frustrating and traumatizing thing about this is witnessing and being a part of being silenced by people, both directly and indirectly, that I revered.”

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Trolling

About a month later, Bridget Anderson held a talk examining the use of Native American mascots for sports teams.

In the crowd was Bailey, who Anderson and two others in attendance say harassed her during the question-and-answer session.

He aggressively mocked the premise of her talk, that sports teams should not use Native Americans as mascots given the lengthy history of genocide of native peoples in this country. Anderson was stunned. A colleague, Stephanie Sugioka, confronted Bailey and defended her. Another former ODU professor also confirmed to The Pilot that she witnessed the incident.

“I didn’t think he was going to run up and grab me in front of the whole big audience … but I felt trolled,” Anderson said. “I felt stalked, to be honest. Because why was he even there?”

To Anderson and others on the ODU faculty, it felt like Bailey was focusing more and more of his attention on her.

“He was obviously trying to date her. He was interested in her,” said an ODU professor who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation from the university.

Anderson says she went to Wilson as she had after Bailey grabbed her crotch and kissed her in her office. Still, her concerns went nowhere.

“He wanted to handle it in the College of Arts and Letters,” she said.

In the university’s statement, Wilson denied the claim.

From her time on the sexual harassment committee, she knew the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity was in charge of any investigations into sexual misconduct.

State law and university policy changed over time, but the September 2011 revision of the university’s sexual harassment policy clearly states that the vice president in charge of the office “must be advised of all complaints or reported incidents of sexual harassment.”

At the time she didn’t think Bailey would go after students, so she acquiesced to Wilson, a decision she now regrets.

“I had it in my mind that he was only targeting grown-ups because it seemed like he got off on the power of domination,” she said. “Knowing what I know now, it seems so ridiculous.”

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The knife

At the spring 2012 faculty meeting, Bailey sat down by Anderson.

She moved to another seat in the crowded meeting room and he followed, sitting beside her again. During the meeting, she said, Bailey kept trying to put his hand on her leg. Eventually she got up and left.

It was then that he cornered her in the mailroom and that she pulled the knife.

Another ODU professor, who says she was just outside the mailroom, heard what happened next. Though she has since left the university, she asked not to be identified for fear of retribution.

“You come any closer, I’m going to hurt you,” the professor recalls Anderson saying.

The professor didn’t look inside, but the next time she saw Anderson, she asked what happened. Anderson told her the long story.

“She said that … he had grabbed her crotch and that he’d been sort of stalking her, menacing her,” the professor said.

After the knife incident, Anderson said she and Bailey met with Wilson together. She said it was an awkward conversation without a resolution.

ODU officials insisted Anderson go to counseling for pulling the knife, which she still carries and is legally allowed to have on campus. Later, Anderson says, ODU administrators tried to characterize the counseling as “trauma counseling.”

But that was not her impression.

“It was all about using my words and not getting angry,” Anderson said. “I had been using my words for two years.”

Through the university, Wilson denied having ever met with Anderson and Bailey together or knowing anything about her being sent to counseling.

Anderson doesn’t think Bailey was punished.

After she held a knife to his throat, she says, Bailey stopped even looking at her.

She was relieved, but Bailey was still on campus. And she worried she would get in trouble for pulling the knife.

Maura Hametz said she tried to reassure Anderson.

“She was very, very worried about how that would make her look. And if people were going to talk about it, and how that would affect her reputation. And she was worried about her job,” Hametz said. “She was trying to defend herself.”

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An investigation

In May 2012, Anderson said she got a call from ReNeé Dunman, the assistant vice president for institutional equity and diversity from 2008 to 2020. Dunman told Anderson she was conducting an investigation into Bailey’s actions.

Anderson had told Stephanie Sugioka, a lecturer in the from 2010 to 2017 and the widow of former department chair Jeff Richards, about her encounters with Bailey.

Sugioka says she went to Dunman’s office, an assertion the university denies. She also says she talked to the chair of the Department of Women’s Studies, Jennifer Fish, who told her that some students had come to her about Bailey harassing them. Sugioka says Fish told her that she went to the dean but because a student wouldn’t come forward with a specific accusation, the university wouldn’t do anything.

“I don’t want to be too hard on anyone, but I really feel like the administration should have acted at that point, especially when the department chair of the Women’s Studies Department came and complained to them,” Sugioka said.

When contacted by The Pilot, Fish said she could not speak about the incident because of student confidentiality. In the university’s emailed response, Bredehoft accused The Pilot of trying to get Fish to violate federal law by contacting her.

“It is correct that at least one student came to Dr. Fish … to discuss Mr. Bailey’s approach to writing and a belief he was ‘creepy,’” Bredehoft’s email states. “The single person who approached Dr. Fish asked her to keep the complaint confidential, and to take no action on it. Dr. Fish honored the person’s request for confidentiality.”

Sugioka also felt like the school didn’t want to look into Bailey’s actions because he brought prestige to ODU.

“They just didn’t want the other information to come out because it would make the university look bad,” she said.

She reported what she knew to Dunman’s office, though she didn’t name Anderson.

Dunman quickly got in touch with Anderson anyway.

In their response to this story, ODU officials say Dunman confirmed to them that she had a discussion that could be characterized as a complaint from Anderson.

“That discussion related to what Ms. Anderson felt to be inappropriate comments to students, mentioned the hot tub incident, and came close to the start of Mr. Bailey’s time at ODU,” Bredehoft wrote.

Bailey’s lawyer said in an email that Bailey met in 2012 with an ODU representative who “declined to specify any reported complaint.”

“Otherwise ODU has never notified Mr. Bailey about these allegations, either because they are demonstrably false or because they have been recently fabricated during the open season on Mr. Bailey in the press,” Gibbens, the lawyer, said. “Ms. Anderson’s allegations are delusional — not only has she fabricated stories about Mr. Bailey, she has fabricated a ludicrous story that she ‘pulled a knife’ on Mr. Bailey in a mailroom.”

In a May 8, 2012, journal entry Anderson wrote that Heller, the chair of the English department, urged her to talk to Dunman. She is a prolific journal keeper and says she went back through years’ worth of journals to make sure she gave Dunman accurate details.

Dunman and Anderson met and talked several times during the summer of 2012, according to Anderson’s journals. She told Dunman much of what had happened, though she left out the knife incident because, Anderson says, she was ashamed of it.

Anderson says Dunman clearly cared about the investigation — she told Anderson she was looking into three other incidents involving, one undergraduate and two graduate students.

Dunman told Anderson she interviewed Bailey for hours and that her investigation had uncovered disturbing information. She was recommending Bailey be fired.

But after Dunman met with James Wright, ODU’s top lawyer, that’s not what happened, Anderson says.

“I was told by ReNeé Dunman that Legal had decided to give him a warning,” Anderson said. Bailey was told not to go to department meetings and to avoid her.

Wright did not respond to a request for comment.

ODU officials deny that such a meeting ever occurred and say Wright wouldn’t have had the authority to determine how to handle the situation. Dunman denies she ever contemplated advising that Bailey be fired, according to ODU’s statement. When contacted, Dunman told The Pilot she had no comment.

Heller and Dunman then had their only meetings with Bailey about his conduct, according to ODU’s email. They told him he was putting his employment at risk.

“As far as we can discern, there were no such complaints about Mr. Bailey after these discussions,” Bredehoft said.

Anderson and Dunman met on Aug. 15, 2013, for two hours following up on the closed investigation, according to Anderson’s journals.

According to Sugioka, Bailey was “read the riot act” by Dunman and other members of the administration. It was her understanding that Bailey was told he could finish out his one-year contract but that it wouldn’t be renewed.

But Bailey would remain an ODU professor through the spring of 2016.

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The second grad student

Elizabeth Argento was a 23-year-old graduate student when she took a class with Bailey in the spring of 2014. She’d taken a class with him before, but this time he focused on her.

“Pretty early on he was telling me that my work was really great, that I was an excellent student,” she said. “I was very flattered. He’s a very prominent writer. I was excited that he was giving me attention.”

He signed a copy of his new memoir, “The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait,” to Argento. It reads: “To Liz — You are the redemption of my teaching career, such as it is — steady grooving.” It’s dated March 19, 2014.

At events where students and professors were drinking together, Argento says Bailey would put his hand on her leg and touch her shoulder.

“I was really flattered by the attention. I mean, yeah, I was uncomfortable with the flirting and touching, but I was like, you know, I’ll just have to put up with this because this guy could help my career someday,” she said.

Argento says she is a recovering alcoholic and has bipolar disorder. She would write about her manic episodes and impulsive decisions. One day he made a suggestion in front of the class.

“He asked if I wanted to write more about my sex life. He was telling me that if I wrote about, like, sexual escapades in a manic episode that it would make the story better,” she said. “I’m not really comfortable with writing that kind of stuff. But you know, this really prestigious guy was telling me to do that, so I did.”

She later shared a passage for the class about having a one-night stand with a man during a mental health crisis.

“After class he pulled me aside and he said, ‘You know, that guy was lucky. … He was in the right place at the right time to be with you,’” Argento said.

Because Bailey was so revered in the department, she said, she was able to explain away the incident to herself. He was telling her that she was the best student he’d ever had, that she was the best writer in the world.

She finally started to stay clear of Bailey after an incident in his office. They were talking about her master’s thesis when, she says, he propped his foot up on the table, giving her a direct view of the crotch of his tight pants.

“If you sit like that your crotch is really protruding,” she said. “I was just sitting there, like, this feels wrong.”

Argento said she hurried up the meeting and got out of his office. It was the last time she was ever alone with Bailey. Tara Burke, who in 2011 saw Bailey accost the visiting writer, said she remembers Argento talking to her about the incident years ago.

Bailey, in the email from his lawyer, denied all of Argento’s allegations.

“Mr. Bailey recalls an entirely positive relationship,” his lawyer said.

The suggestion that Argento “was abused by Mr. Bailey crossing his legs in his office during a discussion of her thesis, denigrates and delimits the critical social problem of sexual abuse,” Bredehoft wrote in his emailed response.

Still, the university would have investigated had someone complained, Bredehoft wrote.

“No one complained,” the email states.

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Speaking out again

Since Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth was released and allegations came to light in April, Bridget Anderson has been reliving what Bailey did to her.

She’s been reminded why she keeps a knife in her pocket. You have to be ready for predators, she says. They exist. They will find you.

Bailey’s harassment and sexual incidents changed Anderson, said a friend and former faculty member who asked that her name not be used for fear of retribution.

Anderson stopped going to parties with her friends in the creative writing program because she was never sure when he would show up. Her office door, before always open to students and colleagues, closed. A group of people she considered family she now holds at a distance.

“This free-spirited, amazing woman turned quiet,” the friend said.

Anderson worries what her English department colleagues will say about this story. If they’ll be mad at her for telling what happened.

She says she’s come forward because she loves ODU and she wants it to be a better place and the only way to stop others from going through something similar is to talk about it and make sure in the future women are protected.

It’s why Anderson spoke up in 2010, too.

“I thought at the very least, people needed to know what kind of person we were bringing into our community,” she said.

But she also wonders why, after telling so many people about Bailey, she and the other women are being called liars by the university.

And she wonders why it’s the victims who have to speak out.

How we wrote the story

Shortly after the publication of stories by Nola.com, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times about sexual assault allegations against Blake Bailey, The Virginian-Pilot received several tips suggesting we look into his time at Old Dominion University. Reporter Gary Harki started contacting current and former ODU professors, as well as former graduate students of the Master’s of Fine Arts program in creative writing.

The Pilot interviewed 14 women and one man who were either graduate students or faculty at the time about Bailey’s time at ODU. The alleged victims who spoke to The Pilot and three of the witnesses provided documentation from close to the time of the alleged assaults that corroborates their accusations. Bridget Anderson, whose allegations of abuse stretch from 2010 to 2012, provided copies of pages from nine volumes of her journals from that time period.

The Virginian-Pilot also submitted a Freedom of Information Act Request in April for any investigations by ODU into Bailey. In response, Giovanna Genard, ODU’s assistant vice president for strategic communication and marketing, wrote that “ODU has one document related to Blake Bailey in the Office of Equity and Diversity and it is exempt from disclosure due to the fact that it is a personnel record.”

In Virginia, the law gives public entities the option to keep personnel records secret, but it does not require it.