An actual investigative journalist at Haaretz has written an illuminating piece about the Ronell case and the Butler letter. It's the first piece to include some actual information about the complainant maligned by Ronell's friends in the now infamous letter:
Insofar as is known, the...doctoral student designated as M. and Ronell had an adviser-advisee relationship over a period of about five years. M. was an admirer of Ronell and according to the complaint, for her part she had a special affection for him, so much so that the boundaries between the professional and the personal became blurred.
It is known, for example, that Ronell hosted M. in Paris and introduced him to writer Pierre Alféri, son of Ronell’s mentor Jacques Derrida. The circumstances of the souring of the relationship aren’t clear, nor is it known if it was gradual process or if a single incident led to the rupture. People close to Ronell have said the filing of the complaint came as a “total shock” to her as there had been no hints that M. was about to “turn on her.” They noted that Ronell was appalled to discover that the complainant had accused her of “psychological abuse.”
The article also confirms some of what one correspondent told me (but one of Ronell's colleagues vigorously denied) about her relationships with students:
She gathered around her a coterie of admirers, with some of whom she conducted “eccentric relationships,” as the former student said. These were manifested, for example, in small dinners to which her favorite students were invited.
Thus, notwithstanding the powerful demonstration of support that Butler, Zizek and others organized to express shock at the attempt to besmirch Ronell, not everyone in the small world of academic German studies in Europe and the United States was surprised by the publication of her name in such contexts. On a number of Facebook pages where the affair is being discussed, there are those who say that the mixing of the professional and the personal is a known tendency of hers, and has been evident for years. A well-known professor of humanities who remembers Ronell from the early days of her university career, though he was not in her class, relates: “The talk was always about very non-standard relationships, but not of a sexual hue or inappropriate contexts. I’m talking about phoning at very strange times of day, asking for unusual things and creating some sort of dependency relationship.
“We know the typecasting of men taking advantage of this closeness for an affair or a sexual connection, but in academia there is also a female version of this and its manifestations are sometimes different,” adds the professor. “She would bring into her orbit certain male and female students, nurture them and sometimes this would end in bitter disappointment. There was a pattern there of becoming close and then an explosion.’”
The narrative of becoming close followed by an explosion is a good description of the case of M. Five years ago, when he began to send out feelers about working with Ronell, there were those who warned him of the unconventional relationships she tended to develop with her students. These warnings quickly turned out to be prescient. “The relationship was very intense from the get-go,” says one of M.’s friends. “At first she complimented him and he sought this closeness, until at some point it became oppressive and he began to suffer.”
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