Avital Ronell harassment case: Some things aren’t complicated.

But there’s something more at work here worth noticing. Quite often, pleas for more “complex” discussions wind up functioning as a way to defend the accused and delegitimize accusations, all while preaching the value of “nuance.” Before we lean into good-faith pleas for complexity, we need to develop an eye for its counterfeit.

That brings me to the Avital Ronell case, in which Ronell, an NYU professor, was disciplined for sexually harassing a doctoral student, Nimrod Reitman, who is now suing her and the university. One senses in ongoing discussions of the case that the reversed genders in play (the alleged harasser is female, the accuser male) somehow make the whole business much more complicated. And indeed, there are some complicating factors: Ronell and her accuser, for instance, are both queer. But there are simplifying factors too: She is an academic star with high-profile defenders. And several of them signed a letter to NYU on her behalf in response to what they evidently saw as an unjust investigation of her conduct.

The letter, which you can read here, is a laundry list of testimonials referring to Ronell’s supporters’ “enduring admiration,” her “remarkable” mentoring of students, the “damage” the investigation is causing her, and the signatories’ “objection to any judgment against her.” It was addressed to NYU administrators and has been defended on the grounds that it was private and a draft—yet was nevertheless “confidentially” circulated to dozens of faculty, many of whom might have been in a position to hire Ronell’s alleged victim. Having smeared Reitman in eerily familiar terms, called him malicious—twice—and suggested that “any judgment against [Ronell]” would be intolerable (even though the signatories admit to not knowing the facts!), the letter concludes with a demand that she receive exceptional treatment: “We testify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual commitment of Professor Ronell and ask that she be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation. If she were to be terminated or relieved of her duties, the injustice would be widely recognized and opposed.”

The injustice that would go widely recognized and opposed would be, instead, the letter itself. It has been widely seen as an effort to torpedo a Title IX complainant’s case and the only “due process” to which the victim had access. True admirers of these thinkers and scholars (many of whom have written seminal texts on gender and power—complicatingthings) have been shocked by the retrograde attitudes the letter revealed. Demanding exceptional treatment for a colleague—and calling any failure to deliver a predetermined outcome “injustice”—is as disappointingly generic as it is ethically unsound. At least Junot Díaz’s defenders in the academy wrote an open letter that made their intentions and position clear to the wider academic community. This group—which includes several academic stars with enormous institutional power—tried to keep Reitman’s character assassination semiprivate. It was circulated, with some care, to the very people whose good opinion Reitman needed in order to professionally succeed, and in a manner that made any defense on his part impossible. This was the academy’s version of Hollywood power players calling an actor “difficult.”

And this is what I mean by asymmetrical complexity. The letter suggests that Ronell deserves to be read with infinite generosity and nuance even as it flattens her accuser to a malicious smear. It reproduces, with eerie exactitude, the reductive patterns of strategic victim blaming with which I began this essay—blindly parroting the playbook that has during #MeToo almost exclusively been used by men. Gender theorist Judith Butler has since apologized for signing that letter, noting, without apparent irony, that it “appeared online without our consent.” And yet, despite the fact that the investigation was undertaken by the university’s Office of Equal Opportunity, she grimly warned against a disregard for “due process.” Does that sound like a brilliant thinker digging into difficult and complicated questions? Or does it sound like a familiar script? “I’m a believer in due process,” said Catherine R. Stimpson, an English professor, defending her signature on the infamous letter that attempted to tell administrators, without evidence, what they ought to conclude. “I believe the timing was in response to a fear of possible revocation of tenure.” Some might argue that losing tenure under certain circumstances is appropriate.

Now, it’s worth noting that defenders may be objecting to Title IX proceedings themselves as constituting “due process.” Many—including Joan Scott and Laura Kipnis—have written about a system they have come to see as a threat to academic freedom. (You can read a report Joan Scott co-authored for the American Association of University Professors here.) The argument is, in part, that Title IX processes oversimplify complicated dynamics and flatten distinctions; for instance, they risk conflating academic discussions of sex with actual sexual harassment. But what flaws there may be in university-based mechanisms for “due process” don’t change the fact that the letter’s goal would have left the alleged victim with no recourse within the institution at all.

The demand for complexityhas arisen with particular urgency in this case on the grounds that Ronell and Reitman are queer. This is offered as a kind of mitigating consideration that, properly understood, might make the correspondence between Ronell and Reitman less damning. Scholar and fellow NYU professor Lisa Duggan has suggested that perhaps what has transpired is a “culture clash” between different discourse communities. Referring to emails in which the parties describe each other as “sweet companion-prince” (Ronell) and “Baby” and “Sweet Beloved” (Reitman), Duggan wrote, “The nature of the email exchange resonates with many queer academics, whose practices of queer intimacy are often baffling to outsiders.” (The “outsiders,” here, are those of us startled by the excerpts of the email exchanges.) “A queer woman and a gay man in a romantic relationship? Romantic language that does not signify sexual desire?” Duggan writes, presenting these as concepts likely beyond the ken of outside observers. There’s just one problem: Reitman, a queer man presumably conversant in queer conventions—and the recipient of this “romantic language”—disagrees with Duggan’s interpretation. And appears to have registered his discomfort to Ronell and to others, contemporaneously.

Reitman’s lawsuit alleges, in fact, that he felt pressured to perform much this florid language: Ronell demanded it of him and called it “rhetorical cushioning.” The lawsuit includes several examples allegedly taken from Ronell’s emails, some of which do seem to explicitly request that he warm up his tone: “Please next time add some layers of warmth,” she writes (indicating that Reitman was not volunteering the affection Duggan seems to characterize as consensual). She tells Reitman she “cannot really bear hearing for another round a break in tonality and strange reprove.” She writes that “ ‘I love you too’ does not cut it darling,” and “Maybe we can find a way for this not to happen, for me not to feel unnecessarily abandoned, I’m sure a slight rhetorical shift would do.” These emails show Ronell repeatedly instructing Reitman to express more affection than he had volunteered. Is this really “queer kinship”? Or is “queer kinship” being used to mask a coercive dynamic?

Ronell herself contends that Reitman, far from objecting, in fact initiated much of the language of their exchanges. She doesn’t seem to acknowledge the institutional power she held over Reitman and, despite the distress he explicitly claims, portrays herself as harmlessly effusive, and even a victim herself. “I’m heartbroken that my fast and loose and exuberant and stupid and childish use of language can somehow be gathered up to be a viable weapon against me,” Ronell said to the Chronicle of Higher Education, hand-waving away the possibility that she herself could do harm: “I don’t impose my zany, affectionate, over-the-top kind of sheltering gestures on people who don’t seem to require or ask for that from me.”

Ronell—a brilliant theorist of language—positions herself, in effect, as a linguistic bumbler unaware of her language’s effects. What’s more, she calls the response to the case “sexual paranoia,” suggests that it’s motivated by misogyny rather than genuine concern for graduate students, and, with a touch of fearmongering, suggests that her case will somehow fuel male malfeasance: It “allows for patriarchy to say, ‘See, there’s a predator woman—they have libidos, too—so now leave us alone so we can go around and have our encounters with 18-year-old girls.’ ”

So much for complexity.

Laura Kipnis has suggested both that Ronell’s case might reflect our aversion to “sexual mother-monsters” and that it might not have been about sex at all. “There’s no indication that Ronell wanted sex with Reitman; there’s no indication sex took place,” Kipnis writes. “Is the emphasis on sex required because other ways of framing the story might raise human questions too complex to be settled via a lawsuit?”

This seems like one of those exciting invitations to complex thinking, so I want to take a minute to track its operative logic. There’s a “gotcha-with-statistics” quality to Kipnis’ observation that “variations on the word ‘sex’ are deployed more than 90 times” in the course of Reitman’s lawsuit despite the fact that no sex took place. Having reproduced her search myself, I note that she’s including phrases like “sexual harassment” (which accounts for 26 of those instances). Is this nuanced analysis? Does Kipnis sincerely believe that the absence of actual sex requires that we fundamentally reconceptualize sexualharassmentclaims as being too “complex” to be settled via a lawsuit?

It’s also unclear what Kipnis is seeing in the substance of Reitman’s complaint, which details things like: “[S]he pushed her buttocks into his groin. Ronell also kissed Reitman’s neck and mouth, several times attempting to engage in an open-mouth kiss. … During this time Reitman’s body remained tense, and he repeatedly attempted to move away from Ronell.” Or: “Ronell also grabbed Reitman’s hands and put them on her breasts, holding them in place with her own hands.”

Granted, Kipnis’ claim that “there’s no indication that Ronell wanted sex with Reitman” might make sense if her position was that Reitman was simply lying—after all, Ronell denies every allegation of physical contact. But that’s not what Kipnis is arguing. Instead, she does what many scholars arguing for complexity are doing in practice: She signals extremeskepticism of the victim’s account, calls Ronell’s critics a “mob,” mocks them for taking Reitman’s allegations at face value, and then pretends that, out of extraordinary open-mindedness, she’ll grant, “for the sake of argument, that the Ronell allegations are true.” In other words, she declares herself to have provisionally accepted that the text I quoted above is 100 percent accurate. And on its basis, she pronounces, definitively, that there is “no indication” that Ronell wanted sex.

This is not a sophisticated acknowledgment of human complexity that advances the conversation; it’s a strange and distressing refusal of the case’s basic terms.

Another of Ronell’s defenders, Slavoj Zizek, has been less shy about calling Reitman a liar while also insisting that Ronell is complexand deserves to be deeply and intelligently read and understood: “[I]n today’s academia persons with sensitivity are more and more rare. Avital’s ‘eccentricities’ are all on the surface; there is nothing sleazy hidden beneath her affected behaviour, in contrast to quite a few professors.” Does Ronell’s accuser receive this capacious acceptance of human foibles? No. Complexity only goes one way, and here is Zizek’s final word:

The only reasonable explanation I see is that he engaged in (faking) a personal friendship with her to get her help in promoting his career, and then dropped her when he didn’t get the desired results because she was ethical enough not to privilege him over others but continued to treat him professionally in professional matters—it’s as simple as that.

The smear against Reitman shines through, but I confess I did not find this formulation simple, nor do I find Ronell’s treatment of Reitman, as described, particularly “professional.” But of course, what Zizek is hinting here is actually a little more pernicious than that: By adding in professional matters, what he’s really defending is Ronell’s right to make whatever personaldemands she wished on her advisee. It wasReitman’s responsibilityto compartmentalize the personal from the professional, as if refusing the former wouldn’t affect the latter. To Zizek, his failure to do so—Reitman’s expectation that an adviser in his profession who made constant demands on him day and night would help him professionally—reveals him, not her, as venal and corrupt.