room”.
The club has been partly funded by the Academy. The alleged sexual assaults occurred between 1996 and 2017, some of them in the club’s premises, according to Dagens Nyheter.
Several women spoke openly, allowing the newspaper to reveal their identities, and their stories were corroborated by witnesses, the paper said.One of the accusers claims to have been raped in an apartment in a posh Stockholm neighbourhood.
“Everyone knows and everyone has always known,” that he was attacking young women, she says.- ‘Do not touch me’-The women said they had remained silent out of fear of jeopardising their careers because of the man’s close relations with leading publishers, producers, directors and composers.
Writer Elise Karlsson told AFP that she was working under precarious conditions in 2008 when she was 27-years-old.“I suddenly felt his hands on my buttocks (and) at no point had I shown any interest. I was shocked and told him ‘do not touch me’ and slapped him,” she said.
Karlsson said he later approached her and said she “would never find work” in the sector again. “I didn’t have the opportunity to confide in a leader, we knew (the man) was mainly targeting young and vulnerable people,” she added.
According to columnist Svante Weyler, the lack of transparency in the Swedish Academy has led to a code of silence. - ‘Unwanted intimacy’ -
After a “crisis meeting” on Thursday evening, the Swedish Academy announced that it was cutting all ties with the accused, whom it had funded and allowed to manage an apartment it owns in an upscale Paris neighbourhood.
The Academy said in a statement that “members of the Academy, daughters of Academy members, wives of Academy members and staff of the Academy have experienced unwanted intimacy or inappropriate behaviour” by the man.
The prominent institution said it would launch an internal inquiry to find out if the perpetrator “has had any direct or indirect influence on the Academy’s prizes, scholarships, and fundings of any kind”.
Culture Minister Alice Bah Kuhnke said she regretted honouring him with the 2015 Order of The Polar Star, awarded to members of the Swedish royal family and foreigners for services to Sweden.