Bob Dylan allegations: why the press has got it wrong

So, now it’s Bob Dylan facing allegations of historic abuse. In his case, they arrive in the form of a civil lawsuit from a 68-year-old woman, identified only as “JC”, who claims that he “exploited his status as a musician” to “obtain control over her as part of his plan to sexually molest and abuse” the girl who was just 12 years old at the time. This crime, heinous if true, would have been committed in April 1965, over 56 years ago.

Where do we begin?

Well, there are perhaps three ways we could think of this story.

The first is legally, which will be left entirely to a New York court. Nothing needs to be said or should be said about that.

The second is philosophically. Has our moral language changed? What constitutes “guilt” in a culture where guilt and innocence have been supplanted by other labels, used before and after any trial, whereby judgement before the law rarely means the same as judgement in the eyes of the public?

Yet, somewhere between the two, we have a third side to the story, centred on the way the allegations are reported. #MeToo began as the legitimate need to take allegations of abuse seriously, yet it has become synonymous with the process of toppling the rich and famous, as well as the media frenzy that follows any such fall from grace. If the media were guilty of uncritically elevating these “gods” onto their pedestals, should they be reporting a story in which they were so heavily complicit?

Writing on Wednesday in The Times, Lesley-Ann Jones delivers a piece (“Rock’s MeToo moment has arrived”) about Dylan that’s none too subtle in the way it manages a precarious balancing act. It’s typical of the journalism around cases of this kind and begins with the usual legal niceties. “The octogenarian superstar must be presumed innocent until and unless found otherwise”, she writes, but then proceeds to lean heavily into the prevailing mood: “Ladies and gentlemen, having feasted on Spacey, Weinstein and Hollywood, I give you rock’s #MeToo moment.”

“Feasted”?

It’s just one word but striking. Proximity means that, syntactically, it looks back to the “Ladies and gentlemen” (it’s you and I guilty of the feasting) but, to the ear, it also connects with the “I give you”, in which case it is Jones gorging on scandal. It’s a pivot that is so indicative of the cultural moment we’re in.

Jones shifts subtly from the facts of the case as far as we know them to settle our focus on the bigger picture in which the “guilty” are finally brought to trial. The portrait she proceeds to paint of Dylan is unflattering. She notes that “the accused denies all charges, naturally” when she could have written “the accused denies all charges”. The additional “naturally” means so much more. There’s an edge to the writing that’s hard to describe but easy to identify. She writes that “when Dylan took his backing singer Carolyn Dennis as his lawfully wedded in June 1986, the couple had a five-month-old daughter”. How should you read that? As a matter of fact, or veiled implication that there was something illicit about “taking his backing singer” as his wife? Is there immorality in the fact that they had a child out of wedlock? Dylan, it seems to stress, is a man whose sexual life is far from straightforward. And, in case that’s unclear, note again the title of the piece. “Rock’s MeToo moment has arrived” is not “might have arrived”.

Jones isn’t the only one to take this approach which has become the standard way of reporting #MeToo allegations. Like is too routinely compared with “like”. Tom Leonard, writing in The Daily Mail, offers that “it’s fair to say that, to borrow a classic Dylan song, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ when it comes to celebrities and allegations of sexual misconduct” (take a moment to groan), but he then proceeds to contextualise the sexual mores of the time with lurid tales. He highlights the story of Dana Gillespie, a British actress and singer, who has “claimed that by 15 she had been to bed with David Bowie, and by 16 with Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, as well as bedding The Who’s Keith Moon, Mick Jagger, Michael Caine and Sean Connery.”

Take a step back and remember that this story is about allegations made by a woman approaching 70 years old, about incidents that happened to her at the age of 12, that would mean that one of the century’s most iconic musicians is a paedophile. Is this really the moment to throw around lurid allegations about other celebrities?

Cultural shifts are always worth noting but the one around #MeToo is not simply a matter of changing attitudes towards historic sex crimes. It is increasingly a form of revisionism by which the media itself seeks to correct past wrongs. The moral posturing belies decades of prurient reporting. There was a time, not that many years ago, when British tabloids were uncritically glamourising Bill Wyman’s relationship with Mandy Smith. Indeed, Lesley-Ann Jones herself wrote a much stronger piece for The Times two years ago, in which she described her complicity in a media world that looked the other way (“I was there when Bill Wyman dated Mandy Smith. My guilt haunts me”).

Yet, when writing about Dylan, her history with Wyman (she was also his biographer) is glossed over: “Music biz folk sat around making grim predictions about the future of the former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman and his Lolita, Mandy Smith, with whom he first slept, Smith insists, when she was 14.” Compare that with her previous admission: “Some memories torment us, despite our best efforts to forget them. My guilt is hinged to the things I never said, but really should have”.

One of the oldest problems faced by the press is being both observer and subject. How does the photojournalist take photographs without changing the behaviour of people who know they’re being photographed? The most renowned photojournalist, Henri Cartier-Bresson, tried to solve that problem by once sticking his camera through the gap in a fence and pressing the shutter. It produced his most famous photograph, “Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare”.

Print journalists need to start doing the same, by removing themselves and their judgements from the story. Verdicts are too often rendered long before any trial begins and that benefits nobody, least of all the victims.