Remember back when our favorite Orwell-groupie-who-doesn't-get-Orwell Mr. Sullivan wrote that heartwarming review for the Times about the Saturday Night Live writer who learned as a boy from a kindly old monk that when grownups sleep with children it's the fault of the children for taking advantage of the grownups?

Well, it turns out that the gentleman who wrote the book has been accused by his daughter of molesting her when she was just a little younger than that, also in the Times.

The gentleman declines to deny the charges, to protect his daughter, he says, but he apparently steered the reporter toward intimates who were not so gentlemanly. He also at one point offers to take her to see Fr. Joe, whose particular form of wisdom he apparently felt would be apposite.

Daniel Okrent, the Times ombudsman, says that upon investigation, their reporter found the charges credible and they went with the story, but he's still a little squicked because, well, it's all just so messy, which presumably handing the front page of the Book Review to a celebration of having as one's moral lodestar someone who thinks children are responsible for their own molestation isn't.

via Lean Left, which also has an interesting breakdown of Mr. Okrent's column (did you know that it is the job of the umbudsman to see that the Times doesn't upset readers?)

update: Richard Cohen of the Washington Post says that Hendra "should have known" that his daughter would come forth with these accusations, which he nonetheless assumes not to be true because the lady in question has been to psychiatrists and suffered in the past from anorexia and is, we can safely assume, almost certainly making it up.