Bob Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin said in a new interview the timeline around sexual abuse allegations filed in a lawsuit recently are “not possible.”
Speaking to Huffington Post, Heylin said, “It’s not possible. Dylan was touring England during that time, and was in Los Angeles for two of those weeks, plus a day or two at Woodstock. The tour was 10 days, but Bob flew into London on April 26 and arrived back in New York on June 3.”
Heyline continued, “If Dylan was in New York in mid-April, it was for no more than a day or two. Woodstock was where he spent most of his time when not touring. And if he was in NYC, he invariably stayed at his manager’s apartment in Gramercy, not the Chelsea.”
Huffington Post noted, “Heylin also said the singer didn’t start living at the Chelsea Hotel until autumn of that year.”
Heyline has written nine books about Dylan with his most recent title, The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling, 1941-1966, covering extensively the time period the abuse allegedly took place.
As previously reported, a lawsuit was filed on August 13 in Manhattan Supreme Court by a woman who accused Dylan of sexually abusing her when she was 12 years old. The court documents identify the plaintiff as “J.C.” and state, “Bob Dylan, over a six-week period between April and May of 1965 befriended and established an emotional connection with the plaintiff.” The documents detailed Dylan did this to “lower [J.C.’s] inhibitions with the object of sexually abusing her, which he did, coupled with the provision of drugs, alcohol and threats of physical violence, leaving her emotionally scarred and psychologically damaged to this day.”
The plaintiff, who is now 68, claims some of these incidents took place in Dylan’s apartment at the Chelsea Hotel. A spokesman for Dylan denied these allegations saying, “This 56-year-old claim is untrue and will be vigorously defended.”
Page Six noted, “The suit was filed late Friday (August 13), on the eve of the closure of the New York Child Victims’ Act look-back window. The window allowed victims of childhood abuse to file suit against their attackers and the institutions that protected them regardless of how old the claims were and whether they had since passed beyond the statute of limitations.”