Taylor said the authors were female co-workers of his, and they each chose “voluntarily” to enter in romantic relationships, including some “pursuing” him. 

“Mr. Asher was married at the time of these relationships, as were many of the women. He is deeply sorry for the pain these alleged ‘consensual decisions’ caused his family, and others.” Taylor also stated that Asher has taken legal action and demanded that Oliver and the SCBWI remove their “false” statements. 

Dana Tuley-Williams, system librarian at the Keith Leftwich Memorial Library at Oklahoma City Community College said, as librarians, they evaluate books for their quality as an academic resource, and an author’s personal actions doesn’t really affect the accessibility of the book. 

Williams said there was one situation more than ten years ago where an author wrote a memoir and made up large portions of the story. “He was exposed as a fraud and there was a lot of uproar about it,” she said. James Frey wrote “A Million Little Pieces,” which detailed his recovery of being an alcoholic and a drug addict. It was a pick on Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. 

That’s the only situation Williams can recall where a library took action based on negative actions of an author. 

“I’ve worked here 17 years and we’ve never had an incident like [Asher’s]. But the James Frey book I think we did end up moving it to fiction. If we begin scrutinizing the personal lives of authors, we’re going to be very unhappy,” she said. “Many of the great authors were not good people.” 

“It’s been checked out enough that I’d like to look at the condition of it. Generally after 21 uses it gets pretty worn out,” she said. 

Williams says the young adult genre is very popular at the Leftwich library, and that many people don’t know that it carries best-sellers or “pleasure reading” books. The library orders their books from their primary online vendor, Yankee Book Peddler, which offers a wide variety of books.