Author accuses Yale of sexism

A furious row has erupted among some of America's most eminent academics after a feminist writer claimed she was one of many women sexually abused at Yale University.

Naomi Wolf, 42, high-profile author of The Beauty Myth, has named her former professor Harold Bloom as the man who harassed her when she was a student there.

The claims, which it is said will be published in next week's New York magazine, have sparked controversy among the country's academic elite.

Bloom, one of the world's leading Shakespearean scholars has found an unlikely ally in feminist philosopher and writer Camille Paglia.

Paglia, 56, also one of Bloom's former students, said: "It really smacks of the Salem witch-hunt and all the accompanying hysteria. It really grates on me that Naomi Wolf for her entire life has been batting her eyes and bobbing her boobs in the face of men and made a profession out of courting male attention by flirting and offering her sexual allure."

She said it was "indecent" of Wolf to wait for 20 years to "bring all of this down on an elderly man who has health problems, to drag him into a 'he said/she said' scenario so late in the game". Bloom, now 73, has remained silent on the matter.

Wolf first claimed she had been abused in a passage in her book Promiscuities, in which a professor visits her at home allegedly to discuss her poetry, but then gropes her between the legs.