‘Everybody knew.” That’s what they said about Harvey Weinstein, and that’s what they’re saying now about James Levine—but can it be true? Not in the narrowly legal sense. As of today, nobody “knows” anything about the alleged transgressions of the Metropolitan Opera’s music director emeritus beyond the indisputable fact that, as the New York Times has reported, four men have publicly accused him of abusing them sexually many years ago when they were teenagers. According to the New York Post, which broke the initial story on Saturday, one of them went so far as to file a police report in 2016.

Yet...