Do we like Bob Dylan?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decades of work, a 2018 song project for same-sex couples, a blunt 2012 take on slavery, and no harmful words of his own turned up.
Robert Zimmerman was born in Duluth on 24 May 1941 and grew up in Hibbing, on Minnesota's Iron Range. He played his first talent show at Hibbing High in 1957, moved to the Twin Cities in 1959 for university, and became Bob Dylan in Minneapolis before heading to New York.
From there it's a very long career: protest anthems, a plugged-in rock reinvention, decades on the road and, in 2016, the Nobel Prize in Literature. He told the Swedish Academy the news left him speechless, then skipped the ceremony citing pre-existing commitments and sent a recorded lecture the next year. Very Dylan: honoured, slightly aloof.
The harm check comes up clean on what we found. In a 2012 Rolling Stone interview he said America was founded on the backs of slaves, and that ending slavery more peacefully would have left it far ahead. In 2018 he reworked a standard as “He's Funny That Way” for the Universal Love project, made for LGBTQ+ couples.
Gaps, though: we found nothing from Dylan himself on trans rights, climate or migrants, so we can't say more than that. No record turned up of him pushing conspiracy theories or working with people who do. Silence isn't an endorsement, but it isn't harm either.
The scary one is the 2021 lawsuit. A plaintiff identified only as J.C. alleged he sexually abused her at the Hotel Chelsea in 1965. His spokesperson called the allegation untrue, and a federal judge dismissed the case with prejudice in July 2022 after she dropped it. His lawyer said the plaintiff had destroyed evidence, which is his side's claim, not a court finding, and no court ruled on the merits.
He was also sued by the estate of his former co-writer Jacques Levy over a share of his 2020 catalogue sale. That's money, not misconduct, and he won: New York's Appellate Division said the agreement was unambiguous and didn't entitle the estate to proceeds.