Neil deGrasse Tyson under investigation after accusations of sexual misconduct

Washington Post

Days after multiple women accused Neil deGrasse Tyson of sexual harassment and assault, Fox Entertainment Group and the producers of the television series “Cosmos” said they were investigating the celebrity astrophysicist.

The allegations were reported Thursday on the website Patheos, which features writing on religion, science and the skeptic community. In the report, Bucknell University astronomer Katelyn Allers said Tyson grabbed her arm and reached into her dress while looking at a tattoo of the solar system. Ashley Watson, a former assistant to Tyson who worked on his latest “Cosmos” series, said she quit her job after Tyson made inappropriate sexual advances.

That's not even the worst of the allegations:

Patheos has previously reported allegations by musician Tchiya Amet, who said Tyson drugged and raped her when they were graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.

I sincerely hope that these allegations are not true. I have a great deal of respect for Dr. Tyson as a scientist and science communicator. If true, that makes Dr. Tyson's lengthy Facebook post essentially a wordy lie that will be picked apart in court.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit taken aback by this news.

Time to pick him apart, that is between the legs.

a reply to: projectvxn

Social justice comes for everyone at some point.

It's sad that some champion the downfall of such brilliant concepts as innocent until proven guilty.

Neil's a smart guy, but I've seen him fall for other such liberal nonsense.

So reap what you sow, and such.

a reply to: projectvxn

Damnit.

I hope this isn't true and financially motivated.

Neil is one of the few geniuses who can explain complex concepts to layman who have a minor understanding of the field.

a reply to: CriticalStinker

I used to respect him, logically.

Until he caved on some issues to typical SJW feels...at that point, to me, he was just a dead man walking.

I guess now he might see the folly in such ideals.

a reply to: projectvxn

Nooooooooooooooo

Please be fake

originally posted by: Allaroundyou
a reply to: projectvxn

Nooooooooooooooo

Please be fake

That's the thing though...true or false...doesn't matter.

He will be tried by public opinion. I hope he has good "social console".

One of his accounts strikes me as very odd.

It's so repetitive.

She is a talented, warm and friendly person — excellent traits for morale on a high pressure production. Practically everyone she knows on set gets a daily welcome-hug from her. I expressly rejected each hug offered frequently during the Production. But in its place I offered a handshake, and on a few occasions, clumsily declared, “If I hug you I might just want more.” My intent was to express restrained but genuine affection.

In the final week of shooting, with just a few days left, as a capstone of our friendship, I invited her to wine & cheese at my place upon dropping me off from work. No pressure. I serve wine & cheese often to visitors. And I even alerted her that others from the production were gathering elsewhere that evening, so she could just drop me off and head straight there or anywhere elsewhere. She freely chose to come by for wine & cheese and I was delighted. In the car, we had started a long conversation that could continue unabated. Production days are long. We arrived late, but she was on her way home two hours later.

Afterwards, she came into my office to told me she was creeped out by the wine & cheese evening. She viewed the invite as an attempt to seduce her, even though she sat across the wine & cheese table from me, and all conversation had been in the same vein as all other conversations we ever had.

link

That said, I think it should be proven before his life is wrecked.

a reply to: CriticalStinker

Proof, that's old school.

Embrace extreme leftism, embrace social justice and embrace wrongthink/speak.

What time is the public hanging?

a reply to: MisterSpock

Embrace extreme leftism, embrace social justice and embrace wrongthink/speak.

Leftists may use it as a political tool more often...buy I've seen it from every ideology as a weapon against opponents.

originally posted by: CriticalStinker
a reply to: MisterSpock

Embrace extreme leftism, embrace social justice and embrace wrongthink/speak.

Leftists may use it as a political tool more often...buy I've seen it from every ideology as a weapon against opponents.

True, but in modernity and specifically within America, the source is undeniable.

My concern focuses on the present, within the pinnacle of human society.

a reply to: projectvxn

If he is guilty, he deserves punishment.

If he is not guilty, his accusers deserve punishment.

Unfortunately, he will be branded with the accusations even if he is innocent and the accusers will walk away scott free if they are guilty.

But I blame science in general for having a sexual abuse condoning culture. They haven't done enough to bring the offenders to justice...

... just like people blame the church (any of them) for the criminal actions of individuals.

His reaction to this is telling:
Niel deGrasse Tyson's Facebook page

For a variety of reasons, most justified, some unjustified, men accused of sexual impropriety in today’s “me-too” climate are presumed to be guilty by the court of public opinion. Emotions bypass due-process, people choose sides, and the social media wars begin.
In any claim, evidence matters. Evidence always matters. But what happens when it’s just one person’s word against another’s, and the stories don’t agree? That’s when people tend to pass judgment on who is more credible than whom. And that’s when an impartial investigation can best serve the truth – and would have my full cooperation to do so.

Sorry for some reason it posted instead of paragraph jump.
Anyways he goes on to say:

I’ve recently been publically accused of sexual misconduct. These accusations have received a fair amount of press in the past forty-eight hours, unaccompanied by my reactions. In many cases, it’s not the media’s fault. I declined comment on the grounds that serious accusations should not be adjudicated in the press. But clearly I cannot continue to stay silent. So below I offer my account of each accusation.

And so it would seem that this can either be a case of actual sexual misconduct, or it could be just another abuse of the #metoo movement. In the long term this attack on Tyson (regardless if it's true or not) damages science as a whole when it comes to getting ideas across to the average person. That's the world we live in though, guilt through public critics rather then by facts.

a reply to: projectvxn


Did he stand up Kavanaugh and the false accusations against him? NO? Then suck it up cupcake. Cannibalism is a bitch and you made a bad choice jumping on the SJW bandwagon.


We must believe the victim right?

Never liked him, he is very unstable and get quickly emotionel. And he embrace ignorance when it comes to space.

We just watched an interview with this guy on PBS this evening, I thought it was going to be interesting. But he just spews the same old science that has been accepted officialy while rejecting anything different without considering if it is feesable. That kind of jerk mindset turns me off, how are we going to advance in science if we do not investigate things that do not walk step in step with our beliefs.

After five minutes of watching him full of himself I told the wife to change the channel. How disappointing. By observing his personality I would say that these allegations against him may be real. He is a celebrity and I think that he would abuse his position. I knew a few Physicists in my lifetime personally and they were pretty different than him, they would discuss stuff over my head and even bore me with some of the science. This guy seems to be just an actor that got a degree. A parrot to enthuse those who know little. He was stating hypothesis as fact, one thing I do not like.

In this case, I believe the women who accused him.

The one that accuses Tyson of drugged and raping her has also blogged that she came to that conclusion while she was "attuining " herself with the universe. She says she doesn't remember what happened only that she can't remember one night.

Tyson said that he became aware of the womans accusations years ago and the blogs on the internet about it. He made copies of those blogs so that if at some point the story changed he would have records of it.

Over this time I had a brief relationship with a fellow astro-graduate student, from a more recent entering class. I remember being intimate only a few times, all at her apartment, but the chemistry wasn’t there. So the relationship faded quickly. There was nothing otherwise odd or unusual about this friendship.

I didn’t see much of her after that time. Our student offices were on different floors of the building and we were not in the same classes. A few years later, I ran into her, pregnant, with who I think was the father by her side. That’s when I had learned that she dropped out of graduate school. Again, this is not itself an unusual fact, but I nonetheless wished her well in motherhood and in whatever career path would follow.

More than thirty years later, as my visibility-level took another jump, I read a freshly posted blog accusing me of drugging and raping a woman I did not recognize by either photo or name. Turned out to be the same person who I dated briefly in graduate school. She had changed her name and lived an entire life, married with children, before this accusation.

For me, what was most significant, was that in this new life, long after dropping out of astrophysics graduate school, she was posting videos of colored tuning forks endowed with vibrational therapeutic energy that she channels from the orbiting planets. As a scientist, I found this odd. Meanwhile, according to her blog posts, the drug and rape allegation comes from an assumption of what happened to her during a night that she cannot remember. It is as though a false memory had been implanted, which, because it never actually happened, had to be remembered as an evening she doesn’t remember. Nor does she remember waking up the next morning and going to the office. I kept a record of everything she posted, in case her stories morphed over time. So this is sad, which, for me, defies explanation.

I note that this allegation was used as a kind of solicitation-bait by at least one journalist to bring out of the woodwork anybody who had any encounter with me that left them uncomfortable.

Overview

I’m the accused, so why believe anything I say? Why believe me at all?

a reply to: projectvxn

Tyson lives in Lower Manhattan with his wife, Alice Young. They have two children: Miranda and Travis

*Time to drag out his family into the public spotlight so we can all see how rapey and predator-enabling they all are.

*precedent

originally posted by: MisterSpock

but I've seen him fall for other such liberal nonsense.

So reap what you sow, and such.

Ya that one video was disturbing.

High IQ doesnt inherently keep one above the sorts of insanity that flow from tribalism.

i used to have a great deal of time for Neil, loved a lot of what he did with Cosmos, but over the years that magic has worn thin as it's become clearer that the role of omnipotent teacher he has in the show is actually how he sees himself in life... So many interviews and things where he just comes off as incredibly pompous and arrogant, unnecessarily over-explaining and talking down.. he clearly buys wholeheartedly into his own hype and it's just really unappealing.

Seeing his lengthy, point by point, "this is why you think things and you're wrong" response to these allegations, written as it's a script for a new special he's presenting is the final nail in the coffin of my respect for him. Guy knows no humility.

also "yeah i put my hand up her sleeve but you don't understand i was really keen to see pluto" is a really really messed up thing to be posited as a defense.