It seems that for every maligned Brett Kavanaugh, there are two dozen guilty-as-sin Roy Moores. Pop astrophysicist and Twitter wet blanket Neil deGrasse Tyson is the latest celebrity under fire for alleged sexual harassment and assault, and as journalists dig deeper into the previously ignored allegations, things are looking worse and worse for him.
For four years, Tchiya Amet has publicly accused Tyson of drugging her and raping her in 1984, while the two of them were the only black graduate students in the astronomy department of the University of Texas at Austin. The story was relegated to her blog and a quick, mostly ignored article on the Christian blog Patheos. Now there are three other women accusing Tyson of sexual harassment. BuzzFeed News has now interviewed more than 30 people over the course of three years regarding all four allegations.
The evidence that exists for Amet’s story so far comprises a photo of Tyson from the time, and the word of her ex-husband that Amet had “told him something bad had happened with Tyson” including drugging and something traumatic in 1986. Her contemporaries from UT-Austin don’t recall her making any specific allegations at the time, but they do remember her departure from the university being sudden and “under a cloud,” one that Amet says stemmed from trauma after the Tyson incident.
That’s still pretty thin as evidence goes, even if true. But the three allegations of harassment and misconduct are far more recent and better corroborated.
In 2009, Katelyn Allers alleges that Tyson reached into her dress during a party after grabbing her tattooed arm. Both her friend and another witness who snapped a photo of Allers and Tyson right before the incident both confirmed the incident and provided the photos to BuzzFeed News. Tyson says he was admiring the tattoo of the Solar System that she had just shown him. Having been personally involved in the recent controversy over Pluto, he writes, he was interested in whether it was there on her shoulder. He doesn’t explain why he didn’t simply ask, which most people would consider more appropriate.
In 2010, an anonymous woman told BuzzFeed News that at a party, Tyson made enough sexually aggressive remarks and unwanted advances that she cited the encounter in a 2014 email to her employer to reject a proposed professional collaboration with Tyson. Two friends confirmed that the woman did tell them about the incident at the time, and the existence of this email is something that could be definitively proven.
This year, Tyson’s former assistant Ashley Watson alleges that Tyson invited her to his apartment and initiated persistent, unwanted physical contact and kept on talking about sex. BuzzFeed News reports that Watson immediately resigned as his assistant and reported the incident to a producer. A few months later Watson reached out to Amet. It’s a pretty big deal for someone like Tyson to lose a top aide this way.
One contemporaneously corroborated allegation of harassment could be a drunken mistake. Three of them, backed by some degree of evidence and consistency, could be a pattern.
Tyson’s Facebook post, in which he refused to name any of his accusers, may have dug him into a deeper hole. Of Amet, with whom he says he had a “brief relationship,” Tyson more or less resorts to accusing her of being unsuccessful and crazy.
“For me, what was most significant, was that in [Amet’s] 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,” wrote Tyson of Amet. This could be true. But it’s also a typical tactic for dealing with scandal to disqualify its source.
With regards to Allers’ allegations, Tyson says his grope at her shoulder was “simply a search [for Pluto] under the covered part of her shoulder of the sleeveless dress.” Simply! (And again, he could have just asked about Pluto.)
Of Watson, he concedes that he said, “If I hug you I might just want more.” But he claims he never attempted to “seduce” her. But this is hardly a sufficient explanation for such an abrupt resignation, especially given that Watson and Tyson had what appears to have been a very close professional relationship.
Tyson has yet to respond to the anonymous accuser, but it can at least be proven whether or not she sent the email to her employer. It would have been an odd thing to send if the incident had never occurred.
I’ve always wondered why Tyson has to rain on everyone’s parade on Twitter, trying to ruin the fun of New Year’s (“A day that’s not astronomically significant … in any way … at all … whatsoever”) and football (“Sometimes I wonder if we’d have flying cars by now had civilization spent a little less brain energy contemplating Football”).
Maybe, just maybe, he was waiting for a cavalcade of women to rain on his.
