Tchiya Amet says Neil DeGrasse Tyson raped her in the 1980s. As his star rose, no one believed her. Three additional women, one for the first time, now say Neil sexually harassed them. This isn't looking good for the popular science entertainment personality.
Allegations against Neil DeGrasse Tyson were previously detailed on this website, patheos.com.
Now there's reporting from Azeen Ghorayshi for BuzzFeed News:
Read the restWith three women now making allegations on the record, the Patheos article spread far and wide, prompting Fox Broadcasting Company, which produces the show, and National Geographic, which airs it, to announce an official investigation. A spokesperson for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where Tyson has led the Hayden Planetarium for over 20 years, said that it has never received a complaint about him, but was also looking into the allegations. On Saturday, Tyson released a 1,600-word statement on Facebook, confirming many of the details of Watson's and Allers' allegations, and apologizing for what he deemed clumsy displays of affection that had been misunderstood.
He also responded to Amet's rape allegations, his only public acknowledgment of the claims in the four years since Amet first blogged about them. He said they had been friends in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, and had been "intimate" on a few occasions. But he denied raping her. Noting her "odd" interests in New Age healing, he suggested she had a "false memory." (Watson, Allers, and Amet have disputed much of Tyson's statement.
