Last Thursday, the religious website Patheos reported allegations of sexual harassment made against Neil deGrasse Tyson. One physicist accused him of non-consensually feeling beneath her dress at a conference, while a former assistant said he had made suggestive comments to her that prompted her to quit her job. The allegations join an older allegation of rape, by a woman who was a fellow grad student of Tyson’s at the University of Texas at Austin—first on her blog in 2014, and then reported in the New York Times on Saturday. Tyson responded to the allegations on Facebook on Saturday, in a note titled, “On being accused.”
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One thing that struck me while reading his note is that he confirms doing many of the more minor things the women bring up, but he denies that any of them were harmful. He paints himself as a bumbly nerd who is just here to talk about planets and go on adventures, not one of the most powerful men in physics and a behemoth in entertainment alike. Ultimately, he sees his interactions with other woman as a sort of word problem that can be cleared up via an investigation—if someone could just do the math, we’d certainly be able to figure out the rational, hard truth.
Source: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Response to Allegations of Sexual Assault Is Self-Defeating
