National Geographic and the producers of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s upcoming show Cosmos are investigating as well.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is a groundbreaking astrophysicist, popular TV host, and noted Internet personality.
He’s also been accused of sexual misconduct by three women, as David G. McAfee reports at Patheos, a website that hosts a variety of blogs on religion, spirituality, and atheism.
One woman, Tchiya Amet, says that Tyson drugged and raped her when the two were students at the University of Texas, Austin. Another, Ashley Watson, says he made unwanted advances when she was his assistant, causing her to quit her job. A third, Katelyn Allers, says she was “felt up” by Tyson at a party in 2009.
Tyson has not responded to requests for comment from McAfee or from Vox. Allers said in an email to Vox that McAfee’s description of her encounter with Tyson was accurate, but declined a further interview.
Fox and the National Geographic channel, which were scheduled to host Tyson’s documentary series Cosmos in 2019, have announced that they are investigating the reports, according to the Hollywood Reporter .
McAfee told Vox that he first learned of the allegations against Tyson in 2017, and decided to investigate because he was a fan of Tyson. He wrote about Amet’s allegations on Patheos in 2017, and published an interview with her in November. McAfee said that Watson and Allers contacted him after reading that interview.
For a time, the allegations did not receive the kind of mainstream attention typical of such stories in the #MeToo era, perhaps because they were first published at Patheos, which is not known for breaking news. But the claims made by Amet, Watson, and Allers are serious, and come at a time when the scientific community is beginning to reckon with the issue of sexual misconduct.
Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the first black person to hold the role. The author of several popular science books and the host of the science TV shows NOVA ScienceNow and Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey as well as the podcast StarTalk, he was recognized for his role in making science accessible to the public with the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 2015. He is also a prolific Twitter user who has been both celebrated and mocked for his tweets.
According to the three women who spoke to McAfee, he’s also guilty of sexual misconduct. Amet told McAfee that she visited Tyson’s apartment when the two were graduate students in 1984. He gave her a glass of water. The next thing she remembers is waking up to a sexual assault, she said. Amet has spoken and written about her allegations publicly several times in the last few years, confronting Tyson at a public event in 2010 and blogging about the allegations in 2014.
