Ashley Watson was ecstatic, earlier this year, when she got the job to be Neil deGrasse Tyson's driver. She wanted to be a Hollywood producer, and thought this gig with his hit TV show, Cosmos — even if she was just shuttling him to and from the set — could help her make useful industry connections.
So when a friend sent her an article from a fringe website claiming that the famous astrophysicist had drugged and raped a woman in the 1980s, Watson, then 28, didn't think much of it.
On Thursday, Watson's allegations were made public on a blog called Patheos, which had previously published Amet's claims, twice. The new story also described a third woman, Katelyn Allers, an astronomy and physics professor at Bucknell University, who said Tyson had grabbed her and reached down the front of her dress to look at her tattoo at a scientific meeting in 2009.
Now a fourth woman has told BuzzFeed News her experience of sexual harassment from Tyson. In January 2010, she recalled, she joined her then-boyfriend at a holiday party for employees of the American Museum of Natural History. Tyson, its most famous employee, drunkenly approached her, she said, making sexual jokes and propositioning her to join him alone in his office. In a 2014 email shared with BuzzFeed News, she described the incident to her own employer in order to shoot down a proposed collaboration with Tyson.
.Over the course of nearly three years, BuzzFeed News has spoken with more than 30 people for this story, including the alleged victims and their families, Cosmos crew members, and graduate students and professors who were at UT Austin 30 years ago. Dozens more from that time did not reply to requests for interviews.
But for Watson and Allers, the tragedy was the loss of a different black scientist: Amet.
For years, Amet had been trying to make the world listen to her account of a powerful man who had once assaulted her and derailed her life. Mainstream publications, including BuzzFeed News, were unable to adequately corroborate the events from so long ago, and did not publish her allegations. And internet commenters assailed her character and New Age lifestyle. Her claims may have stayed buried forever, if not for the women who saw in Amet's story a shadow of their own.
There is much more in the full article.
