US astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson targeted by #MeToo campaign
By
David Walsh
12 January 2019
American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has become one of the most recent targets of the #MeToo campaign, the sexual witch hunt sweeping the professional middle classes in the US and beyond.
Nothing that has come to light so far demonstrates that Tyson is guilty of any wrongdoing. On the contrary, the published material suggests he is the victim of a virulent strain of political and psychological hysteria.
Tyson has been the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City since 1996. The Rose Center is part of the American Museum of Natural History, whose Department of Astrophysics Tyson founded in 1997.
Tyson hosted the PBS television show NOVA ScienceNow from 2006 to 2011. In 2014, he hosted the television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a sequel to Carl Sagan’s 1980 series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. He has also been the host of a television talk show, StarTalk, since April 2015.
Despite the unproven and flimsy character of the charges against him, StarTalk has been pulled off the air by the National Geographic Channel while Fox Networks Group investigates the allegations against Tyson.
The reader may judge for him or herself the seriousness of the accusations:
A woman by the name of Tchiya Amet El Maat, formerly Staci Hambric, with whom Tyson was a graduate student at the University of Texas in 1984 and with whom he had a brief relationship, started accusing the scientist in 2010 of having raped her three decades previously.
Buzz Feed News, which posted a lengthy, sensationalized article about the “case” against Tyson in December, notes that in 2014 Amet “traveled to…