We Never “Believed All Women”: 5 men you forgot were accused of assault
Trigger warning: sexual abuse, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are discussed
For the last few weeks, my life has been dominated by the cultural fallout of the Amber Heard vs. Johnny Depp defamation trial.
I didn’t discuss the case on this site until the day it was officially over. In my post, “The Women We Won’t Protect,” I bemoaned the problematic, often misogynistic rhetoric that surrounded the trial. My objection to the social media-led backlash against Amber Heard wasn’t even about who was right or wrong within Depp and Heard’s calamitous relationship; it was about how nauseatingly callous the Internet’s coverage on it became, eventually leading me to create a currently-35,000+ word document comprising all the major allegations and supporting evidence at the center of this scandal.
I’ve fallen down this rabbit hole far enough to know that the situation is complicated. It’d be very easy for supporters on either side to cherry-pick the information that best represents their arguments (and trust me, many of those supporters have). For that, I can’t say there aren’t reasonable individuals on both sides of this divide. What I can say is that, across social media, there have been some horribly unreasonable takes, one of the most troubling being captured in this tweet from professional-bad-take-haver, Dominique Samuels.
To be fair, Samuels does live in the UK, which I’ve never visited. Maybe the Spice Girls’ homeland actually has been through a radical Girl Power revolution where all women who accuse powerful people of abuse are automatically believed “no matter what,” but I sincerely doubt it. (I watched the Netflix documentary about Jimmy Savile; I don’t think the Brits are doing any better than we in the US are at addressing allegations of assault and harassment.)
So while I agree with Samuel’s point about women being capable of inflicting abuse “too” (as if any reasonable person has ever claimed otherwise), and I understand why Depp’s recent victory has been so celebrated by male victims who have been stigmatized due to their gender, the idea that we’ve ever lived in an era in which women are believed “no matter what” is absolutely ludicrous.
The material affects of #MeToo’s late 2010s uprising have been exaggerated since the movement came to prominence, when incredibly powerful men started spreading claims of a “witch hunt” and voiced irrational fears of the dreaded “false allegation”–something that is extremely rare and tends to fit easily recognizable patterns even when it does occur (speaking of male victims, men are about 230 times more likely to be a victim of rape than be falsely accused of it).
If #MeToo did anything, it helped countless victims of every gender feel a little less alone and provided some much-needed education on how powerful institutions value profit over people when called to “investigate” sexual misconduct. Some men were ousted from their industries and a small handful were legally held accountable for their crimes, but there’s no doubt that not every alleged predator was persecuted–either within our justice system or our culture.
Of course there are the men whose post-#MeToo prosperity still stings victims to this day. If it weren’t bad enough that millions of women had their bodily autonomy put at risk by a recent Supreme Court ruling, those of us affected are well aware that one of the Justices making this decision was accused by three women of sexual assault. That Justice was nominated to the court by a man accused of sexual assault or harassment by at least 26 women–a man who bragged about “grabbing [women] by the pussy” on tape prior to being elected the President of the United States (thank God he was replaced in office by a man accused of sexual assault by 25 less women).
But at least we remember those accusations. What’s more horrifying are the stories of women whose allegations made headlines briefly before becoming short paragraphs on a famous man’s Wikipedia page that’s constantly racking up new accomplishments.
So here’s five of those famous men accused of assault whose reputations are doing just fine:
Ryan Seacrest
In November of 2017, Ryan Seacrest revealed that a former stylist of his had made an official complaint regarding incidents that allegedly took place years prior. Suzie Hardy had not yet made her allegations public, she’d merely sent a letter via her attorney a week prior to Seacrest’s announcement, requesting that he and the E! channel “address the treatment of all women at the network” and “take responsibility” for the misconduct she’d alleged.
Hardy worked as Seacrest’s personal stylist for E! News from 2007 until 2013. She claims the abuse started with inappropriate questions about her personal life, made all the more unsettling as Seacrest’s assistant repeated claims that Seacrest had “a crush” on Hardy. In her letter to E!, Hardy said that by the end of 2007, Seacrest gave her a “bear hug” in his underwear inside his dressing room, something he’d do at least 10 more times throughout her employment. In 2008, he allegedly “cupped her crotch” briefly. In 2009, Hardy claims that Seacrest slapped her ass so hard it left a red welt. She took a photo of it. Her attorney submitted it to E! along with an analysis of the photo’s metadata proving that it was taken on the day Hardy claims.
Far from being a he-said-she-said story, one of Hardy’s co-workers corroborated much of her account. He told E! investigators and reporters for Variety that he witnessed Seacrest slapping Hardy’s butt. The co-worker also attests to Hardy telling him about other instances of Seacrest’s misconduct immediately after the incidents allegedly occurred, and he claims to have witnessed Seacrest pushing Hardy’s head into his crotch on multiple occasions while she was tying his shoes. Hardy and her co-worker further allege an incident in which Seacrest, in his underwear and with a visible erection, grabbed Hardy and pushed her onto the bed of his hotel room, where he climbed on top of her and dry-humped her. He only stopped when Hardy’s co-worker yelled at him.
The worst incident for Hardy occurred in 2010, when she alleges that Seacrest asked her about her sex life, then forcefully grabbed her vagina when she refused to answer. Two non-work associates have stated that Hardy told them about this shortly after the alleged incident.
In 2013, Hardy says she was asked to meet with executives from human resources at E!. They asked about her relationship with Seacrest to which she responded that, while she’d never entered a physical relationship with him, he had touched her inappropriately throughout her employment. Her employment was terminated two weeks later.
Seacrest continues his association with E!, remains the host on American Idol as well as a co-host and executive producer on Live with Kelly and Ryan and recently renewed a contract with iHeartMedia that will last through the end of 2025.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
In December of 2018, Buzzfeed published a report on four women accusing Neil DeGrasse Tyson of sexual misconduct.
Some of the allegations against the astrophysicist were relatively benign (relative, at least, to the more severe actions we could declare as “misconduct”). Katelyn Allers met Tyson during the American Astronomical Society conference of 2009. When she showed him a tattoo of the solar system that went from the top of her arm to the side of her chest, Tyson attempted to “find Pluto” by pulling on the fabric at the top of Allers’ dress and “sort of looking down it,” which she called “inappropriate and sexual.”
Ashley Watson, Tyson’s former assistant on the television show Cosmos, alleged that Tyson had been inappropriate with her as well, most notably during an evening in which she was invited to “talk” with Tyson at his home. She had hoped he was going to offer her a new position. Instead he invited her to share a bottle of wine and “unwind for a couple hours” while he played Nina Simone in a white undershirt, speaking of his need for “emotional, spiritual, and physical releases.” He asked her if she required such releases too and repeated suggestive song lyrics that played on his speakers. When Watson left about two hours later, Tyson said to her, “I want to hug you so bad right now, but I know that if I do, I’ll just want more.” The following evening, he told her she was too “distracting” to make it as a producer, prompting Watson to quit working as Tyson’s assistant.
Another woman, whose identity remains anonymous, alleged that Tyson had sexually harassed her at a holiday party for the American Museum of Natural History. She claimed that Tyson drunkenly approached her, made sexual comments, and propositioned her to join him alone in his office.
The first two claims were initially made public via a website called Patheos, with the third becoming public days later through Buzzfeed. Prior to the latter article, Tyson responded to the allegations on Facebook. He confirmed that the two women’s accounts were truthful, yet said he never meant to cause any discomfort. In regards to his interaction with Allers, he wrote, “In my mind’s eye, I’m a friendly and accessible guy, but going forward, I can surely be more sensitive to people’s personal space, even in the midst of my planetary enthusiasm.” He then mentioned that Watson had told him she’d been “creeped out” at his apartment shortly after the evening in question and claimed that he apologized profusely, which she accepted.
Tyson’s response to a third accuser in the Patheos article, however, was less affirming to his alleged victim’s account.
Tchiya Amet El Maat met Tyson when the two were both graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin. They were the only two black graduate students in the astronomy department and soon became friends. Amet said he was “like a brother” to her, until a day that she recalls drinking from a cup that looked like a coconut shell in his apartment, then woke up naked in his bed as Tyson performed oral sex on her. He began to penetrate her once he realized she’d woken up, she claims. She doesn’t remember much of what happened next. “I came out of it for a moment and shook my head, and then I went out again,” she told Buzzfeed. “The next thing I knew, I was at class the next day.”
Amet dropped out of school soon after. Her now-ex-husband told Buzzfeed that she’d spoken of her past with Tyson during their marriage. She never used the word “rape,” he claims, but said she did describe Tyson drugging her and alluded to “something traumatic” happening. “It bled onto our relationship,” he said. “It caused emotional problems for her.”
In 2014, Amet traveled to Austin to file a police report against Tyson. One of the officers wrote that she “had tears in her eyes as she said this has affected her entire life: her marriage, her relationship with her children, her unrealized ambitions and the choices she had made over the course of her life.” Unfortunately for Amet, the case had passed the statute of limitations for sexual assault in Austin. She wrote her own blog post about her trauma a few months later, however, the story wouldn’t come to public attention until it was picked up by Patheos in 2018.
In response, Tyson admits to his friendship with Amet and claimed the two had been “intimate only a few times.” Amet denies this, saying the only time their relationship was at all sexual was the one occasion in which she alleges he raped her. According to Tyson, he neither drugged nor assaulted Amet, claiming the two didn’t have much chemistry and so the relationship quickly faded. “There was nothing otherwise odd or unusual about this friendship,” he said.
Despite being the only other black grad student in their program, Tyson says he didn’t realize Amet had dropped out of school until years later when he ran into her and her husband while Amet was pregnant. In his statement, Tyson says Amet “had changed her name and lived an entire life, married with children, before this accusation”–as if her ability to create a family has anything to do with her allegations of assault (in fact, Amet has said her trauma is what prompted her name-change, stating that she didn’t want to identify with her old self anymore; she “wanted her to be dead”).
Tyson challenges Amet’s accusations further by lambasting her digression from the study of evidence-based sciences into an interest in New Age philosophies, rooted in energy, astrology, and ancient teachings. He paints her as unstable, writing, “For me, what was most significant, was that in this new life, long after dropping out of astrophysics graduate school, she was posting videos of colored tuning forks endowed with vibrational therapeutic energy that she channels from the orbiting planets. As a scientist, I found this odd.” In the same paragraph, he challenges her recollection of events from the evening of the alleged assault, stating, “[A]ccording to her blog posts, the drug and rape allegation comes from an assumption of what happened to her during a night that she cannot remember. It is as though a false memory had been implanted, which, because it never actually happened, had to be remembered as an evening she doesn’t remember.”
Tyson was later investigated for misconduct by Fox, National Geographic, and the production of Cosmos. Ashley Watson was unimpressed by the scope of the investigation, telling The Daily Beast:
“I had one 30-minute sit-down with a Fox HR representative and a 45 minute-hour sit-down with a man from a private company. I gave them both lengthy lists of extremely reliable people who could corroborate my story, text messages from that time, emails NDT had sent to me, etc. None of the people I gave contact info for were ever contacted by these companies.”
Tyson continued his affiliation with Fox, National Geographic, and Cosmos, hosting all 13 episodes of Cosmos: Possible Worlds in 2020.
Ben Affleck
While plenty are aware of actor Casey Affleck’s history of sexual harassment–something that prompted him to step down as a presenter at the 2018 Oscars–less are familiar with the allegations against Casey’s more famous brother, Ben.
Ben Affleck’s relationship with the #MeToo movement has been contentious for some time. In 2017, when Harvey Weinstein was exposed as a serial rapist whose crimes in the entertainment industry were long hidden to the public, Affleck implied that, despite years of working with Weinstein on multiple projects, he hadn’t known about the producer’s pervasive sexual abuse until Ronan Farrow published his bombshell report on the story. Rose McGowan called this a lie, tweeting that she’d told Affleck years prior of her own assault by Weinstein. The actor, she claims, said he’d “told [Weinstein] to stop doing that.”
After this, Affleck started wracking up his own allegations. At 19, Hilarie Burton’s assault was televised when Affleck grabbed her breast during an appearance on TRL in 2003. Responding to the accusations publicized by McGowan, a Twitter user wrote about Burton’s experience, saying, “Everyone forgot though.” Burton responded, “I didn’t forget.” In her book, she spoke of the incident further, writing, “I was nineteen, and I’d taken it on the chin and kept going. One of MTV’s top brass called me and said, ‘You handled that so well.’ I didn’t realize that I was being groomed—trained to be a good girl and a good sport, someone who would put up with much worse behavior.”
Affleck would tweet an apology toward Burton in 2017. He’s yet to address allegations made by Anna-Marie Tendler, an artist and Queen who’s been mentioned on this website before, which were publicized shortly after his apology to Burton. Tendler tweeted,
“I would also love to get an apology from Ben Affleck who grabbed my ass at a Golden Globes party in 2014. He walked by me, cupped my butt and pressed his finger into my crack. I guess he tried to play it like he was politely moving me out of the way and oops touched my butt instead of my lower back? Like most women in these situations I didn't say anything but I have thought a lot about what I'd say if I ever saw him again.”
TV writer Jen Statsky responded to Tendler’s tweets, writing, “I was also at this party and *multiple* friends had this same exact experience.”
Despite his silence on these claims, Affleck’s career seems unaffected. Today, he’s more commonly associated with memes involving Dunkin’ Donuts, outdoor napping, or his absolutely hideous back tattoo. His renewed relationship with Jennifer Lopez has also attracted dominantly positive media attention, being widely regarded as a source of comforting Y2K era nostalgia.
Morgan Freeman
In May of 2018, CNN published a report regarding sexual harassment claims levied against actor Morgan Freeman.
Reporters for CNN talked to 16 people–eight who claimed to have been made victim to Freeman’s inappropriate behavior, and eight who claimed to have witnessed it. Four said he “repeatedly” behaved in ways that made women feel uncomfortable at work. Two said he subjected them to unwanted touching, including a production assistant who alleged Freeman had tried to lift her skirt multiple times and asked if she was wearing underwear on the set of the film Going In Style. She also claimed that he would sometimes rest his hand on, or attempt to rub, her lower back.
Multiple people reported that Freeman’s constant sexually-suggestive comments about their appearance, as well as his habit to stare at coworkers’ breasts, caused many women who worked with Freeman to adapt their wardrobe choices in an effort to mitigate harassment. A senior member of the production staff for the film Now You See Me told CNN, “He did comment on our bodies... We knew that if he was coming by ... not to wear any top that would show our breasts, not to wear anything that would show our bottoms, meaning not wearing clothes that [were] fitted.” A manager at Revelations Media said,
“If I ever passed him he would stare at me in an awkward way, would look me up and down sometimes stopping and just staring. One time he stopped, looked me up and down as I walked into a room of people, and everyone burst out laughing. And I literally froze feeling very uncomfortable and one of the people in the office said, 'Don't worry, that's just Morgan.’ That sort of interaction was when I stopped wearing a skirt around the office when he was there. I can't say it was an accident that I'd be wearing a potato sack and a ponytail on certain days when he was there and do my best to avoid him when he was in the office.”
Even one of CNN’s reporters for the piece alleges to have faced harassment during a press-junket interview with Freeman around 2017, when he allegedly told her he “wished he was there” in reference to her pregnant belly.
Others have claimed to have witnessed events such as Freeman giving female interns unwanted massages. Another woman claimed to be a victim of him pressing his body against hers in a public setting after being called out for staring at her breasts.
The allegations against Freeman do not appear to have affected his career. He’s set to star in multiple upcoming films alongside actors such as Helen Mirren, Al Pacino, Josh Hutcherson, and Florence Pugh.
Thomas Middleditch
Like Ben Affleck, Thomas Middleditch was not well-regarded by many #MeToo activists prior to his own allegations becoming public.
At the beginning of 2018, when the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements were still a fresh topic in the entertainment industry, Middleditch was asked about his former Silicon Valley co-star TJ Miller’s assault allegations in an interview with The AV Club. Miller was accused by an unnamed former girlfriend of performing violent acts during sexual intercourse without her consent. Adult film actress Dana DeArmond then tweeted her own claim that she’d been harassed by Miller while shooting the 2011 TV film Mash Up. Middleditch said of the allegations:
“Speaking as a guy, as a man, as a male human, it’s kind of scary, with this fervor that’s surrounding it, where an allegation can just pop up and then it’s really incumbent upon you to fervently defend your character. I’m not gonna dive into what’s real or not. I’m just saying it’s a little bit scary… You don’t want to live in a world where it’s just so stiff that there’s no, I don’t know, something? I don’t know where I’m going with that, but I don’t really know enough about [the allegations against Miller] to comment on. Just don’t know about it, really. But it is tricky, you know. It’s weird. It’s like we live in a world where currently the climate, let’s say, is where a j’accuse will really turn your world upside down.”
Speaking of her time on the set of Silicon Valley, alongside Middleditch and Miller, Carla Walton alleged that the entire production was toxic, tweeting in June of 2018:
“TJ Miller was a bully and petulant brat and pretty much everyone who had any power on that (almost all male) set, including the male cast members, enabled him and were complicit in his unprofessionalism.They can fuck off forever…I’m pretty open about this, and I don’t know if other women on the show had a different experience than me, but it was kind of a nightmare.”
In 2021, allegations against Middleditch from two years prior were made public. In a now-closed Hollywood nightclub called Cloak & Dagger, a woman named Hannah Harding claimed that she and her friend were groped by Middleditch who pursued and made sexual comments toward Harding, though she rejected his advances multiple times. She says he later sent her a private message on Instagram apologizing for his actions, however she witnessed him repeating the same behaviors with other women at Cloak & Dagger. Harding said the club owners “cared more about famous people at their club than women's safety.”
Even with the accusations against Middleditch being somewhat recent, they already appear to be largely forgotten as the actor continues his work on multiple TV shows. He can be seen telling Seth Meyers about using his pilot license to fly rescued dogs around California in an interview from four months ago.