#MeToo: Sexual harassment and assault allegations continue to surface across industries

After being acquitted in courts of a handful of the dozens of sexual assault allegations against him, disgraced actor Kevin Spacey now wants to revive his career.

Prior to the ongoing litany of allegations made against him for sexual assault and misconduct, Spacey was primarily known as a decorated Hollywood and stage veteran, a two-time Oscar winner, and the star of Netflix’s groundbreaking House of Cards. That all changed in 2017 when actor Anthony Rapp accused Spacey of sexually assaulting him in 1986, when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was 26.

R. Kelly has been sentenced to 20 years in prison on child pornography charges. Kelly, one of the most celebrated R&B singers of the ’90s, was convicted in September 2022 on three counts of child pornography and three counts of enticing a minor in Illinois. He is already serving a 30-year prison sentence in New York after being convicted on sex trafficking charges in 2021. The two convictions are the culmination of a long, slow build of accusations that go back decades.

Kelly has been accused of sexual relationships with minors going back to 1994, when he married 15-year-old pop star Aaliyah. (The marriage was annulled.) In the 25 years since then, he has been sued multiple times for inappropriate sexual contact with a minor (he settled out of court every time), and he was eventually charged with creating child pornography. (A jury found him not guilty on the grounds that they could not conclusively identify the other figure in his infamous sex tape as a child.)

Two powerful men in America are on trial this week.

One has been accused of sexual harassment or assault by at least 100 women. He has since been charged with sexual assault and rape. Five women have taken the stand in recent days to testify that he had a pattern of manipulation, abuse, and assault. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

Astrophysicist and TV host Neil deGrasse Tyson has been under investigation by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he is the director of the Hayden Planetarium, since four women accused him of sexual misconduct last year.

But last week, the museum announced that it had concluded its investigation and Tyson will keep his job.

More than a year after he resigned from the Senate amid sexual misconduct allegations, Al Franken describes what happened to him as a kind of violence.

The junior senator from Minnesota, Franken announced his resignation in 2017 after eight women accused him of kissing or touching them in ways that made them uncomfortable. The first woman to come forward publicly, Leeann Tweeden, provided a 2006 photograph of Franken pretending to grab her breasts while she was sleeping.

Aziz Ansari addresses the sexual misconduct allegation against him at the very beginning of his new Netflix special.

“I’m sure there’s some of you that are curious how I feel about that whole situation,” the comedian says in his special Right Now, released this week. “I felt so many things in the last year or so: There’s times I felt scared, there’s times I felt humiliated, there’s times I felt embarrassed, and ultimately I just felt terrible that this person felt this way.”

What’s striking about E. Jean Carroll is how happy she is.

The journalist, author, and advice columnist recently wrote in New York magazine about the “hideous men” who have assaulted her in her life. The one that got the most attention was Donald Trump — Carroll writes that he sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1995 or 1996.

For a few years when I was a teenager, my favorite movie was Edward Scissorhands.

I loved its spiky early-’90s Tim Burton aesthetics; I loved the sweetness of its story, hiding under so much self-conscious weirdness; and I loved Johnny Depp’s wounded, vulnerable performance as the titular scissor-handed boy, who couldn’t get close to anyone without hurting them. I laughed when Edward accidentally punctured a waterbed in a wordless, humiliated frenzy. I cried when he accidentally injured his girlfriend. I cried more for Edward than for the bleeding girlfriend, actually, because I could see that it hurt him to hurt her, and I was more interested in his pain than in hers.

President Donald Trump deployed half a dozen tactics in a press release on Friday that any abuser would recognize.

Trump’s goal was to get us to question our own eyes and discredit columnist E. Jean Carroll, who described an encounter with Trump in the 1990s that ended in rape.

Advice columnist E. Jean Carroll is one of more than a dozen women to accuse President Trump of sexual assault, harassment, or other misconduct.

Many of those women came forward before the election in 2016. Trump denied the allegations (and has now denied Carroll’s too) and was elected despite them. He’s still in office. Just as Justice Brett Kavanaugh sits on the Supreme Court, even though Christine Blasey Ford testified that he sexually assaulted her when they were in high school. Just as Roy Moore, who has been accused of pursuing underage girls, has announced his second run for United States Senate.

Advice columnist E. Jean Carroll says that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in 1995 or 1996, forcibly penetrating her in the dressing room at a Bergdorf Goodman department store.

In a disturbing and detailed account published in New York magazine on Friday, Carroll writes that a chance encounter at the New York store turned violent after she agreed to accompany Trump to the dressing room. There, she writes, he “lunged” at her, kissed her, and held her against a wall while he assaulted her.

On Friday afternoon, New York magazine published an excerpt from a memoir written by E. Jean Carroll in which the noted columnist describes being raped by Donald Trump in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Carroll is at least the 22nd woman to step forward on the record with an account of an unwanted sexual advance or other encounter with Trump.

Carroll explains in the excerpt that she didn’t come forward sooner out of fear that she’d be attacked, threatened, and smeared by Trump and his supporters. Trump has denied the accounts of all of the other women. A White House official told New York that the accusation is “completely false.”

Last week, R. Kelly was charged with 11 new counts of sexual abuse and assault. That’s in addition to the 10 counts of sexual abuse he was charged with in February, plus the civil charges he’s facing for falling behind on rent and child support. R. Kelly seems to be facing some very serious trouble.

But that trouble has been a long time coming. Kelly has been accused of sexually abusing young women and teenagers for decades, and although he stood trial for child pornography charges in 2008, at the time, his career continued without faltering. When he was found not guilty, he continued to work without a hitch. It’s only been over the past few years that the tide has started to turn against him: first when a report emerged in 2017 that Kelly was holding women against their will in a “cult,” and then again this year after Lifetime’s docuseries Surviving R. Kelly prompted an outpouring of public approbation. (Kelly has consistently denied all accusations of any kind of improper sexual conduct.)

McDonald’s workers are making a lot of noise this week as the company prepares for its annual meeting Thursday with investors.

Dozens of women just filed gender discrimination complaints against the company, and cashiers and cooks are planning a nationwide strike Thursday to demand union rights and $15 hourly pay.

Jen was fired just before Christmas in 2017.

She had worked for a music venue for a few months when she learned that David, a musician who she alleges raped friends of hers, was an investor in the company (both of their names have been changed to protect anonymity).

The #MeToo movement may have toppled producer Harvey Weinstein and other men accused of sexual misconduct from their positions of power, but according to caterer Venorica Tucker, it hasn’t put a stop to the harassment many servers and bartenders deal with every day.

“Sometimes there’s a little pinch; sometimes there’s just little comments or brushing up against you,” said Tucker, who works in catering at the US House of Representatives and is an advocate with the group Restaurant Opportunities Centers United. “Sometimes they will indicate that they might tip you better if you’re a little friendlier.”

Joe Biden’s presidential campaign has not yet launched, but it’s already rocked by a long-simmering controversy over the propriety of his interactions with women.

A former Nevada state legislator named Lucy Flores wrote a personal essay that New York magazine published on Friday, in which she describes an encounter with Biden at a 2014 campaign event. Flores says the then-vice president came up behind her, touched her shoulders, and kissed the back of her head. The behavior, she says, wasn’t criminal, but it made her feel uncomfortable. Amy Lappos, a former congressional aide who recalls Biden rubbing noses with her at a 2009 fundraiser, similarly says the incident “wasn’t sexual” but also that there’s “absolutely a line of decency” and “a line of respect” that Biden crossed. On Tuesday, two more women came forward to the New York Times with, similarly, stories they described as having “made them uncomfortable.”

Astrophysicist and popular TV personality Neil deGrasse Tyson was accused last year of sexual misconduct by four women. Fox and National Geographic, the networks that hosted his shows StarTalk and Cosmos, launched an investigation.

Now that investigation has concluded, and the networks announced late last week that Tyson will be returning to TV. But Fox and National Geographic haven’t released any details of the investigations, leaving the women who came forward to wonder how the networks decided Tyson could come back.

Aziz Ansari isn’t afraid to talk about sexual misconduct.

R. Kelly, Michael Jackson, the strangeness of watching the workplace romance of The Office in a post-#MeToo world — all came up during Ansari’s show in March at the Chicago Theatre, part of an international tour that includes upcoming dates in the UK, Sweden, and Denmark, as well as elsewhere in the US.

When they were in graduate school together in the 1980s, Tchiya Amet says she looked up to Neil deGrasse Tyson.

They were both black students in the majority-white astronomy department at the University of Texas Austin at the time, and Tyson was “like a big brother” to Amet, she told Vox in 2018. “We were comrades.”

Two men have accused Michael Jackson of sexually abusing them as children in a devastating new HBO documentary. In Leaving Neverland, Wade Robson and James Safechuck say they were manipulated and abused by a man they worshipped — a man they loved. It’s much more detailed than anything we’ve ever seen or heard about Jackson allegedly abusing kids before, and it could change the way we think about the music legend.

Now, the Michael Jackson estate is suing HBO for potentially more than $100 million over the documentary, in part because the film’s director, Dan Reed, never reached out to the estate for comment.

Sunday night, as HBO aired part one of its new soul-shaking documentary Leaving Neverland, the Michael Jackson estate did what it’s always done best in regards to the decades of child abuse allegations surrounding the singer: deflect and distract.

The estate dropped a last-minute documentary of its own on Jackson’s official YouTube channel, free for a limited time: a concert documentary, Live in Bucharest (The Dangerous Tour), from Jackson’s 1992 Dangerous tour — ironically, a tour that collapsed due in large part to the news about the first police investigation into the allegations. The concert film is, as Variety notes, exactly the same length as the first part of Leaving Neverland.

Nobody wants Leaving Neverland to exist. That much is clear.

In HBO’s two-part, four-hour documentary, which airs on March 3 and 4, Wade Robson and James Safechuck discuss in painful detail the molestation they say they experienced at the hands of pop superstar Michael Jackson when they were boys. The film is not the first time Jackson has been accused of molesting young boys — in 1993, a lawsuit against him was settled out of court. And in 2005, he was acquitted of similar accusations in a criminal trial that was prompted in part by the 2003 documentary Living With Michael Jackson, in which the singer held hands with 12-year-old Gavin Arvizo and talked about sharing his bed with children.

A former staffer says that Donald Trump kissed her without her consent in 2016; she’s the first woman to accuse him of sexual misconduct after his presidential campaign began.

Alva Johnson, who worked for the Trump campaign in Florida, says that Trump grabbed her hand and kissed her on the lips outside a rally in Tampa in August 2016, Beth Reinhard and Alice Crites report at the Washington Post.

R. Kelly has been charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. A judge has approved a no-bail arrest warrant for him.

Prosecutors say that each of the 10 charges against Kelly is a class 2 felony, punishable with three to seven years in prison or with probation. Kelly is expected to appear at a bond hearing on Saturday.