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Neil deGrasse Tyson Accused Of Misconduct By 4th Woman 8 Years After Tchiya Amet Said He Raped Her

The astrophysicist released a statement saying he'll cooperate with an investigation.

Eight years after a woman accused Neil deGrasse Tyson of rape during a question-and-answer segment of a panel, a fourth accuser has come forward with allegations.

Last week, representatives at Fox, NatGeo and the producers of Cosmos announced they were investigating three women's accounts of sexual misconduct against Tyson.

On Wednesday,  Buzzfeed News reported new allegations made by an unnamed woman. According to the report, the woman accused the director of the Hayden Planetarium of drunkenly propositioning her at a 2010 staff holiday party at the American Museum of Natural History.

In 2014, the woman first reported the incident to her employer and refused to work with Tyson on a project. A copy of the email sent to her boss was shared with Buzzfeed, which has been investigating the Tyson story for over three years.

The most recent woman joins three other accusers, including Tchiya Amet, who said Tyson drugged and raped her while they were grad students in the astrophysics program at the University of Texas in the 1980s.

In April 2010, Tyson was finishing a Q&A segment at a San Francisco event when Amet hopped on the mic and made the public allegations.

“I’m here in honor of all the people that you raped, assaulted, harassed, violated, denied,” she said, “and for the lives that you affected and for the lives of their parents and their friends and everyone that was involved when you were a TA in grad school at UT Austin in 1984 ― including myself.”

She went public with her story in 2014 and detailed her experience in a report with the Austin Police Department.

“She and Tyson were going to study on this unknown date. stated that Tyson handed her a glass of water (possibly contained a date rape drug). [Redacted] stated that she had had blacked out. Upon coming to, [Redacted] found herself naked on a bed with Tyson performing oral sex on her without her consent. [Redacted] then stated that Tyson realized that she had come to when he suddenly then got on top of her (naked as well) and penetrated his penis into her vagina,” read the report obtained by HuffPost.

Additionally, Ashley Watson, who worked as Tyson’s assistant on Cosmos, said he made a sexual advance one night at his apartment after work. Dr. Katelyn N. Allers, a Bucknell University professor, also claimed she was "felt up" by Tyson at an American Astronomical Society convention in 2009.

Tyson responded to the allegations and his recollection of his interactions with all the women in a lengthy Facebook post

"In any claim, evidence matters. Evidence always matters," he wrote. "But what happens when it’s just one person’s word against another’s, and the stories don’t agree? That’s when people tend to pass judgment on who is more credible than whom. And that’s when an impartial investigation can best serve the truth – and would have my full cooperation to do so."

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