Elizabeth A. Harris

He also slid into his best creepy smirk and sexually harassed an underling in a corporate training video.

“Not only are you a solid candidate,” his character said to a woman up for a promotion, “but I’ve been watching you move around out here, and you’re solid everywhere.”

“What?” he responded. “Being hot’s a good thing!”

This project may not win Dillinger any trophies, but office workers around the country are seeing a lot of him — or other actors playing odious characters just like his. New or expanded laws mandating sexual harassment training in states like New York and California, as well as a nationwide awakening to a very real problem, have fostered a market for workplace training videos and for actors who can bring #MeToo to life, usually in roles lasting just a minute or two.

They play harassers and their victims, supervisors who comfort, colleagues who intervene, and co-workers who look into the camera and say it’s not their problem. On Backstage.com, the job listings site for actors, casting calls are going out for parts such as, “A client of a big manufacturing company; a little sleazy; makes an unwanted advance on a salesperson,” and “an account manager at a large manufacturing company; strong and articulate; she stands up for herself” when a client makes an unwanted advance.

These videos do not, naturally, have a reputation as great cinema, which is not surprising considering that, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, they can have a lot of legal ground to cover. In New York, for example, training programs have to define sexual harassment, give information on state and federal sexual harassment laws and lay out avenues for handling complaints. There must also be interaction, so there are often little quizzes along the way to keep viewers paying attention, or least keep them from wandering off completely.

They are made by law firms, human resource outfits and companies that specialize in compliance training, which may also be making videos on topics such as respectful communication and bribery. Some keep the whole operation in-house, with a small team of people wearing multiple filmmaking hats (director today, producer tomorrow), while others contract with outside film companies to hire actors and put the videos together.

The productions are nothing if not efficient.

“When I get a new crew they look at the call sheets and go, ‘Are you out of your mind? You’re giving us 45 minutes to shoot two pages!’” said Lori Richardson, the producer and director of video content at Emtrain, a compliance training company. In a typical film, it might take at least half a day to shoot that amount, she said. “But I’m pretty quick on set and I keep it moving along.”

Laura Faye Smith, the actress who was harassed by Dillinger’s character, said it took about half a day to shoot her scenes.

She didn’t have to use too much imagination to get into character.

She said she once had a real-life job as a human resources manager, which including giving sexual harassment training. Then, one day, it happened to her: one of her superiors, who was also the boss’s father, put his arm around her, got right in her face, and said her high heels made her the perfect height for him to kiss her.

“No matter how much you know about this,” she said, “when it happens to you, it’s hard not to go into this thing of ‘did I bring this on somehow?’”

In an effort to make the scripts more relatable to these real-life experiences, film companies say they are trying to make videos more engaging, with better acting and higher production values. They also change up where scenes are set to make them more relevant to the companies who may be buying the films. Dillinger’s character harassed Smith’s twice — once in a printing plant and once in a retail setting.

Emtrain said it has created scenes that riff off current events, like the memo written by a Google engineer that said “personality differences” between men and women helped explain why there were fewer women engineers and high ranking executives at the company.

Some companies have started to use virtual reality. Mursion, a San Francisco startup, allows managers — as well as prospective teachers, Air Force captains, executives from finance and tech — to practice difficult conversations with an avatar. In one training, you are a commanding officer in the armed forces and a woman comes to you because she hooked up with a subordinate who is now defying her authority.

There is a range in quality and approach in these programs, though they tend to charge in roughly the same way. Traliant, which produced the videos with Dillinger and Smith, said it starts at about $25 per user, but that price can drop to less than $5 for companies with more than 10,000 people. Emtrain generally charges $47 per person for the year, dropping to about $20 for an organization of 3,000, and it includes additional services like a way for people to ask anonymous questions on tricky issues like bias, ethics and harassment, and feedback for companies on potential problem areas based on what employees say.

The actors themselves generally make a few hundred dollars per video, not a large sum, but also not bad for what often amounts to a few hours of work.

While many executives and lawmakers have embraced these training videos, there are questions about how effective they can be. For years, companies have used such videos to try to defend themselves from any lawsuits saying they didn’t do enough to ensure safe working environments. Whether workers took the training to heart was not necessarily the top concern.

“My worry is that there will be some category or organization who believes they have checked the box by conducting training, whether or not there is any commitment from leadership to actually change the culture,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center. “I don’t want to suggest that training itself is harmful, but I also think that training alone is not likely enough to actually change organizations.”

Frank Dobbin, a social science professor at Harvard, said that while research in this area is thin, there is some evidence that training for managers can be helpful, as can bystander intervention training. But he said there are also studies that suggest typical harassment training might make some men more hostile than they were to begin with, perhaps because they feel a threat to their way of thinking.

“It’s possible that training for whole populations of employees, which is what the states are now moving toward, is going to backfire,” Dobbin said. “I don’t think there’s any evidence that it reduces harassment and there’s some evidence that it’s likely to increase harassment.”

Michael Del Polito, a media producer and director at LRN, an ethics and compliance company, said that the company realized that in most cases, employees are mandated to watch the videos. “It’s not necessarily something they’re electing to do,” he said.

Still, he said, the company tries to make them watchable. Last year, one of LRN’s sexual harassment videos won a Telly award, which honors video and television production. In it, a woman tells a colleague she was groped by a superior in Las Vegas after a conference; the flashbacks to what happened in Vegas were illustrated by animated people made of neon lights.

Del Polito said: “We try to approach it as, we respect our audience and try to put something out that — within reason, of course, given time and budgetary constraints — try to put out the best product possible because we think our audience is sophisticated.”

This article originally appeared in

The Most Watched Show at the Office? Sexual Harassment Training Videos

Troy Dillinger was having a good month. A working actor in Los Angeles, he played in June a lawyer in a Lifetime movie, a coach in a public service announcement about opioids, and a judge in Cardi B’s video “Press.”

Set way back from the road, this maze of open-air passageways and courtyards is about the size of two football fields, an unusual vision of limestone bumping up against the Utah Rockies. It has played host to Mary and Joseph, John the Baptist and Jesus — as well as Lehi, Amulek and Alma the Younger.

This is the Motion Picture Studio South Campus, owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Jerusalem set, near Goshen, Utah, is part of the church’s substantial film and media production arm, which includes full-time producers, editors and animators, and a fully equipped studio in Provo, complete with sound stages, editing bays and a clutch of 19th-century Americana houses constructed on a backlot.

The church is an important piece of a film and TV ecosystem in northern Utah, which includes a small world of independent films that cater to the Latter-day Saints market, BYUtv (part of Brigham Young University, which is affiliated with the church), as well as mainstream commercials, television and movie productions that film in the state, drawn by a generous rebate program and its proximity to Los Angeles.

Taken together, it’s like its own little Hollywood in the mountains. For the country’s 7 million Latter-day Saints — 6,709,072 according to the church — it is also an answer to a culture that often does not speak its language, and a way to reinforce the conservative values it finds lacking in much of popular entertainment.

Here, the faithful can see their own stories — films about prominent church figures or a series reenacting Bible scenes — without the mockery (sometimes gentle, sometimes not) they’re often subject to, like in Broadway’s “The Book of Mormon” musical. And there is not an R rating in sight.

A Bounty of Work

Ben Hoopes, a carpenter with a slow, rolling voice, builds sets in Utah. Last December, he made one for a church Christmas concert. Then he put together a talk show set for BYUtv, before moving on to “High School Musical,” a Disney show filming in the area. After that, he worked on the church’s most recent big project: a video series that visualizes (not dramatizes!) scenes from the Book of Mormon; it began releasing episodes on Sept. 20.

On a sunny September morning, Hoopes was out at the church set near Goshen patching up the “limestone” walls after a stretch of shooting for the “Book of Mormon Videos.” This Jerusalem (or Bethlehem or Mesoamerica or wherever the church needs it to be) has a concrete foundation and wooden frame, but the facade is made of Styrofoam coated in a stucco and then painted a nice sandy color. Birds like to nibble at the stucco.

There is a whole community of crew members, directors and producers who, like Hoopes, carve out a living working freelance in Utah. “I’ve always had an abundance of work here,” said Chantelle Squires, a director and producer based in Utah who has worked with the church, BYUtv and in local independent films. “I’ve always felt like, why would I leave?”

This year, BYU Broadcasting, which owns BYUtv, is in production on 25 shows including TV movies, scripted dramas, reality shows, religious content and a cooking show. It is staffed by 158 full-time employees, more than 200 students who work part time, and a small army of freelancers who operate in just about every job, from directors and producers to grips and production assistants.

The network says its audience is growing, and its sketch comedy show Studio C, which is like a G-rated “Saturday Night Live,” has nearly 2 billion views on YouTube. But it still sometimes brushes up against a barrier that holds it apart.

Take “Dwight in Shining Armor,” a comedy that premiered this year about a 21st century teenage boy in the suburbs and a warrior princess who awakens there after being asleep for 1,000 years. Michael Dunn, the managing director of BYU Broadcasting, said the show was tested with focus groups in Dallas (“heavily evangelical,” Dunn noted) and San Diego (“very heavily agnostic”). He said that the audiences, made up of parents with children, loved the show. But there were a few who said that because it was made by BYU, they wouldn’t watch it.

“People have bias,” he said. “You can’t get around that.”

Still, there is enough demand for this kind of content to beget a streaming service called Living Scriptures that is geared specifically to Latter-day Saints (the church and its followers no longer refer to themselves as Mormons). Its 2,500 titles are arranged into Netflix-style categories with a distinct tilt, like Church History, Animated Book of Mormon, Must See LDS Films, and Miracles Collection.

And then there are the actors. Most Americans probably wouldn’t recognize Kirby Heyborne’s blond waves — but many Latter-day Saints do. Along with a number of national commercials, including a Snickers spot with Mr. T, Heyborne has played Elder Calhoun in “The Best Two Years,” a movie about four missionaries in the Netherlands, and Jared in “The R.M.” (“Returned Missionary.”)

“Just today, I was at Walmart picking up some chocolate milk and the bagger was really friendly to me,” Heyborne said one day last month. “At the very end — and you can kind of tell, people get a little twinkle in their eye — he very kindly said to me, ‘Do you like it when people recognize you?’”

But Heyborne has also caught some criticism from the faithful. In 2008, he was in a commercial for Miller Lite, a decision for which he still sometimes gets a scolding. (Latter-day Saints are supposed to abstain from alcohol, coffee, tea and tobacco.) Heyborne is hosting a new show on BYUtv called “Making Good,” and under a promo video posted on YouTube, one commenter wrote, “He drank beer. I hate him.”

Heyborne, who is a member of the church, said he did not actually drink the beer.

While actors in Utah can become something of a face, they generally cannot convert that into a proper living. Jasen Wade, who has crisp blue eyes and the kind of chin you could use to shave ice, said that when he works as a leading man in these independent movies — most of which are low-budget affairs shot in just a couple of weeks — he makes $200 to, occasionally, $450 a day.

“In my entire career, I’ve probably made money on three films,” said Wade, who works at a power plant and just got his real estate license. “Other than that, I either break even or I’m in the hole because I have to take off work to be there.”

By the Book

On the set, one camera was trained on a group of women dancing in flowy, midcalf skirts, swishing scarves around their heads in a demure nod to seduction. Another focused on the wicked King Noah who drank wine and flirted with concubines from beneath an elaborate hat.

Nearby a producer named Aaron Merrell, who works full time for the church, draped a well-worn copy of the Book of Mormon across his lap, “Season Three” printed neatly in permanent marker along the outer pages. This was a shoot for the church’s “Book of Mormon Videos,” and Merrell was keeping an eye on their scripture to make sure the action stuck to its source material.

The church teaches that in the early 19th century, its founder Joseph Smith discovered inscribed golden plates buried on a hill near his home in Palmyra, New York, which he then translated into English, creating the Book of Mormon. Among other proclamations, the book holds that Jesus Christ appeared in the Americas after his resurrection. That book sets the Latter-day Saints apart from other Christian denominations, who even today often view the relative newcomer faith as suspect — or even apostate.

The “Book of Mormon Videos” are being put on YouTube (viewable in internet-friendly snippets of a couple minutes each) so anyone who wants to watch them can: Missionaries who will use them as proselytizing tools or members who might show them to their kids. And, the church hopes, perhaps even nonbelievers who are curious about the faith will watch.

The church also makes self-help and inspirational videos that live on YouTube, on topics like addiction, bullying and how to recover after discovering that a spouse watches pornography. There are videos for use in its temples, as well as instructional videos on topics including how its clergy should protect children from abuse, directions for missionaries on diet, hygiene and exercise, and even advice on how to maintain a church parking lot.

“The goal of all of our productions is to create messages that invite all of God’s children to follow Jesus Christ,” said Scott Smiley, director of film and video for the church. “That goes from parking lot maintenance videos all the way to the Bible and Book of Mormon videos.

“Really,” he added, “that means to act as he acted.”

Randy Astle, author of “Mormon Cinema: Origins to 1952,” said that the first church-sponsored movie was a silent film called “One Hundred Years of Mormonism” made in 1913, and that the effort has continued steadily since 1953. Now, with movies and videos as a regular part of religious classes, church and cultural activities, “it just permeates all aspect of Mormon culture,” he said.

“The church also kind of positions itself as providing an alternative to Hollywood,” he said. By offering up its own content and steering members away from what it sees as problematic, it’s telling followers, “You need to look for this good moral content,” he added.

But its productions, he said, are not likely to make film critics particularly effusive.

“Films we see as classics challenge us,” Astle said. “They probe dark subject matter, they challenge our beliefs. When they’re made by the church, the people who pay for them don’t want that. They want them to affirm belief. To answer questions, not to ask them.”

The technical production, however, is impressive, he said, so they can look like Hollywood movies.

But on set, it is quickly made clear this is not Hollywood. To kick off every day of shooting, the cast and crew gather around the monitors or the cameras, and they pray.

And they are all praying the same way, because just about every person on a church production — actors, directors, carpenters, script supervisors — is a Latter-day Saint themselves. Merrell, the church producer, said that exceptions can be made if a particular specialty needs to be filled, but it is “generally preferred” that crew members be church members. Those in good standing are given what is called a temple recommend, a little wallet-size card that attests to their status. (A church spokeswoman said there are exemptions for religious organizations that make such hiring preferences legal.)

Becky Swasey, head of the hair and makeup department on the “Book of Mormon Videos” project, has worked on movies made by AMC and Francis Ford Coppola. She said there is a vibe on set that comes from a shared sense of mission and purpose. But the shoots feel unusual in other ways, too.

“People don’t swear — I’ve got to watch my mouth!” she said. “There’s no coffee or tea. And people tend to be a little less divalike.”

A First Family Screening

John Hajicek arrived at the Megaplex Theaters at Jordan Commons in Sandy, Utah, dressed in a sharp blue suit, clutching a locked briefcase in each hand. Inside, he carried what he said was precious Latter-day Saints memorabilia. He had copies of the Book of Mormon that appear to have been printed in the 19th century. An early pencil sketch of Joseph Smith. A suede map Smith supposedly carried around in his pocket.

Hajicek had been invited to a film screening that night for “Out of Liberty,” a movie about a jailbreak, in which one of the people doing the breaking is Joseph Smith.

The director, Garrett Batty, also invited some very special guests: members of the Smith family.

“To all the descendants of Joseph and Lucy,” Michael Kennedy, one of those descendants, said from the front of the theater, “would you please stand up.”

Several dozen people put their popcorn aside and rose from their seats. The room took it in (“Wow!” a woman breathed), and then burst into a firm and gracious applause.

And with that, the movie could start.

Lights. Camera. Prayer. A Mini-Hollywood Grows in Utah.

PROVO, Utah — In the heavy quiet of the Utah desert, past fields of alfalfa and fruit trees, past the Goshen trailer park and a big, sprawling dairy farm, the domes of Jerusalem rise up from the patchy grass.

Pellicano was a private investigator in Hollywood, a man who drove around town with a baseball bat in his trunk and who was very good at uncovering people’s secrets. He ran a vast surveillance operation out of his office with a sprawling network of wiretaps. If you needed an unpleasant issue to go away, or a nasty tidbit to improve your standing in a divorce or business dispute, he was the go-to guy.

He wiretapped actors Sylvester Stallone and Keith Carradine, and did work on behalf of Chris Rock and Courtney Love, among many others. He conducted an illegal criminal background check on Garry Shandling, threatened a journalist and, according to testimony at his trial, even offered to have a producer killed, his body buried in the desert. He had been behind bars since 2003.

On Friday, the private eye who intimately knew Hollywood’s underbelly — and, some would say, was its leading man — walked out of a Los Angeles federal prison at the end of his sentence and was free for the first time in more than 15 years.

Although it has been a long time since Hollywood last heard much from the man who heard its private conversations, he is hardly forgotten, and some of those he investigated were dreading this day.

“It’s certainly not comforting,” said Jude Green, who testified that Pellicano threatened her during her divorce. “I’m looking for peace and harmony — I’ve had enough excitement.”

Friends and former employers have not forgotten him, either. Some have contributed to a trust fund worth “in the tens of thousands” to help Pellicano get by, according to a person familiar with the fund who declined to be identified because it was a private effort. Requests for an interview with Pellicano, placed through a lawyer, went unanswered.

Pellicano, who turned 75 on Friday, was originally known as an audio expert from Chicago. He was used as an expert witness by prosecutors and hired by The New York Times in 1979 to determine if the voice on a recording belonged to the former Shah of Iran.

By the 1990s, he had set up shop as a private investigator in Los Angeles who wouldn’t open a case without a $25,000 retainer and could charge clients hundreds of thousands of dollars. A former employee testified that in his offices on Sunset Boulevard, a Los Angeles police officer on the take would swing by to pick up stacks of hundred dollar bills, and a half-dozen iMacs sat recording phone calls in his “war room.” As recently as last year, he teased in an interview with the The Hollywood Reporter that he might — just might — have Mafia connections.

“If you tried to connect me to organized crime, you probably could get close — but no cigar,” he said.

In 2002, his career began to unravel spectacularly. A reporter named Anita Busch, who had written for The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, had recently published articles about the waning career of Michael Ovitz, one of the founders of the Creative Artists Agency and a former president of the Walt Disney Co. That summer, she found what appeared to be a bullet hole in her windshield, along with a dead fish and a rose on a tin tray on the hood of her car. A note was taped to her car that said, “Stop.”

She later sued Ovitz for hiring Pellicano. According to court documents, she said her phone had been tapped, her computer hacked and her hard drive erased. She said that two men in a Mercedes tried to run her over and that she had been warned that someone planned to blow up her car. Ovitz planned to argue that the fish was Steven Seagal’s fault — Busch had been reporting about Seagal as well — though the FBI found no persuasive evidence that the actor was involved, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

She and Ovitz settled out of court. He did not respond to a request for comment.

While investigating the threat against Busch, the authorities found grenades and C-4 explosives in a safe in Pellicano’s office. He was sentenced to 30 months on weapons charges. In 2008, he was convicted again, this time on more than 70 charges including racketeering, wire fraud and wiretapping, and he had been in prison until this day.

“My code word when I would call the FBI,” Green said, “was C-4.”

Green said Pellicano cornered her outside a Santa Monica, California, dog groomer where she had taken her Shih Tzu for a haircut. He blocked her car and got in her face, then followed her to a Peet’s Coffee, where he boxed her in again and then shoved her inside the store. She said she yelled to make a scene and fled.

Pellicano often represented himself in various cases, preferring to refer to himself in the third person. This sometimes created a difficult situation for witnesses and a variety of odd scenes.

Neville Johnson represented the plaintiffs in several lawsuits against Pellicano and other organizations, including the Los Angeles and Beverly Hills police departments, where Pellicano had officers feeding him confidential information.

Johnson recalled that during a deposition at a federal prison in Big Spring, Texas, Pellicano would say things like, “I hereby instruct myself not to answer.”

That deposition got off to an inauspicious beginning. As Pellicano sat in the prison cafeteria in his jailhouse uniform, the court reporter instructed him to raise his right hand and asked if he swore to tell the truth.

“He said, ‘No,'” Johnson recalled.

In addition to his other recordings, Pellicano was fond of taping his own phone calls — including incriminating ones — and many of those were recovered by investigators. But the FBI suspected there were even more recordings because on the tapes they did find, Pellicano spoke about storing some audio files outside his office.

Or so said an FBI agent, Jonathan Mosser, when he was cross-examined by Pellicano at his trial:

Pellicano: Who was the person that told you that Mr. Pellicano took audio files and stored them off site?

Mosser: Mr. Pellicano.

Pellicano: Mr. Pellicano?

Mosser: Yes.

Pellicano: When did Mr. Pellicano tell you that he stored information off site?

Mosser: In the audio recordings.

Pellicano very likely could have faced less time in prison if he had cooperated with the authorities, but he never talked. In his interview last year with The Hollywood Reporter, he discussed “omerta,” the Mafia code of silence, and the value of keeping secrets. Among them, he said, were Michael Jackson’s. Pellicano worked for Jackson in the 1990s, but said he quit when he learned what The Hollywood Reporter described as “truths even darker than those alleged in Jackson’s molestation scandal.” The Jackson family and estate have denied all allegations of sexual misconduct against him.

Pellicano emerges into a world of technology and surveillance vastly different from the one he left behind. With the landscape so changed, and his private investigator license revoked, it is not clear how he will make money now. Lawyers who sued Pellicano usually gave up because he had no money to pay any judgments.

He does, however, emerge with his secrets, and whatever value they possess. In a Newsweek interview in 2011, he claimed that he had offers to publish an autobiography, but that he could not write it because the clamor of prison was too distracting.

Bert Fields, a prominent entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles who had worked with Pellicano over many years, recalled him as doing “superb work.” (Fields was investigated in connection with Pellicano’s activities, but said he had not used any wiretaps in any of his cases, and he was not charged.)

Fields said he made a “minor contribution” to Pellicano’s post-release trust fund.

“He served his time and paid his dues, and I felt it was appropriate to make a contribution,” he said. “It had absolutely nothing with trying to keep him quiet or anything like that, and if anyone were to say that, I would probably sue them.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/arts/anthony-pellicano-prison-release.html" id="efd83191-a0bd-33f1-a352-a35a8fa1cbac">The New York Times</a>.

Before the hacking of Sony Pictures and the Democratic National Committee, before the News of the World tabloid broke into voicemail messages and before the first WikiLeak, there was Anthony Pellicano.

Private Eye to the Stars Exits Prison

He wiretapped actors Sylvester Stallone and Keith Carradine, and did work on behalf of Chris Rock and Courtney Love, among many others. He conducted an illegal criminal background check on Garry Shandling, threatened a journalist and, according to testimony at his trial, even offered to have a producer killed, his body buried in the desert. He has been behind bars since 2003.

By the 1990s, he had set up shop as a private investigator in Los Angeles who wouldn’t open a case without a $25,000 retainer and could charge clients hundreds of thousands of dollars. A former employee testified that in his offices on Sunset Boulevard, a Los Angeles cop on the take would swing by to pick up stacks of hundred dollar bills, and a half-dozen iMacs sat recording phone calls in his “war room.” As recently as last year, he teased in an interview with the The Hollywood Reporter that he might — just might — have Mafia connections.

While investigating the threat against Busch, the authorities found grenades and C-4 explosives in a safe in Pellicano’s office. He was sentenced to 30 months on weapons charges. In 2008, he was convicted again, this time on more than 70 charges including racketeering, wire fraud and wiretapping, and he has been in prison until this day.

Green said Pellicano cornered her outside a Santa Monica dog groomer where she had taken her Shih Tzu for a haircut. He blocked her car and got in her face, then followed her to a Peet’s Coffee, where he boxed her in again and then shoved her inside the store. She said she yelled to make a scene and fled.

Pellicano will emerge into a world of technology and surveillance vastly different from the one he left behind. With the landscape so changed, and his private investigator license revoked, it is not clear how he will make money now. Lawyers who sued Pellicano usually gave up because he had no money to pay any judgments.

He will, however, emerge with his secrets, and whatever value they possess. In a Newsweek interview in 2011, he claimed that he had offers to publish an autobiography, but that he could not write it because the clamor of prison was too distracting.

Anthony Pellicano, Notorious Detective to the Stars, Is Walking Free From Prison

“The investigation is complete, and we are moving forward with both ‘StarTalk’ and ‘Cosmos,'” Fox Broadcasting and National Geographic said of his two shows. “'StarTalk’will return to the air with the remaining 13 episodes in April on National Geographic, and both Fox and National Geographic are committed to finding an air date for ‘Cosmos.’ There will be no further comment.”

The statement did not say what investigators concluded about the complaints. Tyson was accused in December of behaving inappropriately with two women, in an article published by the website Patheos.

One accusation came from Ashley Watson, his assistant on “Cosmos,” who said that during a visit to his apartment, which she took to be a work visit, he made her feel uncomfortable by holding her hands and looking into her eyes in what he called a Native American handshake. As she was leaving, she said, he told her, “I want you to know that I want to hug you so bad right now, but I know that if I do I’ll just want more.” She quit the show.

The other account came from Katelyn N. Allers, a physics and astronomy professor, who said that while examining her tattoo of the solar system, Tyson had followed it into her dress. The article also revisited an earlier accusation against Tyson leveled by Tchiya Amet El Maat, who has accused him of raping her in 1984 when they were graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.

In a lengthy Facebook post written at the time, Tyson described the first two instances as harmless gestures. He denied the allegation of rape.

“Accusations can damage a reputation and a marriage,” he wrote. “Sometimes irreversibly. I see myself as loving husband and as a public servant — a scientist and educator who serves at the will of the public.”

A spokesman for National Geographic said Tyson would not comment beyond the statement sent by National Geographic and Fox.

Amet said she was interviewed by a representative from Fox as part of its investigation, as well as someone from the American Museum of Natural History, where Tyson directs the Hayden Planetarium. A spokeswoman for the museum said its investigation was not complete.

“I feel ignored,” Amet said Friday. She said she planned to become “more vocal, more active” in response.

Watson said that this case was “always the word of a low-level assistant and a perceived eccentric woman of color against an extremely powerful and wealthy TV personality,” so she was not at all surprised by the news.

“I spoke up for Tchiya and wish her nothing but peace,” Watson said. “She has my support and I believe her.”

Allers did not respond to a request for comment.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/arts/neil-degrasse-tyson-sexual-misconduct.html" id="f5ae909b-f3ed-3b3c-aacf-e49178843ebe">The New York Times</a>.

The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson will return to television after the broadcasters of his shows announced Friday that they had completed their investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against him.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Will Return to TV After Misconduct Investigation

Loughlin, 54, who made her name in the late 1980s as Aunt Becky on the family sitcom “Full House,” had an important role in the Hallmark show “When Calls the Heart” and was the hero of the channel’s TV movie series “Garage Sale Mysteries." But no longer.

“We are saddened by the recent news surrounding the college admissions allegations,” Crown Media Family Networks, Hallmark’s parent company, said in a statement. “We are no longer working with Lori Loughlin and have stopped development of all productions that air on the Crown Media Family Network channels involving Lori Loughlin including ‘Garage Sale Mysteries,’ an independent third party production.”

Loughlin is one of 50 people charged in a fraud scheme in which wealthy parents paid to help their children win admission to elite colleges or to inflate their SAT scores. Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, founder of the Mossimo fashion brand, were accused of paying two bribes of $50,000 each to Donna Heinel, a senior associate athletic director at the University of Southern California. Prosecutors said Heinel then marked the girls as recruits for the rowing team, which would improve their chances of admission, even though neither daughter participated in the sport.

After each daughter got her acceptance letter, the couple paid $200,000 each time to a charity whose founder, William Singer, was the mastermind of the operation, according to prosecutors. Loughlin and Giannulli were charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud, and were each released on bail.

Heinel, who faces a charge of conspiracy to commit racketeering, was fired by USC. Singer has pleaded guilty to several charges and is cooperating with investigators.

One of Loughlin’s and Giannulli’s daughters, Olivia Jade Giannulli, is a social media influencer, paid to promote brands to her millions of followers on YouTube and Instagram. At least one brand, Sephora, ended its partnership with Giannulli after her parents’ arrests.

While Hallmark’s owner said it would stop development of shows featuring Loughlin, it did not say whether it would air any episodes or movies already completed. She plays a miner’s widow in “When Calls the Heart,” a period drama set in a Canadian coal mining town. In “Garage Sale Mysteries,” she plays an antiques dealer who solves crimes. A spokesman for Loughlin declined to comment.

Another actress charged in connection with the scheme was Felicity Huffman, who is accused of paying $15,000 to have a test proctor inflate her older daughter’s SAT score.

Huffman and Loughlin both have coming projects with Netflix. Loughlin has a role on “Fuller House,” a reboot of the 1980s and 1990s sitcom, and Huffman is in the cast of “When They See Us,” a series about the Central Park jogger case, written and directed by Ava DuVernay, as well as the movie “Otherhood.” Both of Huffman’s projects have wrapped production. Netflix declined to comment.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/arts/television/lori-loughlin-hallmark-cheating.html" id="5de57552-ff06-32c6-af3e-cb7777fe3dda">The New York Times</a>.

The owner of the Hallmark Channel said on Thursday that it would no longer work with shows featuring actress Lori Loughlin, one of the parents implicated in a sprawling college admissions cheating operation that was revealed by federal prosecutors this week.

Hallmark Channel Cuts Ties With Lori Loughlin After Arrest in Cheating Scandal

In the first act, the principal presides over a “Community Activated Conversation” with parents (also known as a Facebook Live chat) to talk about an outbreak of mumps.

The conversation does not go well.

“We’re all threatened by your ANTI-SCIENCE DEATH CULT,” one parent offers.

“Do what you want,” comes the reply, “just keep your POISON off my kids.”

Jonathan Spector, 40, who wrote “Eureka Day,” said that he started thinking about vaccines as a subject after moving with his girlfriend, now his wife, to the Bay Area. When their friends started having children, whispers began to circulate at farmers markets and house parties that this person or that person was refusing the shots.

“I had this experience of talking to people who were very smart, very well educated, and sort of agreed with me about everything,” Spector said. “And then you would realize that in this one area, they seem to live on a different planet than you do.”

“Eureka Day,” which is in previews and opens in New York on Thursday at Walkerspace in a Colt Coeur production, follows four parents and the principal as the school faces down the mumps — and as the perceived good of the individual crashes into the good of the group.

It arrives in New York as public health officials struggle to contain an outbreak of measles, and it pulls at a larger thread many feel unraveling around us: What do you do when you cannot agree on basic facts?

The divisions do not track along typical political battle lines, Spector added, making it richer material for a playwright.

“Abortion or gun control or climate change — any one of those things is predictive of all the others, but not vaccines,” he said. “There are vaccine skeptics on the far left and on the far right,” and, he added, it is more difficult to wave them off as unthinking nincompoops if they otherwise agree with you.

Indeed, “Eureka Day,” which is already scheduled for productions in Philadelphia, Washington and Sonoma County, California, gives the anti-vaccine parents their humanity, though it does not buy their arguments. Spector said it makes him uncomfortable even discussing the play in terms of the “vaccination debate.”

“I don’t feel like it’s a debate,” he said. “From my point of view, the science is settled.”

Nonetheless, Josh Costello, the artistic director of Aurora Theater Company in Berkeley, which commissioned the play and staged its world premiere last year, said that anti-vaccine audience members who saw it seemed comfortable with their portrayal.

“We spent a lot of time talking about how we wanted the play to accurately represent people’s points of view without validating a point of view with which we disagree,” Costello said. “That’s a really fine line to walk.”

Another pleasant surprise, Costello said, were the wails of laughter that came from the audience during the group chat scene.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, the audience was roaring with laughter for like seven straight minutes,” he said. “We had to redo some of the cues to make it less funny so the audience could hear the dialogue and the key lines.”

Spector said that, after discovering at the New College of Florida that he was a terrible actor, he set out to become a director. While he had always written, he said, “I didn’t realize that writing plays was still a thing people really did in the world.” But as he moved from project to project, “what was appealing to me,” he added, “was being able to be intimate with this writing I was really excited about.”

He read hundreds of scripts a year as the literary manager of the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and went on to get an MFA in playwriting from San Francisco State University.

Spector lives in Oakland with his wife, Molly Aaronson-Gelb, and their 3-year-old daughter Maisie, who he said tries to rope other children into acting out plays at school. The couple are co-artistic directors of a small company, Just Theater, which they founded in 2006.

Aaronson-Gelb is a director as well as a high school drama teacher, and some of her experiences, both as a private school student in the Bay Area and in previous teaching jobs, inspired the “Eureka Day” setting. (It was the school she attended that cheered for opposing teams.)

“Eureka Day” is Spector’s first production in New York. It will be directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt, who was nursing her 2-month-old daughter Esme in the rehearsal room this month while giving the actors notes.

Her husband, Brian Wiles, plays Eli, a parent awash in self-satisfaction and tech money; every now and then he gave Esme googly eyes from his seat.

One directorial challenge: managing the laugh lines in that chat scene, where Facebook comments will be projected behind the actors for the audience to read.

“The build at the end felt the most right it’s felt,” Thomas Jay Ryan, who portrays the principal, said after one run-through.

“You keep saying, ‘Oh they’re going to be screaming laughing — in Berkeley they were screaming laughing.’ Well, OK,” he added. “That’s the kiss of death!”

But for Campbell-Holt, balancing the laughs and the flare-ups in “Eureka Day” is no longer just a theatrical exercise.

“As a new mom,” she said later, “my awareness of this public health crisis has really shifted to being much more immediate. It’s personal.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/25/theater/eureka-day-play-vaccinations.html" id="d39cdbbd-a57c-3d6c-a28f-d509cb1084e8">The New York Times</a>.

Can a Play About Vaccines Be a Laughing Matter?

“Eureka Day” is a play about a school in Berkeley, California, where the soccer team cheers when the other side scores a goal, and where parents were so concerned that an 8th grade production of “Peter Pan” would have “colonialist issues” that it was set in outer space. It is also a school where many — many — families refuse to vaccinate their children.

“The museum’s investigation into allegations concerning Neil deGrasse Tyson is complete,” a museum spokeswoman said in a brief statement. “Based on the results of the investigation, Dr. Tyson remains an employee and director of the Hayden Planetarium. Because this is a confidential personnel matter, there will be no further statements by the museum.”

Tyson was accused of behaving inappropriately with two women in an article published in November on the website Patheos.

In one instance, Katelyn N. Allers, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, said she met Tyson in 2009 at a party after a gathering of the American Astronomical Society. He was examining her tattoo of the solar system, which stretches along her arm to her collarbone, and she said he followed the tattoo with his hand, putting it into her dress. He said he was looking for Pluto, she said.

Ashley Watson, who had been his assistant on the television series “Cosmos,” made another accusation. She said that during a visit to his apartment, which she thought was for work purposes, he held her hand and stared into her eyes, in what he called a Native American handshake, for about 10 seconds until she pulled away. Watson said that as she was leaving, he told her, “I want you to know that I want to hug you so bad right now, but I know that if I do, I’ll just want more.” She subsequently quit her job.

The article also included already public allegations by Tchiya Amet el Maat, who said Tyson raped her in 1984 when they were in graduate school at the University of Texas, Austin.

Tyson responded to the allegations in a long Facebook post, in which he denied the rape and described the first two incidents as benign.

“While I don’t explicitly remember searching for Pluto at the top of her shoulder, it is surely something I would have done in that situation,” Tyson wrote of Allers’ account. “As we all know, I have professional history with the demotion of Pluto, which had occurred officially just three years earlier. So whether people include it or not in their tattoos is of great interest to me.”

Allers said she was interviewed in person for several hours by an investigator from T&amp;M; Protection Resources, a company the museum hired. She said the investigator followed up with witnesses she provided and looked into a speech Tyson gave at a conference in 2014, which she said included jokes about gay people and criticisms of conservatives.

Tyson was also investigated by Fox Broadcasting and National Geographic, which broadcast his television series “StarTalk” and “Cosmos.” Those companies announced in March that their investigations were complete and that his shows would return to the air. Allers said that investigation seemed less thorough to her, just a half-hour phone call with investigators from the two networks.

Allers said she did not find the results of the museum’s investigation surprising — “This is kind of the way the world works,” she said — but added that there was no good possible outcome either way.

“Any time this comes up in the news — I’m sure it will, even with this outcome — I get bombarded with emails and phone calls that are pretty hateful and kind of scary,” Allers said. She said she hoped the museum was “taking steps to make sure behavior like this doesn’t continue to occur.”

Amet was outraged by the museum’s decision.

“If Neil deGrasse Tyson had raped a white woman, he would not be on TV anymore, and this woman would have received a settlement,” Amet, who is black, said in a statement.

Watson said she had declined to speak with the museum’s investigators, as she was worn out from telling her story to other investigators and to news outlets. She said she just wanted to move on.

“In hindsight, I should’ve talk to them,” she said in a text message. “Although I personally don’t think the outcome would’ve been different.”

Tyson, who has led the planetarium since 1996, did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/arts/design/neil-degrasse-tyson-keeps-job.html" id="781cab90-f38f-3ea9-a9a2-f50d7fc21e04">The New York Times</a>.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who leads the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, will keep his job, the institution said Thursday. The museum has closed an investigation into sexual misconduct accusations against him.

After Investigation, Neil deGrasse Tyson Will Keep His Job

“The museum’s investigation into allegations concerning Neil deGrasse Tyson is complete,” a museum spokeswoman said. “Based on the results of the investigation, Dr. Tyson remains an employee and director of the Hayden Planetarium. Because this is a confidential personnel matter, there will be no further statements by the museum.”

Ashley Watson, who had been his assistant on the television series “Cosmos,” made another accusation. She said that during a visit to his apartment, which she thought was for work purposes, he held her hand and stared into her eyes, in what he called a Native American handshake, for about 10 seconds until she pulled away. Watson said as she was leaving, he told her, “I want you to know that I want to hug you so bad right now, but I know that if I do, I’ll just want more.” She subsequently quit her job.

The Louvre became the first major institution to scrub the family’s name, which is all the more striking because opioid abuse is viewed as far more of a crisis in the United States than it is in France.

But the name retains its honored position at a number of American institutions: the Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Guggenheim Museum, the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other places. Outside the United States, there is the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London and more.

The three Sackler brothers, who built what became Purdue Pharma, and their heirs have been prolific donors to the arts and sciences for decades. Several museums, including the Guggenheim and Metropolitan Museum of Art, have said they would no longer accept donations from the family, but neither they nor any other large institution, other than the Louvre, have stripped the name from any wings, galleries or buildings.

That is because removing a name, even one that has become culturally toxic, is an enormously complicated decision, mined with legal, financial and moral concerns. Here are some of those issues:

This week the Louvre Museum in Paris said it had removed the Sackler name from its Sackler Wing of Oriental Antiquities, following an outcry over the role of some Sackler family members in the production and promotion of the opioid painkiller OxyContin.

Elizabeth A. Harris

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