A New York-based crisis consulting firm says that the fall of Harvey Weinstein has inspired an 11-fold increase in accusations of sexual misconduct against high-profile people.
Per a database compiled by Temin and Co., since the Oct. 5, 2017 New York Times story detailing decades of misconduct by Weinstein, and an equally devastating New Yorker report just days later, 379 high-profile people have been accused, a staggering increase from the two years prior.
Temin and Co. looked into accusations starting from December 2015, when charges were brought against Bill Cosby for a 2004 sexual attack on former Temple University employee, Andrea Constand. The firm’s president and CEO Davia Temin told TheWrap that just 38 high-profile people were accused of sexual misconduct or other similar misdeeds from Dec. 2015 until the Weinstein accusations became public.
But after Weinstein came the #MeToo movement, and a wave of women coming forward to report abuse. “We can see it was not the Cosby issue,” Temin said. “It was absolutely Weinstein.”
In total, Temin and Co.’s database found that at least 417 high-profile people have been accused since December, 2015. Of that group, 193 have either been fired or left their jobs, and 122 have been put on leave, suspended or facing investigations. And in the remaining 69 cases, there were no repercussions.
Temin and Co. compiled the database by analyzing national news articles about sexual and other misconduct by celebrities and other high-profile executives. For example, she told Bloomberg they added the firing of Netflix’s chief communications officer Johnathan Friedland over multiple uses of the “N-word.”
The database included those with at least seven separate mentions in national outlets.
Temin said her firm started to compile the database because she wanted to see the actual numbers behind all the accusations. “There were a lot of anecdotes, I wanted to have something that was as concrete as we could make it,” she said. “Stories are important, anecdotes are important. But so are metrics.”
Temin is closely paying attention to those people who haven’t been fired but also haven’t been publicly cleared.
“They haven’t fired them or cleared them. There is still a large subset that’s in limbo,” she said, noting that her database is reliant on public information, so it’s possible they could’ve been either quietly let go or welcomed back. “When I look at it, I still the see the gray zone of people of indeterminate outcomes. Is that the new way for trying to game the system?”