Do we like Neil deGrasse Tyson?
Our score: 6 out of 10. Nothing harmful in his own words turned up, but the 2018 allegations, which he partly denied and partly apologised for, keep the number in the middle.
Tyson is the bloke who made astrophysics a pop-culture thing. He directs the Hayden Planetarium, and his shows Cosmos and StarTalk have been a fixture of science TV for years. His new book, Take Me to Your Leader, is a cheeky guide to meeting aliens, and his May NPR chat was classic Tyson: breezy, funny and a bit smug about human ego.
The messy chapter is late 2018. Patheos first reported accounts from women, including a university astronomy professor and a former assistant of his, and a separate allegation from a woman who says he drugged and raped her as a grad student in 1984. NBC noted it had not independently verified any of it. Tyson denied the 1984 allegation outright, calling his accuser's memory unreliable, and said he welcomed an investigation.
On the lesser claims he was more mixed. He said he was deeply sorry if the professor found a 2009 after-party moment creepy, and he told NBC-reported readers he apologised profusely to the former assistant over a 2018 encounter. Fox and National Geographic cleared him to return to his shows in March 2019, and in July the museum said he stays on as planetarium director. None of those bodies published findings, which is why this lands as a close call and not a clean slate.
On the harm test he comes up clean. He was on Real Time with Bill Maher in 2024 and pushed back when Maher called a Scientific American piece on sex differences in sport unscientific. Tyson said science matters and suggested women may have an edge in long-distance swimming. Where you land depends on whether you read that as sensible nuance or as going soft on a live fight, but it isn't campaigning against anyone's rights. In June 2026 he argued that immigrants have been vital to American science.
The June comments, made on a podcast and reported by The Nerd Stash, warned that tighter immigration rules could leave the US less influential in science. A few X users disputed it, and one called him a liberal pundit. It's an argument about policy, not a scandal, and it fits a man who spends his life defending evidence.
There was a business stoush too. A former co-founder of his production company sued in a New York federal court over copyright, and in 2019 Law360 reported that Tyson won. That's a legal win, not a character reference, but it isn't a mark against him either.