Do we like Robert Tapert?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean run on harm and no court or allegation trail turned up, but the public record on his own views and charity is thin.
Rob Tapert is the producer behind the Evil Dead franchise and the co-creator of Xena: Warrior Princess, so he is a sort of patron saint of cult telly and gloriously messy horror. He is still at it, and was producing the franchise alongside Sam Raimi when Evil Dead Rise came out in 2023.
The Xena story is the one that matters here. Tapert has said Universal was so worried the show would be seen as a lesbian show that Xena and Gabrielle were kept out of the same frame in the opening titles. He has also said the crew leaned into the subtext partly because they were “doing it to be naughty”, so the studio was the handbrake and the writers kept nudging it.
That is a mixed legacy for LGBTQ+ viewers. Many fans cherish the show as a rare queer-coded story of its era, while others wanted the relationship made explicit. Tapert also said it was never really meant to be about two gay women on the road together, which tells you the network-era limits, not a campaign against anyone.
On the harm test, we found nothing: no words against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and no slide into conspiracy talk in what we read. His recent work is mostly horror with long-time partners such as Raimi, and nothing there shows a harmful pattern. To be fair, he is a producer who rarely gives political interviews, so this is an absence of evidence, not a ringing endorsement.
The recent news is a business story, not a scandal. Evil Dead Burn opened on 10 July 2026 to about $13.7 million in the US, below the $25 to $30 million that tracking had predicted. Tapert has also said the next one, Evil Dead Wrath, is set in 1972 and could have trouble with the ratings board.
We found no court cases, no allegations and no stories of him treating cast or crew badly, which for a Hollywood producer of four decades is worth a nod. We also found no documented charity work of his own in sources we could open, so we can't give him a gold star for giving back, just a clean sheet.