Former Grammys boss Neil Portnow accused of rape

Nearly six years ago, Neil Portnow—who was the head of the Recording Academy, the non-profit that runs the Grammys, at the time—responded to a backlash over a year of almost exclusively male nominations by suggesting that female artists needed to “step up” if they wanted to be considered for future awards. A few months later, the Recording Academy launched an investigation into its own misogynistic bias (one that was apparently a disaster), and a few months after that, Portnow resigned from his position at the Recording Academy.

Portnow is back in the news today, with The New York Times reporting that he’s being sued by a woman for allegedly drugging and raping her in 2018, and she’s also accusing the Recording Academy of having a role in a supposed cover-up. This ties in with something that happened in 2020, when Recording Academy CEO Deborah Dugan was mysteriously let go just a few days before the Grammys and later sued the organization for allegedly covering up sexual harassment allegations against Portnow and then retaliating against her when she tried to bring up separate sexual harassment allegations of her own (against another employee at the Recording Academy).

The New York Times says that this is the alleged incident that Dugan claimed was being covered-up, making this the first time that the unnamed accuser—all we know is that she’s a musician who is not from the U.S. and that she apparently “once performed at Carnegie Hall.” According to her suit, she met Portnow at a Grammys event in early 2018 and later asked if she could interview him for a publication she had launched. Later that year, she met him in a hotel and he gave her “some Grammy memorabilia” and a glass of wine that made her “feel woozy,” and then she started losing consciousness.

The woman claims Portnow raped her that night, and though she still felt “woozy” in the morning, she left the hotel when Portnow went to a meeting. She says she stayed quiet because of Portnow’s “prominence and stature in the music industry,” but after he allegedly ignored several attempts by the woman to reach out to him, she emailed her accusations to the Recording Academy (a copy of the email was included in the suit) and filed a police report—though, for reasons that were not given in the suit, the New York district attorney’s office declined to press charges.

In a statement obtained by the New York Times, a representative for Portnow denied the allegations and said that the suit was “undoubtedly motivated by Mr. Portnow’s refusal to comply with the plaintiff’s outrageous demands for money and assistance in obtaining a residence visa for her.” It also referred to the accusations in the suit as the “latest incarnation” of a “‘new and improved’ story” filled with “even more outrageous and untrue allegations.” That statement also says that the woman’s accusations were investigating by the Academy’s HR department and outside lawyers who found “absolutely no proof to support any of the allegations”—though the woman says she was never interviewed for any such investigation.