In Days After Grammys, a #MeToo Spark Comes to Music

For months, the question made its way through the music industry in group emails, in whispered office conversations and at black-tie cocktail parties: When will the #MeToo movement finally come to music?

The answer, it turned out, was in the aftermath of the Grammy Awards.

Since the event, held Sunday night, a high-ranking record executive, Charlie Walk, was accused of sexual misconduct; a coalition of female music executives has called for the president of the Recording Academy, Neil Portnow, to resign over comments he made after the awards.

Oprah Winfrey responded to multiple women who have accused the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons of sexual misconduct, including rape, by cutting him from her latest publication, a spiritual advice book.

The drumbeat began Monday, when a blog post appeared on the website of a women’s wellness studio in Hermosa Beach, California. It accused Walk, president of the Republic Group and one of the industry’s most successful promotion executives, of persistent harassment.

“There was that event at your swank pad when you actually cornered me and pushed me into your bedroom and onto your bed,” read the post. “The bed you shared with your wife ... your wife who was in the room next door. You being drunk and me being 6 inches taller was my saving grace.”

The post was written by a woman named Tristan Coopersmith, who referred to events in 2004 or 2005, when she worked with Walk at Columbia Records. In her post, Coopersmith said she had been paid a settlement, and she had left the entertainment industry eight years ago.

Walk, who has worked with Taylor Swift and is a judge on Fox’s new competition show “The Four,” has denied the accusations. But he has since pulled out of the finale of the show, and the Universal Music Group, Republic’s parent company, has placed him on leave and hired an outside law firm to conduct a review.

As Walk’s story spread, the industry has also been reacting with outrage to Portnow’s comments at the Grammys, where only one woman accepted a solo award onstage. Portnow told reporters that women in music needed to “step up” to advance their careers.

His comment drew rebukes from artists like Pink and Kelly Clarkson, and on Thursday a group of 21 female executives called for Portnow to resign. The group was led by Rosemary Carroll, a lawyer whose clients have included Courtney Love and the Strokes.

“We step up every single day and have been doing so for a long time,” the group said in a joint letter released Thursday night. “The fact that you don’t realize this means it’s time for you to step down.” Among the other women who signed it were Cara Lewis, a top hip-hop agent; Ty Stiklorius, John Legend’s manager; Jennifer Justice of the concert promoter Superfly; talent agents Natalia Nastaskin and Marsha Vlasic; Marcie Allen, a branding executive; and Gillian Bar, another partner at Carroll’s firm, Carroll Guido & Groffman, who helped organize the effort. The list includes no executives from major record labels.

According to the Recording Academy’s most recently disclosed financial statements, Portnow’s annual salary was nearly $1.5 million.

Also Thursday, before the letter was released, the Recording Academy announced that it was establishing an independent task force to examine the institution and “to overcome the explicit barriers and unconscious biases that impede female advancement in the music community.”

In the days leading up to the Grammys, gender issues in music began to take center stage. A report on diversity in the business published grim numbers — 9 percent of nominees in the last six Grammys were women — and an ad hoc group of female music professionals called for attendees to wear white roses to the show as a symbol of “hope, peace, sympathy and resistance.”

At the ceremony, Janelle Monáe brought a “Time’s Up” message to her speech introducing Kesha, who performed a defiant ballad about her own struggles with abuse.

Many women in music have looked at the latest events as representing the first dominoes to tip — if not fall quite yet — in a long-awaited reckoning.

Monika A. Tashman, a lawyer who has commented on the importance of the #MeToo movement in music, said she could not address the controversy around Walk, but added that the larger movement “exploded for the music industry with Neil Portnow’s ‘step up’ comment,” and called Portnow’s remark “the tipping point for women in the music industry to finally come together as a community and say, ‘enough.'”

In an interview, Coopersmith, a mental health therapist, said she was not even aware that the Grammys took place Sunday. She had written her post about Walk as a therapeutic letter, without any intention to publish, but said she was inspired to share her experience after attending the Women’s March in Los Angeles two weeks ago.

“My choice to share now wasn’t calculated,” she said. “For months, and truly years, I worked hard to not share. But it came to a point where I could no longer not share. It just felt wrong. So often the hardest decisions and the right decisions are the same decision.”

In an industry where gossip is often the favored form of communication, debate about Walk poured out into the comments section of Variety. Several more women used the The Lefsetz Letter, an emailed newsletter by Bob Lefsetz, a former lawyer who is the industry’s full-time gadfly, as a forum to accuse Walk, anonymously, of various forms of harassment, including sending explicit pictures and inappropriate text messages.

In a signed comment, Harvey Leeds, a former executive at Epic Records who had worked with Michael Jackson and others, challenged Walk’s assertion, in a statement this week, that “there has never been a single HR claim against me at any time during my 25+ year career, spanning three major companies.”

Leeds said he had made two complaints to Sony’s human resources department about verbal abuse from Walk. A spokeswoman for Sony, the parent company of Columbia and Epic, declined to comment.

But Walk’s lawyer, Patricia Glaser, said he had no knowledge of any such complaints, and she called Leeds “a disgruntled former employee.”

Coopersmith said that in making her story public, she was motivated not by revenge but “because truth deserves to be shared.”

“I shared for my own healing,” she said. “And most of all, I shared because this conversation needs to continue. It needs to continue until every human in the work force feels safe, protected and respected.”