Variety critic tells her story: A TV executive sexually assaulted me

Variety TV critic Maureen Ryan revealed on Wednesday that an executive in the TV industry sexually assaulted her in 2014.

In a personal story posted Wednesday on Variety, the former Chicago Tribune and Huffington Post critic writes that while the alleged assault “broke her,” the women who have come forward in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal with their own experiences prompted her to share her story.

“What we did see this month, finally, was a mass of survivors coming forward, which is laudable and understandable: There is strength in numbers,” Ryan writes.

She writes that her attacker, whom she did not name for legal reasons, was the boyfriend of someone she knew in the entertainment industry.

Ryan described her alleged attacker as a “predator” who “hunted” her. She said he “came after me three times,” touching her and making crude remarks, even after she moved away from him.

He was reprimanded after his company investigated.

“I later heard that there were rumors of him harassing the network’s assistants. Not long after that ‘investigation’ into what he’d done to me, not long after he had a note put in his file by HR (that was the extent of the consequences he faced), he got a new job at another network,” she wrote

She said the incident was the “real reason” she took two months off from work in 2015 — not to deal with family issues, as she had written in a post in May of that year.

“I needed to heal, mentally and spiritually, and I had to think about whether I even wanted to stay in this industry,” she wrote.

Ryan lauded the women who have come forward to share their stories in the two weeks since the New York Times published its bombshell report on Weinstein.

“Harvey Weinstein, it is clear, is a monster, a sociopathic ogre, and I applaud the journalists who dragged the full scope of his reign of terror into the light of day, and survivors who have spoken out will have my heart forever. I send my love and deep admiration to them all,” she wrote.

Read Ryan’s full story here>>