Winners of the 62nd Grammy Awards will be announced Sunday night — but there's a cloud hanging over the ceremony. Last week, Deborah Dugan, the recently installed president and CEO of the Recording Academy — which hands out the awards — was placed on administrative leave. Earlier this week, Dugan filed a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that includes allegations of sexual misconduct and vote rigging.
The Recording Academy has been struggling for years with criticism that the Grammys were too male, too white, too old and too insular. In came Dugan five months ago, as the Academy's first female leader.
She pledged that the organization could do better, as she told NPR in an interview last month: "We've known as an industry for a long time that we have a monumental problem with gender issues."
Then, just over a week ago and only 10 days before the awards telecast, the Recording Academy abruptly announced that it had placed Dugan on leave pending an investigation into an allegation of bullying that came from a female assistant. But in an interview Thursday, Dugan claimed she was placed on leave as retaliation for accusations she made, and changes she proposed.
Specifically, Dugan says her suspension is the result of a memo she sent in December to the Academy's Human Resources director, which included an accusation that she had been sexually harassed by the Academy's general counsel, Joel Katz. (Katz is also a former Academy board chair.)
In her EEOC complaint, Dugan reiterated her accusations against Katz — and she said she learned that her predecessor, Neil Portnow, had been accused of raping a female artist. Both Katz and Portnow deny the accusations, and Portnow said in a statement that he was investigated and exonerated. In the complaint, Dugan also repeated and elaborated upon her accusations from the HR memo related to questionable financial expenditures, rigged Grammy voting and self-dealing at the public, non-profit organization.
In an interview with NPR on Thursday, Dugan reiterated her accusation against Katz as it is laid out in the EEOC complaint. She said that the incident occurred on May 18, 2019, before she had started officially working at the Academy in August. She had been invited to attend the first day of a three-day board session held at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Laguna Niguel, Calif. She says Katz (an extremely high-profile attorney who recently negotiated the sale of Taylor Swift's former label home, Big Machine Label Group, to Scooter Braun's Ithaca Holdings Group) invited her to dine with him that evening.
"Under the guise of a work dinner," she told NPR, "I was propositioned by the general counsel — that is, Joel [Katz]. It started with calling me 'baby' and telling me how pretty I was. And then in the course of the dinner, after ordering a bottle of wine, I got a little more uncomfortable. He was talking about his private plane and trips that we could do and it ended with him leaning forward to kiss me. As I look back now, I think that there — the fact that they had me meet him and have dinner with him first — was sort of a test of how much I would acquiesce to."