Elizabeth A. Harris

He also slid into his best creepy smirk and sexually harassed an underling in a corporate training video.

“Not only are you a solid candidate,” his character said to a woman up for a promotion, “but I’ve been watching you move around out here, and you’re solid everywhere.”

“What?” he responded. “Being hot’s a good thing!”

This project may not win Dillinger any trophies, but office workers around the country are seeing a lot of him — or other actors playing odious characters just like his. New or expanded laws mandating sexual harassment training in states like New York and California, as well as a nationwide awakening to a very real problem, have fostered a market for workplace training videos and for actors who can bring #MeToo to life, usually in roles lasting just a minute or two.

They play harassers and their victims, supervisors who comfort, colleagues who intervene, and co-workers who look into the camera and say it’s not their problem. On Backstage.com, the job listings site for actors, casting calls are going out for parts such as, “A client of a big manufacturing company; a little sleazy; makes an unwanted advance on a salesperson,” and “an account manager at a large manufacturing company; strong and articulate; she stands up for herself” when a client makes an unwanted advance.

These videos do not, naturally, have a reputation as great cinema, which is not surprising considering that, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, they can have a lot of legal ground to cover. In New York, for example, training programs have to define sexual harassment, give information on state and federal sexual harassment laws and lay out avenues for handling complaints. There must also be interaction, so there are often little quizzes along the way to keep viewers paying attention, or least keep them from wandering off completely.

They are made by law firms, human resource outfits and companies that specialize in compliance training, which may also be making videos on topics such as respectful communication and bribery. Some keep the whole operation in-house, with a small team of people wearing multiple filmmaking hats (director today, producer tomorrow), while others contract with outside film companies to hire actors and put the videos together.

The productions are nothing if not efficient.

“When I get a new crew they look at the call sheets and go, ‘Are you out of your mind? You’re giving us 45 minutes to shoot two pages!’” said Lori Richardson, the producer and director of video content at Emtrain, a compliance training company. In a typical film, it might take at least half a day to shoot that amount, she said. “But I’m pretty quick on set and I keep it moving along.”

Laura Faye Smith, the actress who was harassed by Dillinger’s character, said it took about half a day to shoot her scenes.

She didn’t have to use too much imagination to get into character.

She said she once had a real-life job as a human resources manager, which including giving sexual harassment training. Then, one day, it happened to her: one of her superiors, who was also the boss’s father, put his arm around her, got right in her face, and said her high heels made her the perfect height for him to kiss her.

“No matter how much you know about this,” she said, “when it happens to you, it’s hard not to go into this thing of ‘did I bring this on somehow?’”

In an effort to make the scripts more relatable to these real-life experiences, film companies say they are trying to make videos more engaging, with better acting and higher production values. They also change up where scenes are set to make them more relevant to the companies who may be buying the films. Dillinger’s character harassed Smith’s twice — once in a printing plant and once in a retail setting.

Emtrain said it has created scenes that riff off current events, like the memo written by a Google engineer that said “personality differences” between men and women helped explain why there were fewer women engineers and high ranking executives at the company.

Some companies have started to use virtual reality. Mursion, a San Francisco startup, allows managers — as well as prospective teachers, Air Force captains, executives from finance and tech — to practice difficult conversations with an avatar. In one training, you are a commanding officer in the armed forces and a woman comes to you because she hooked up with a subordinate who is now defying her authority.

There is a range in quality and approach in these programs, though they tend to charge in roughly the same way. Traliant, which produced the videos with Dillinger and Smith, said it starts at about $25 per user, but that price can drop to less than $5 for companies with more than 10,000 people. Emtrain generally charges $47 per person for the year, dropping to about $20 for an organization of 3,000, and it includes additional services like a way for people to ask anonymous questions on tricky issues like bias, ethics and harassment, and feedback for companies on potential problem areas based on what employees say.

The actors themselves generally make a few hundred dollars per video, not a large sum, but also not bad for what often amounts to a few hours of work.

While many executives and lawmakers have embraced these training videos, there are questions about how effective they can be. For years, companies have used such videos to try to defend themselves from any lawsuits saying they didn’t do enough to ensure safe working environments. Whether workers took the training to heart was not necessarily the top concern.

“My worry is that there will be some category or organization who believes they have checked the box by conducting training, whether or not there is any commitment from leadership to actually change the culture,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center. “I don’t want to suggest that training itself is harmful, but I also think that training alone is not likely enough to actually change organizations.”

Frank Dobbin, a social science professor at Harvard, said that while research in this area is thin, there is some evidence that training for managers can be helpful, as can bystander intervention training. But he said there are also studies that suggest typical harassment training might make some men more hostile than they were to begin with, perhaps because they feel a threat to their way of thinking.

“It’s possible that training for whole populations of employees, which is what the states are now moving toward, is going to backfire,” Dobbin said. “I don’t think there’s any evidence that it reduces harassment and there’s some evidence that it’s likely to increase harassment.”

Michael Del Polito, a media producer and director at LRN, an ethics and compliance company, said that the company realized that in most cases, employees are mandated to watch the videos. “It’s not necessarily something they’re electing to do,” he said.

Still, he said, the company tries to make them watchable. Last year, one of LRN’s sexual harassment videos won a Telly award, which honors video and television production. In it, a woman tells a colleague she was groped by a superior in Las Vegas after a conference; the flashbacks to what happened in Vegas were illustrated by animated people made of neon lights.

Del Polito said: “We try to approach it as, we respect our audience and try to put something out that — within reason, of course, given time and budgetary constraints — try to put out the best product possible because we think our audience is sophisticated.”

This article originally appeared in

The Most Watched Show at the Office? Sexual Harassment Training Videos

Troy Dillinger was having a good month. A working actor in Los Angeles, he played in June a lawyer in a Lifetime movie, a coach in a public service announcement about opioids, and a judge in Cardi B’s video “Press.”

“The museum’s investigation into allegations concerning Neil deGrasse Tyson is complete,” a museum spokeswoman said in a brief statement. “Based on the results of the investigation, Dr. Tyson remains an employee and director of the Hayden Planetarium. Because this is a confidential personnel matter, there will be no further statements by the museum.”

Tyson was accused of behaving inappropriately with two women in an article published in November on the website Patheos.

In one instance, Katelyn N. Allers, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, said she met Tyson in 2009 at a party after a gathering of the American Astronomical Society. He was examining her tattoo of the solar system, which stretches along her arm to her collarbone, and she said he followed the tattoo with his hand, putting it into her dress. He said he was looking for Pluto, she said.

Ashley Watson, who had been his assistant on the television series “Cosmos,” made another accusation. She said that during a visit to his apartment, which she thought was for work purposes, he held her hand and stared into her eyes, in what he called a Native American handshake, for about 10 seconds until she pulled away. Watson said that as she was leaving, he told her, “I want you to know that I want to hug you so bad right now, but I know that if I do, I’ll just want more.” She subsequently quit her job.

The article also included already public allegations by Tchiya Amet el Maat, who said Tyson raped her in 1984 when they were in graduate school at the University of Texas, Austin.

Tyson responded to the allegations in a long Facebook post, in which he denied the rape and described the first two incidents as benign.

“While I don’t explicitly remember searching for Pluto at the top of her shoulder, it is surely something I would have done in that situation,” Tyson wrote of Allers’ account. “As we all know, I have professional history with the demotion of Pluto, which had occurred officially just three years earlier. So whether people include it or not in their tattoos is of great interest to me.”

Allers said she was interviewed in person for several hours by an investigator from T&amp;M; Protection Resources, a company the museum hired. She said the investigator followed up with witnesses she provided and looked into a speech Tyson gave at a conference in 2014, which she said included jokes about gay people and criticisms of conservatives.

Tyson was also investigated by Fox Broadcasting and National Geographic, which broadcast his television series “StarTalk” and “Cosmos.” Those companies announced in March that their investigations were complete and that his shows would return to the air. Allers said that investigation seemed less thorough to her, just a half-hour phone call with investigators from the two networks.

Allers said she did not find the results of the museum’s investigation surprising — “This is kind of the way the world works,” she said — but added that there was no good possible outcome either way.

“Any time this comes up in the news — I’m sure it will, even with this outcome — I get bombarded with emails and phone calls that are pretty hateful and kind of scary,” Allers said. She said she hoped the museum was “taking steps to make sure behavior like this doesn’t continue to occur.”

Amet was outraged by the museum’s decision.

“If Neil deGrasse Tyson had raped a white woman, he would not be on TV anymore, and this woman would have received a settlement,” Amet, who is black, said in a statement.

Watson said she had declined to speak with the museum’s investigators, as she was worn out from telling her story to other investigators and to news outlets. She said she just wanted to move on.

“In hindsight, I should’ve talk to them,” she said in a text message. “Although I personally don’t think the outcome would’ve been different.”

Tyson, who has led the planetarium since 1996, did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/arts/design/neil-degrasse-tyson-keeps-job.html" id="781cab90-f38f-3ea9-a9a2-f50d7fc21e04">The New York Times</a>.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who leads the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, will keep his job, the institution said Thursday. The museum has closed an investigation into sexual misconduct accusations against him.

After Investigation, Neil deGrasse Tyson Will Keep His Job

“The museum’s investigation into allegations concerning Neil deGrasse Tyson is complete,” a museum spokeswoman said. “Based on the results of the investigation, Dr. Tyson remains an employee and director of the Hayden Planetarium. Because this is a confidential personnel matter, there will be no further statements by the museum.”

Ashley Watson, who had been his assistant on the television series “Cosmos,” made another accusation. She said that during a visit to his apartment, which she thought was for work purposes, he held her hand and stared into her eyes, in what he called a Native American handshake, for about 10 seconds until she pulled away. Watson said as she was leaving, he told her, “I want you to know that I want to hug you so bad right now, but I know that if I do, I’ll just want more.” She subsequently quit her job.

The Louvre became the first major institution to scrub the family’s name, which is all the more striking because opioid abuse is viewed as far more of a crisis in the United States than it is in France.

But the name retains its honored position at a number of American institutions: the Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Guggenheim Museum, the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other places. Outside the United States, there is the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London and more.

The three Sackler brothers, who built what became Purdue Pharma, and their heirs have been prolific donors to the arts and sciences for decades. Several museums, including the Guggenheim and Metropolitan Museum of Art, have said they would no longer accept donations from the family, but neither they nor any other large institution, other than the Louvre, have stripped the name from any wings, galleries or buildings.

That is because removing a name, even one that has become culturally toxic, is an enormously complicated decision, mined with legal, financial and moral concerns. Here are some of those issues:

Big donations come with strings — and contracts

When a museum puts a name on the wall, almost always in exchange for a substantial donation, there is often a legal contract that outlines how long that name has to stay.

In 1973, Avery Fisher, founder of Fisher electronics company, donated $10.5 million to renovate Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. The agreement included the stipulation that the name Avery Fisher Hall “will appear on tickets, brochures, program announcements and advertisements and the like, and I consent in perpetuity to such use.”

In order to rename the hall, Lincoln Center had to buy out the Fisher family in 2014 for $15 million and promises to feature tributes to Fisher in the new lobby. David Geffen, the entertainment mogul, then stepped in with a $100 million gift to pay for a renovation — and the naming rights to what is now David Geffen Hall.

Geffen also required that his name be used in perpetuity.

In some circumstances, museums have said their contractual obligations mean they have no choice but to keep the name.

In June, Sen. Jeffrey A. Merkley, D-Ore., demanded that the Smithsonian change the name of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, saying the family name “has no place in taxpayer-funded public institutions.” In a letter to Merkley, Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian, said the donation was made in 1982, and as was its custom at the time, the Smithsonian granted the naming rights in perpetuity.

Bunch said the gift policy was revised in 2011 and now limits naming rights to a term of 20 years or until the next significant renovation of the space. (The Louvre said it was able to act because its policy limits naming rights to 20 years; the wing was named in 1997.)

Michael Ward Stout, a lawyer who has negotiated such deals, said the terms depend “on how much the institution wants the money — and how big are the egos of the donors.”

Some Sackler family members have no ties to OxyContin

Bunch’s letter also pointed out that the gift — which included a collection of more than 1,000 works of Asian art and $4 million — was made more than a decade before OxyContin came on the market. In fact, the man behind the donation, Arthur Sackler, had been dead for nine years when the drug was introduced.

Arthur and his brothers Mortimer and Raymond Sackler bought a small company called Purdue Frederick in 1952 and grew it into a pharmaceutical giant. Arthur’s family sold his stake in the company after his death in 1987. Purdue Pharma was founded in 1991 and released OxyContin five years later.

When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City announced in May that it would stop accepting Sackler money, it made a careful distinction, saying it did not want gifts from family members tied to Purdue Pharma, leaving the door open to family members who are not.

It also declined to rename its Sackler Wing, home of the popular attraction the Temple of Dendur, saying it was not in a position to make such a permanent change while litigation against the family was ongoing. The attorney general of Massachusetts has accused members of the Sackler family of directing the company’s efforts to mislead the public about how dangerous the drug really was.

The company has said it “neither created nor caused the opioid epidemic,” and denied the allegations.

Museums don’t want to spook other big donors

Nonprofit cultural institutions live or die by their fundraising, especially in an era of declining government support for the arts. So one concern for museums is how taking down the name of one donor will make all the others feel.

“The ‘damnation of memory’ — as the Romans used to call it — of a generous party of the past could have a chilling effect on donors that might be concerned the history of their family, or an individual associated with them, might illicit a rebuke, said Maxwell L. Anderson, a longtime museum leader.

If someone is in an “adventurous part of the economy,” Anderson continued, like genetic engineering or bio farming, it’s difficult to know how that work is going to look in the future. Take Facebook, for example, which was a national darling just a few years ago, and is now being admonished on Capitol Hill.

They want to stay above the fray

Perhaps the trickiest and most fundamental question is where institutions should draw the line. What counts as so morally abhorrent that an association should be erased — and who gets to decide?

The unveiling of the David H. Koch Plaza at the Met was greeted by protesters because, while Koch (and his brother Charles) have been generous to the arts, their influential political giving to conservative candidates and causes has made them reviled on the left.

The decisions by several museums, including the Met and the Guggenheim, to swear off future Sackler donations came after demonstrations led by Nan Goldin, a photographer who overcame an OxyContin addiction. She has also called on museums to ditch the Sackler name, and she protested at the Louvre just a few days before it did so.

Daniel H. Weiss, president of the Met, was careful to say during the Sackler announcement that it was an extreme circumstance, and that political protests would not be treated the same way. Given that many donors to the arts are wealthy conservatives, Weiss was both drawing a line for the museum to abide by and reassuring patrons that their checks would not be turned away on account of party affiliation.

“We are not a partisan organization, we are not a political organization, so we don’t have a litmus test for whom we take gifts from based on policies or politics,” Weiss said. “If there are people who want to support us, for the most part we are delighted.”

Indeed, some of the most generous patrons of past generations had reputations that many people today would find objectionable, like Henry Clay Frick or Andrew Carnegie.

“Are we meant to rename the Frick because Henry Clay Frick was a union-buster?” Anderson said, referring to the museum on Fifth Avenue. “What are the limits of retrospective institutional cleansing?”

In addition to moral questions, there is a more practical calculation: How enraged is the public at the person in question?

“I do believe there is a level of pragmatism at work here,” said Tom Eccles, the executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. “Museums very much consider the level of public outrage before taking the drastic step of taking someone’s name off a building.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/arts/louvre-sacklers-museums-opioids.html" id="1e743973-f241-313a-a157-26dae716409e">The New York Times</a>.

This week the Louvre Museum in Paris said it had removed the Sackler name from its Sackler Wing of Oriental Antiquities, following an outcry over the role of some Sackler family members in the production and promotion of the opioid painkiller OxyContin.

The Louvre Took Down the Sackler Name. Here's Why Other Museums Probably Won't.

He will anchor an entertainment news show called “ExtraExtra,” which is distributed by Warner Bros. and will air on a number of local Fox stations beginning in September.

In the final sprint of the 2016 presidential campaign, The Washington Post released a recording from 2005 in which Trump could be heard making vulgar comments about groping women while Bush laughed and goaded him on. Bush was recording an “Access Hollywood” segment with Trump on the set of “Days of Our Lives,” where Trump was making a cameo.

Bush, 47, was widely criticized for his role in the tape and quickly lost his job as one of the 9 a.m. hosts of NBC’s “Today” just months after he joined the show.

In an op-ed in The New York Times a year after the recording was published, Bush said he and the other men on the bus “assumed we were listening to a crass standup act.”

“He was performing,” Bush wrote of Trump. “Surely, we thought, none of this was real. We now know better.”

In his new position, Bush will anchor a reboot of the long-running show “Extra,” which will be rebranded as “ExtraExtra” for its 26th season. In an interview with People, which was first to report the news, Bush said of the “Access Hollywood” tape: “It was a bad moment. And I was in it. But one moment doesn’t define your life.” He declined to comment further Wednesday.

Bush, a cousin of former President George W. Bush, first appeared on “Extra” in 2002, which he said was his first job on national television. In addition to his work on “Today” and “Access Hollywood,” he has hosted a nationally syndicated radio show called “The Billy Bush Show.”

“Billy is the consummate journalist with extensive celebrity industry contacts and reach,” Lisa Gregorisch-Dempsey, the show’s senior executive producer, said in a statement. “He’s the perfect host as we reinvent ‘Extra’ for a new generation. I’m thrilled to welcome him back to television.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/arts/television/billy-bush-returns-to-tv-extraextra.html" id="8854146f-b331-35d9-ade9-35bbbd5e52a6">The New York Times</a>.

More than two years after losing his morning show role because of his bantering with President Donald Trump on the infamous "Access Hollywood” tape, Billy Bush will return to television in the fall, Warner Bros. announced Wednesday.

Billy Bush to Return to Television Three Years After Trump Tape Fallout

“He was performing,” Bush wrote of the future president. “Surely, we thought, none of this was real. We now know better.”

Sterling Van Wagenen, a director who helped establish what became the country’s most prestigious annual film exhibition, pleaded guilty in Utah County to one count of aggravated sexual abuse of a child. His lawyer, Steven Shapiro, said Van Wagenen planned to plead guilty to an additional count, involving the same girl, in neighboring Salt Lake County on Thursday. As part of a deal with prosecutors, Shapiro said he is expected to receive two sentences of six years-to-life in prison that he will serve concurrently.

Van Wagenen, 71, was charged with molesting the girl on two occasions between 2013 and 2015, when she was between 7 and 9 years old. But this was not the first allegation against him.

Sean Escobar, who as a boy was friends with two of Van Wagenen’s sons, said that Van Wagenen had touched his genitals during a sleepover at the director’s house in the early 1990s.

Escobar, who is now 38, told his parents the next day. They in turn reported it to a local leader in the Mormon church, to which they belonged.

Van Wagenen eventually admitted to a Salt Lake County sheriff’s detective that he had touched the boy inappropriately, but authorities dropped the case after Escobar’s parents said they did not want to press charges. (The Greater Salt Lake Unified Police Department, which absorbed the sheriff’s department, said its policy today is to move forward with child sexual abuse cases regardless of the parents’ wishes.)

Van Wagenen received a two-year “disfellowship” from the church, but went on to teach at Brigham Young University, which is closely affiliated with the church, and also directed movies for the church. Brigham Young said it had been unaware of the allegations when it hired him, and the Sundance Institute said he has had no role in the festival since 1993.

Last year, Escobar reached out to Van Wagenen, who agreed to meet with him. Van Wagenen apologized for what he had done, and said that nothing like it had happened before or since.

Escobar recorded the conversation on an iPhone he had hidden in a potted plant, then released the recording to the Truth &amp; Transparency Foundation, an investigative website that focuses on religious reporting, thinking it might spur any other victims to come forward. Shortly afterward, the girl did.

David Sturgill, the lead prosecutor on the case in Utah County, said he was satisfied that he could resolve the case quickly and spare the victim and her family a drawn-out court process. “That’s the person I have at the top of my list of priorities when it comes, certainly, to a case like this,” he said.

Shapiro said that was his client’s wish as well. “Sterling decided that he wanted to save the family from as much difficulty as possible and enter the plea today,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/movies/sundance-founder-guilty-abuse.html" id="83311964-ca06-3340-a0bb-afd09f8f67be">The New York Times</a>.

A founder of the Sundance Film Festival is expected to go to prison for at least six years after he pleaded guilty in a Utah courtroom Tuesday to molesting a young girl. The case came to light after he was recorded apologizing to a man he admitted having groped more than 25 years ago.

A Sundance Founder Pleads Guilty to Child Sex Abuse

Over the course of an hour in September, Escobar sat at a dining room table with Sterling Van Wagenen, a founder of the Sundance Film Festival and a respected figure in the Mormon community, and asked him about a moment that had bothered Escobar since he was 13.

Why, he asked, had Van Wagenen touched his genitals?

Van Wagenen apologized and said he had been going through difficulties in his career and his marriage, that he struggles with depression. He sounded sincere and penitent. He pledged, again and again, that he had never done anything like that before or since.

Escobar thanked him and showed him out. Then he walked over to a potted plant, retrieved the iPhone he had hidden there, and tapped the red button to stop the recording.

It is rare for a sex abuse victim to have the chance to directly confront an abuser, even in a court of law. But Escobar’s remarkable confrontation did not quiet his nagging questions:

Had the abuse, which was reported at the time to a local church official and the sheriff’s office, been appropriately dealt with? Van Wagenen admitted to a detective that he had touched the boy inappropriately, according to sheriff’s records, but he was not charged.

And could Escobar really have been the only victim?

“All my life this has bothered me about Sterling,” Escobar, 38, said in an interview this month. “It would haunt me.”

So he released his recording to The Truth &amp; Transparency Foundation, an investigative website focused on religion, thinking it would encourage any other victims to come forward. It was published in February, and for the next few weeks, Escobar agonized over his decision.

“Oh my God, what have I done?” he said he thought to himself. “I’ve ruined this guy’s life.”

This month, Van Wagenen was charged with two counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child, though not for anything he had done to Escobar. Prosecutors in Utah said he molested a girl younger than 10 on two occasions between 2013 and 2015.

A Nightmare Sleepover

Van Wagenen, 71, who declined to comment, has not entered a plea. He was released on $75,000 bail.

Though he never attained Hollywood prestige — one film he produced, “The Trip to Bountiful,” delivered a best actress Oscar in 1986 — he practically put Utah on the filmmaking map when he, along with others including actor Robert Redford, began what became the Sundance Film Festival. (Redford’s wife at the time, Lola Van Wagenen, is a cousin of Van Wagenen’s.) A spokesman for the Sundance Institute said Van Wagenen has not had a role at the festival since 1993.

Escobar, the youngest of four children, lived three doors down from Van Wagenen in the Salt Lake City suburb of Holladay. He became friends with the two youngest Van Wagenen boys.

Escobar said he was sleeping over at the Van Wagenens’ house when the abuse happened. He was on a couch in the basement, with one of Van Wagenen’s sons on a different sofa. Another son slept on the floor.

In the middle of the night, Escobar said, he woke up to find Van Wagenen’s hand down his pants, stroking his genitals. Escobar stirred, hoping Van Wagenen would leave. Van Wagenen pulled his hand away, but a few minutes later, he resumed. The boy stirred again.

When Van Wagenen touched Escobar a third time, the boy jumped off the couch, ran to the bathroom and locked the door. Van Wagenen tried repeatedly to get the boy to come out, but he refused, saying he did not feel well.

Escobar stayed in that bathroom all night.

“There was this big orange cat that got locked in the bathroom with me,” Escobar said. “I just pet the cat all night.”

In the morning, he left the bathroom and went straight to the phone. He called his mother and asked her to pick him up right away. She took him to a drive-through for a breakfast sandwich. With his mother behind the wheel and his sister in the front seat, he told them what happened.

“I just remember my mom,” he said, “it just looked like she’d seen a ghost. She just turned white.”

Van Wagenen told a therapist what he had done, and because the therapist was mandated to report it to the authorities, Van Wagenen went to the sheriff’s office himself. According to a Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office report, he told a detective that he had touched Escobar “sexually, inappropriately,” though he added that he had not gone under the boy’s clothes. (Escobar said he had.)

But the case was dropped after Escobar’s father told the detective that the family did not want to pursue the complaint and that it was “supportive of Mr. Van Wagenen in working out this problem.”

The Greater Salt Lake Unified Police Department, which has absorbed the Sheriff’s Office, said sex crimes involving children “are handled very differently” today. A spokeswoman said such a case would now be submitted to the district attorney regardless of the parents’ wishes.

Escobar’s parents, Randi and Tony Escobar, said this month that they had been trying to protect their son from the stress of a trial, exposure in the news media and teasing at school.

“The only thing we could think about was, ‘We can’t drag our son through all this,’” they wrote in an email. “Today is a very different era, where the victims’ identities are somewhat protected.”

Escobar said he understood his parents’ decision, and they remain close. But he wishes they had let the Sheriff’s Office continue the case so Van Wagenen perhaps could have been stopped.

His life has moved on. After Escobar’s parents reported what had happened to a local leader in the Mormon Church, where they were members, the church disciplined Van Wagenen with a two-year “disfellowship,” a partial exclusion from church life that is short of an excommunication.

But in 1993, the same year he went to the police, Van Wagenen went to work as an adjunct professor of film at Brigham Young University, which is closely affiliated with the church. He would later work as director of content for BYU Broadcasting, and then as an instructor at the University of Utah.

Van Wagenen also directed movies for the church, according to his Facebook page and other biographical materials. The church produces a variety of official films, used for educational purposes or in sacred ceremonies.

A spokesman for the church, formally known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said it had taken “appropriate disciplinary action in this case,” but he did not directly respond to a question about why Van Wagenen was permitted to have roles in the church after he was disciplined.

The spokesman, Eric Hawkins, said that at the time of the report, the church’s practice was to provide spiritual counseling to individuals, and that it was offered. (Both Escobar and Van Wagenen said during the recorded conversation that they recalled no counseling.) Hawkins added that two years later, the church enacted several new safeguards against child sexual abuse, including a 24-hour help line and rules requiring “annotation of the membership record of any individual who has confessed to or been found guilty of abusing a child.”

‘I Don’t Lie Very Well’

Today, Escobar lives in Salt Lake City and St. George, in southern Utah, with his wife, Crystal, and their four young children. He and his wife have done well selling nutritional supplements with a company called Isagenix. She has written a book on motherhood, and the couple hosts a self-help podcast.

The abuse did not derail his life, he said. But its effects have never gone away.

He started sleeping with a hunting knife underneath his pillow, and having dreams that adults were hurting him. He got in fights at school. He became distrustful of adults and church leaders.

As an adult, he said, he is compulsively protective of his children. He will not allow them to be alone with other men. He said that when his children were assigned male teachers, he demanded they be moved to different classes. When they had play dates, he called ahead to make sure a woman would be present at all times. After decades as a “rock-solid” Mormon, he said, he left the church last year.

He could not shake the questions: What if there were other victims out there? What if the abuse was still going on? So in January of last year, he reached out to Van Wagenen’s wife on Facebook.

“I only want to make sure that there are strict provisions in place to keep something like that from ever happening again with grandchildren and so forth,” he wrote.

Eight months later, he texted each of Van Wagenen’s children. He told them that their father had molested him. It was like ripping out his own heart.

“I’m so sorry,” Escobar, wiping tears from his eyes, said in a video message he sent to one Van Wagenen’s children. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

One of Van Wagenen’s daughters suggested that Escobar and her father meet. He could offer assurances that he had never inappropriately touched another child. Maybe, she said, it could bring Escobar some peace.

For days leading up to the meeting, Escobar said, he could barely eat, sleep or function.

“I kept telling my wife, ‘I don’t think I can do this,’” he said. “It was like sending me back to my childhood. I was terrified.”

Escobar did not want Van Wagenen to know where he lived, so they met at someone else’s home. He said he recorded the conversation in case Van Wagenen threatened him. He attached a microphone to his iPhone and stashed it in a plant. His wife sat on the stairs just outside the room where the two men spoke.

After Van Wagenen sat down, Escobar ran through an excruciating list of questions, which he had written in a red spiral notebook.

Have you ever watched child pornography? Van Wagenen said he had not.

How would you have felt if this happened to your own son? “Awful.”

“How can I be the only one?” Escobar asked.

“I’ve never considered myself a pedophile,” Van Wagenen said. “That one instance was so horrifying to me. And I’ve carried the awareness of that — not to the degree that you have, for sure — but I’ve carried the awareness of that.”

“I don’t lie very well,” he added later. “I don’t.”

Afterward, Escobar said, he thought Van Wagenen was probably telling the truth. But probably was not good enough.

Through a friend, he connected with Ryan McKnight at The Truth &amp; Transparency Foundation and handed over the recording. In the article that accompanied the recording, he went by a pseudonym, David. He is identifying himself publicly for the first time in this article.

Escobar said he heard from the parents of the girl Van Wagenen is accused of abusing that the recording had motivated her to come forward. The girl is someone Van Wagenen knew.

“This young girl, the other victim, is a hero to me,” Escobar said. “I helped her, and she helped me.”

He has not heard from Van Wagenen since he was charged. But after the recording went public in February, Van Wagenen’s wife, Marilee, sent Escobar a message on Facebook.

“It is all public now,” she wrote. “We are not angry and understand. I still love you and wish healing for you and all the best for your family.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/28/arts/sundance-founder-abuse-arrest.html" id="2cbc7c63-c60c-39a0-a2d2-14c0ccbf844b">The New York Times</a>.

How an Abuse Victim's Nerve and a Hidden iPhone Led to the Arrest of a Sundance Founder

Sean Escobar had been waiting for the moment for more than a quarter-century.

“I throw up an ‘Exorcist’ amount every day,” said Schumer, who has an extreme form of nausea and vomiting called hyperemesis.

“If you had a good pregnancy, like if you’re someone who enjoyed being pregnant,” she said, putting her hand over her heart, “I just hope your car flips over.”

Men have dominated stand-up comedy since before the days of Jack Benny. But as women have elbowed their way onto the stage more often, one kind of performance has been hard not to notice: pregnant comedians popping up on high-profile comedy specials, late-night shows, and in clubs.

No longer seen as something vaguely unhip that gets in the way of the act and the microphone stand, a baby on the way is now a rich source of stand-up material: stretch marks, placentas and all.

Ali Wong, who has done two Netflix specials while pregnant, explained clogged ducts, lactation consultants and diapers — for mom. (After the baby comes out, “You know what else exits? Her house.”)

Schumer lifted up her dress during her special, “Growing,” to show the bandages over her belly button trying to keep it flat.

Natasha Leggero, clearly pregnant under a rainbow sequined dress, cataloged the reasons she did not want children. (“Does anyone else have people in their family that you don’t want to make more of? I have a brother who lives in a van that he put an address on.”)

And Christina Pazsitzky, comfortably into her third trimester, cheerfully mimed along while talking about masturbation.

Just a few years ago, said Pazsitzky, who performs as Christina P., “We were sort of hidden, it was considered not cool.”

“When I got pregnant with my second child, things had definitely changed,” she said. “The managers and agents were all like: ‘Cha-Ching! Cha-Ching! Where’s the book deal? Where’s the special?’”

Such performances would have been hard to imagine when the grande dame of American comedy, Joan Rivers, appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1967 while carrying her daughter, Melissa.

“I wasn’t allowed to say I was pregnant,” Rivers, who died in 2014, said in a 2007 interview. “I was in a tent,” she added of her poofy dress, “and I had to say, ‘Soon I’ll hear the pitter-patter of little feet.’”

Just four years ago, Ophira Eisenberg, a comedian and the host of NPR’s trivia and comedy show, “Ask Me Another,” said that some bookers had warned her that she might alienate her audience by talking about her pregnancy on stage.

“For years we’ve heard men talk about their penises,” she said, “and we were supposed to accept that that’s universal!”

And today? Forget the pitter-patter.

“All the questions everyone asks — What are you having? Do you know what you’re having?” Schumer said in her Netflix special.

There is no comprehensive count of women in comedy, but comedians, club owners and bookers say there are more of them working today, even though they remain vastly outnumbered by men. And with women starting families later than they used to, these female comics are now more likely to have established careers by the time they start having babies.

“My peers and I kind of hit it, so to speak, just as you’re right at the end of your fertility window,” Pazsitzky, whose children are 9 months old and 3, said. “I’ve worked 15 years to get here.”

Like most working women, she said, “I can’t take a year off to have a baby.”

So there they are, with an audience and microphone, and a whole lot of material.

Wong: “Breastfeeding is this savage ritual that just reminds you that your body is a cafeteria now.”

Leggero: “The amount of weight I’ve gained, I’m not really in the glowing stage. I’m kind of in the what’s-Natasha-sad-about stage.”

Schumer: “I didn’t throw up today!”

They were glad, they said, to have somewhere to channel the sci-fi surprises that come with growing a human.

“I think the first time I said it onstage was at a college, and they just seemed horrified,” Leggero said of announcing her pregnancy to an audience. “I was so excited to try the stuff because I had ideas and jokes I wanted to talk about. But they probably weren’t the exact right crowd.”

As each passing trimester inspires new lines, some have to go. Kara Klenk, a stand-up in Los Angeles who gave birth to her daughter this month (welcome, Rosalie!), said she had to lose a joke in which she explained to political conservatives how birth control worked, because she no longer looked like she had a vise grip on it herself.

But she did keep a bit where she gets super low to the ground in a deep squat, imitating a very tiny person.

“Throughout the entire pregnancy, but in stand-up, too, people treat you like you’re very fragile,” she said. “I could feel the audience going like, ‘Oooh, is she OK, this precious glass figurine?’ It’s OK! I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t OK.”

For women who have difficult pregnancies, the travel often required for stand-up can be a real challenge. In February, Schumer announced that she had to cancel the remainder of her tour, saying that because of her hyperemesis, she was no longer allowed to fly.

Elizabeth A. Harris

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