How One Lawsuit Exposed the Deep Fissures in This #MeToo Group
The problems began even before the allegations against a founding member of Time’s Up Healthcare.
Late last month, the founding members of Time’s Up Healthcare held a meeting to discuss what, exactly, they were doing. The group—an offshoot of the glitzy nonprofit founded to combat sexism in Hollywood—had been largely inactive for over a year, hosting only a handful of meetings and sunsetting multiple promising projects. As the pandemic raged, and members felt less and less supported, founders had begun writing in to complain about the lack of action.
The members at the Feb. 24 meeting were thrilled to see each other, and leadership tried to put a positive spin on things, highlighting multiple initiatives the larger Time’s Up group had been working on. What they did not mention was that two days later, a lawsuit would be filed—and quickly made public—accusing one of the organization's most prominent members of brushing off an allegation of sexual misconduct. Within weeks, more than a dozen of the group’s 50 founding members would be gone and the organization's future would be in question.
Interviews with seven of the group’s founding members, as well as internal communications reviewed by The Daily Beast, paint a picture of how the allegations rocked the foundations of one of the MeToo era's most promising women’s rights groups.