Neil Portnow, former Grammys president and CEO, accused of rape in lawsuit
Neil Portnow, the former president and CEO of the Recording Academy – the organization that produces the Grammy Awards – has been accused in a lawsuit of raping a woman in 2018 in New York.
According to the complaint, filed on Wednesday with the New York State Supreme Court and obtained by CNN, the incident occurred in Portnow’s New York City hotel room in June 2018 while the plaintiff and Portnow met for a work-related matter.
The woman, who is not identified in the complaint, alleges Portnow sexually assaulted her after she became “disoriented and incapacitated,” and ultimately unconscious, after drinking a glass of wine that Portnow had given her.
She is suing Portnow for alleged sexual battery and gender motivated violence, and the Recording Academy for negligent hiring, supervision and retention.
CNN has reached out to a representative for the plaintiff for comment.
In a statement to CNN, a representative for Portnow denied the allegations, describing them as “the product of the plaintiff’s imagination and undoubtedly motivated by Mr. Portnow’s refusal to comply with the plaintiff’s outrageous demands for money and assistance in obtaining a residence visa for her.”
“We continue to believe the claims to be without merit and intend to vigorously defend the Academy in this lawsuit,” a representative for the Recording Academy told CNN in a statement on Wednesday.
The plaintiff is described in the complaint as “an internationally acclaimed musician, inventor, and former member of The Recording Academy.” She was 37 at the time of the alleged assault.
The complaint states she has since suffered “severe emotional, physical and psychological distress, including shame, guilt, economic loss of earning capacity, and emotional loss.”
A prominent figure in the music industry, Portnow served as the president and then president and CEO of the Recording Academy from 2002 to when he stepped down in 2019.
In 2018, he received public backlash and calls for resignation after stating female artists need to “step up” in an interview with Variety, responding to a question about the lack of female representation at that year’s Grammy Awards ceremony.
In the interview, Portnow addressed “women who have the creativity in their hearts and souls, who want to be musicians, who want to be engineers, producers, and want to be part of the industry on the executive level,” saying they need “to step up because I think they would be welcome. I don’t have personal experience of those kinds of brick walls that you face but I think it’s upon us — us as an industry — to make the welcome mat very obvious…”
At the time, he released a statement to CNN saying his comment was “taken out of context.”
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