If you've been following at home, and now that Deborah Dugan was on "Good Morning America" even the hoi polloi are aware of her allegations, you know that Joel Katz denied acting inappropriately with Ms. Dugan.
So it's he said/she said.
However, Dugan supposedly told people right after the incident, which aids are side, but this is never going to be litigated anyway, it's just a matter of how much Dugan is going to be paid to go away.
But as for the legal fees.
Prior to Neil Portnow's tenure...
The Grammys had in-house counsel, Paul Tsuchiya, who went to Harvard and UCLA and was paid $125k a year.
As far as outside counsel, Royal Blakeman was paid $1 per year.
Why in the hell did Grammy legal expenditures then go up to millions of dollars per annum?
As for Neil Portnow and the allegation of the rape of a foreign artist...
Neil says he was exonerated. Maybe true, but who did the investigating? Furthermore, was a check given to the accuser? Can we have a little more sunshine here?
As for the two investigations presently happening, they're not being performed by a third party legal entity, just the usual suspect attorneys on retainer. Is there going to be an even-handed result, when they've got their hands in the till? I ask you.
As for the defense of the integrity of the Grammys by female board members... It's laughable. Ultimately meaningless. They says it's not a boys club. Okay. There's no legal definition of a boys club anyway. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ALLEGATIONS!
Do you think Deborah Dugan would be on "Good Morning America" if all this happened off-cycle, i.e. not during Grammy time? OF COURSE NOT! People only care about the Grammys once a year, when they're presented, after that they don't care at all, if they ever cared at all.
Yup, what kind of bizarre world do we live in where the penumbra is bigger than the main event? Come on, the Dugan saga is much more interesting than the awards show, where acts will shill for attention and only a handful of awards will be given and will immediately be forgotten.
So the mismanagement of this whole affair is astounding. Don't you hire attorneys to get these situations under control?
So who knows what happens to Katz and Portnow in the future. I'll let you speculate. Are they victims of a harpy, caught in the crossfire hurricane of MeToo, guilty until proven innocent? Or do they crawl from the wreckage into a brand new car?
Portnow made millions, he's essentially done anyway.
If Katz delivers for his clients...he'll lose the Grammy gig, but continue to make bucks.
So it really comes down to the voting process and the legal fees.
Now if the Board was smart, and it's not (and if you look at the published member list you'll have no idea who these people are unless you're one of them, there are no household names, none of the big earners on stage, none of the artists who are the engine of the entire enterprise), it would have hired a crisis management firm, to get ahead of the story. Instead, it keeps on putting out press releases that only make the situation worse. There are experts who handle these things. Starting with the Tylenol crisis of yore. Are you afraid to take Tylenol? I doubt it. But that is only because the manufacturer immediately pulled the product from the shelves and tested it and then came back to market with seals on bottles. Can you say Perrier? Which skirted the benzene crisis and then had its U.S. business demolished?
So what the Grammys need to do is immediately address the irregularities in the nomination process and the exorbitant legal fees. THAT'S what they should be forming committees about, THAT'S what a crisis PR firm would immediately address. They'd only have to say they're starting an investigation, by a third party, as they did with Tina Tchen when they looked and found Ms. Dugan, and if they were really duplicitous they could just kick the can down the road and possibly end up with little or no change. But NO, they're stonewalling, addressing everything but the essence, defending their bad behavior when the spotlight is upon them, decimating whatever credibility the organization possesses day by day.
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