Mike Greene, who was president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences from the late 1980s until 2002, has been sued by a former female employee for sexual assault and harassment. The news was first reported by the Los Angeles Times.
Terri McIntyre, who was the L.A. chapter executive director from 1994 to 1996, alleges sexual harassment, negligence and harassment in the 55-page suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Wednesday. Additionally, it names the Recording Academy and claims that “Defendant Greene and/or Defendant Academy have engaged in a cover-up and/or an attempted cover-up.”
It comes on the heels of a suit filed against Neil Portnow, former chairman and president of the Recording Academy, who was accused by a woman who claimed he drugged and sexually assaulted her in 2018. Today’s complaint was filed under California’s Sexual Abuse and Cover-Up Accountability Act, similar to Portnow’s suit in New York under the recently expired Adult Survivors Act.
Greene resigned from the Academy back in 2022 after an investigation into numerous harassment and assault allegations from an Academy employee, as well as mismanaged funds.
McIntyre describes how she was hired in 1994 at the Recording Academy and shortly thereafter learned that Greene expected her to perform sex acts on him to maintain employment. The complaint states that Greene repeatedly told her that she needed to “give some head to get ahead” in the position.
The suit goes into numerous incidents where Greene reportedly assaulted and harassed her. One instance reflects on a 1994 trip to Hawaii where Greene provided her with champagne and “quickly began to feel unwell and began to lose control of her physical movements.” As she lost consciousness, she noticed other people in the room leaving her alone with Greene, and she later woke up in his bed with Greene nude and asleep beside her. She said she sought professional help after the encounter but decided not to pursue a police report for fear of retaliation.
Another incident occurred when she went to visit Greene’s Malibu beach house, claiming “Defendant Greene appeared in front of Plaintiff with [his] erect penis exposed” and forced her to perform oral sex.
Joanne Gardner, a former Recording Academy executive in the mid-’90s, told Rolling Stone that McIntyre confided in her about the allegations. “It was a predatory place for women and Mike Greene was predator in chief,” she said. “This was deviant sexual manipulation. And it was all power-based. These young women didn’t have anybody to take care of them at that point.”
At the time, the Recording Academy did not have Human Resources in place to deal with allegations of assault and harassment. McIntyre says she spoke to numerous supervisors who told her they couldn’t help her, and she resigned in 1996 after she “came to understand that her hopes, dreams and aspirations to work in the Music Industry were defunct and unreachable.” She says she turned down payment and severance in exchange for signing an NDA.
McIntyre’s attorney told the LA Times, “Charles Michael Greene is a very powerful, perverse predator. This suit exposes the culture that permitted him and the Academy to profit for years. It also spotlights the perilous practice of NDAs and hush money employed by the Academy and deployed by the entire music industry that exploits and silences victims.”
