The Scapegoat: How One Man's Career Was Ended By MeToo

Life on Jan. 9, 2020, was interesting for Joshua Helmer. At 31, he was midway through his second year as CEO of the Erie Art Museum in Pennsylvania. He had recently secured the loan of a Chuck Close painting from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and an upcoming sale, including a painting by another famous artist, David Hockney, would help Erie generate funds to buy new works.

And then it was Jan. 10.

“I knew I'd never work again," Helmer said, recalling his reading of a New York Times article that ran that day. ”

He Left a Museum After Women Complained; His Next Job Was Bigger," was co-bylined by veteran Times reporter Robin Pogrebin and Zachary Small, then a freelancer. The article listed allegations from women against Helmer from his time as assistant director for interpretation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), a position he said he resigned from a year-and-a-half earlier. Nine women told the Times that Helmer made “advances” toward them, and four of these co-workers said they became romantically involved or lived with Helmer both during and after his tenure at PMA.

The allegations ranged from the women being made to feel as though Helmer had the power to hold back their promotions, to his yelling at them, insulting their intelligence, or saying things they found unnerving; a woman identified as "a former Philadelphia Eagles cheerleader" told the Times, “I worked in the NFL for five years and no one spoke to me in a way that made me feel that uncomfortable.” There were no public allegations that Helmer directly pressured any of the women to have sex or engaged in any unwanted sexual behavior. He did allegedly suggest to one woman that she should “get to know him” to help her career, according to the Times.

There was one additional complaint from an Erie Art Museum female intern who provided the Times with a screenshot of a text Helmer sent, asking whether she wanted to have a coffee on the deck of his apartment, to which she replied, "

No. Can't sorry." Six years on, the fervor of MeToo has cooled. While some people brought down by MeToo gained a semblance of their previous standing, others, like Helmer, have not.

He self-exiled to northern Pennsylvania, took up woodworking, and hasn't worked again. At the peak of MeToo, arguing that permanent banishment might be too much was a nonstarter. How could women (and some men) feel safe if those who sexually preyed on them were not shunned in ways that assured they could never prey on anyone else again?

There was solidarity in seeing men get their comeuppance, a sense of pride for having the courage to come together with other women and speak up. That campaigns could get overheated, destroying the careers of some men whose actions, while sometimes troubling, might not deserve such harsh punishment, did not at the time seem worth considering. Who cared what happened to guys like Helmer?

“A Weird Day” The Times did not paint Helmer as a 100% cad. ”

Women who dated Mr. Helmer said they were attracted to him at first because they found him warm, affectionate and confident," the authors wrote. While all said the relationships had been consensual, each of Helmer's accusers eventually felt undervalued, belittled, or suspected they had been retaliated against. Although the women said they felt emotionally abused by Helmer, he never faced lawsuits stemming from their allegations.

And while the Times insinuated some official wrongdoing – writing that “Mr. Helmer resigned for reasons that have not been disclosed” – Helmer told the newspaper he had left of his own accord. That his departure from PMA did not seem clearly connected to the women’s accusations made it all the more curious that the newspaper saw the story as worth running on Page 1 of the Arts section. Or would have been curious, had it not been January 2020, when MeToo was at full velocity.

Hundreds of well-known, powerful figures had and were about to lose their careers (Matt Lauer, Mario Batali, Kevin Spacey); some went to prison for charges as serious as serial rape (Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Danny Masterson). Helmer was not accused of monstrous acts, nor was he well-known or powerful. He earned $70,000 a year at PMA.

He was not executive-level and, according to a former department coordinator at PMA, did not have the authority to hire, fire, or promote, a detail that might have tempered the implied power imbalance the Times piece was in part predicated on. Another detail that could have given the Times reporters pause came from the Erie Art Museum board president, who emailed the paper to say that, aside from the declined coffee invitation, "no other allegations had been brought to the board’s attention."

Nevertheless, the consequences for Helmer were immediate. "

The phone's ringing off the hook nonstop. And that night we had an emergency board meeting," Helmer said in an interview with RealClearInvestigations. ”

The board members came into my office, and they were like, 'There's just no way forward from this.'" Without the institutional stamina to fight whatever might be coming their way, Erie accepted Helmer's resignation on Jan. 13, after which, Helmer recalled, the board president drove him home. "

We sat in the driveway, and I was like, 'Wow, that was a weird day.'" The weirdness continued. In the two months after Helmer left Erie, the Times ran four more pieces about the saga.

Each article was co-bylined by Zachary Small, who had initially looked into Helmer for The Art Newspaper, an influential visual arts outlet where Small was then associate editor for investigations. The Art Newspaper, however, declined to run the Helmer piece because, as the paper's former editor, Alison Cole, recently told RCI, "

The Art Newspaper only runs stories we can verify." Symbol of Male Dominance The Times, on the other hand, evidently saw Helmer as part of a larger story about the male dominance of the museum world. "

This [story] was somewhat informed by a much larger culture of patriarchy at these institutions," Robin Pogrebin said on the podcast Museum Confidential, four days after the Times ran the story detailing Helmer's exit from Erie.

"I think it's important to think about this as a referendum on the industry to some extent and how important it is to have more balance in terms of gender." If the aftereffects came quickly for Helmer, they also came for Small, who, up until the Helmer piece, had contributed two pieces to the Times. In 2020, Small (who uses they/them pronouns) had 41 bylines in the paper.

In 2023, they became a staff writer. Which might have been the end of the story but for an incident in November 2025, when the then-CEO at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was fired, thus dragging Helmer's name back onstage.

“I'm like a recurring character in a sitcom or soap opera," Helmer said. ”

The [audience] is like, 'Oh, we thought he was kicked in the head by a horse. Oh, he's back!' You make these small cameos. And then to see another piece added on five years later... it'll never be done.