Do we know who attacked her? Pretty clear it wasn't Roddenberry.
Do you have evidence pointing one way or another?
Grace never named her assailant. But what she did reveal about him in her memoirs and other interviews certainly doesn't rule out Roddenberry.
I have to say - after reading the passage from the Google links in this thread; I assume the "Executive mentioned was probably often referred to as "Great Bird".
Well, I
really didn't want to open this gigantic can of worms, but since it's being discussed anyway, I will say that I personally believe that Roddenberry was Grace's assailant. It's totally circumstantial evidence and with GR, GLW, and her confidant Leonard Nimoy all being dead now, we'll never know for sure, but yeah, I think it was him.
Look at the facts from Whitney's account & other sources.
1) The Executive was someone who likely had an office on the lot. (GLW says that they "found an empty office," but I think that's probably an obfuscation on her part. He was comfortable enough in the office space to pour her a drink from the wet bar.)
2) The Executive was someone who was creatively involved with the show. (He lured Grace there by wanting to talk about ideas for her character. That's unlikely to be an accountant with the studio. It points to someone who was involved in the writing and/or the production of
Trek, very likely both. Someone who had the power and the ability to make changes to Yeoman Rand's character happen. GFW describes The Executive as someone who "had a lot of power over my future.")
3) The Executive was personally involved with someone else, someone who GLW seemed to know. (GLW and Majel Barrett were both in the episode "The Naked Time," which shot from
June 30 to July 11, 1966. GLW says that they were halfway through the shoot for "Miri" when her assault occurred. "Miri" shot from
August 22 to August 30, 1966. Presumably GLW would've also met Roddenberry's wife Eileen by this time.)
4) The Executive was someone who commonly had affairs with other women, to the point that he claimed his partner was understanding about it. (Over the years, Roddenberry had affairs with Nichelle Nichols, Majel Barrett, and his assistant Susan Sackett. And according to "WNMHGB" director James Goldstone, GR only cast Andrea Dromm as Yeoman Smith because
he wanted to score with her, although Dromm has denied that GR ever gave her any problems. And these are just the affairs that we know about.)
5) GLW says that she'd known The Executive "a couple of years" by this point, and had known him to be "a womanizer," but not violent. (See above. I'm not personally aware if Whitney wrote about where or when she'd first met Roddenberry, but she starred in his unsold pilot
Police Story, which Memory Alpha says
was produced in 1965 after "The Cage," although it didn't air
until September 1967.)
6) GLW was worried about seeing The Executive on the lot the Monday morning after the assault. (So it was presumably someone who was regularly on the
Star Trek set, not just someone from the studio that she saw every once in a while.)
7) Grace was fired from the show a couple of days into the September 1966 hiatus in shooting. (So if her firing was retaliatory and not just coincidental timing, it came from somebody high up in the show, someone with the power to make that happen. According to
his entry on Memory Alpha, Roddenberry stepped down as the sole producer of
ST after John D.F. Black's departure from the series in August 1966, and Roddenberry instead became
Star Trek's executive producer. And if Roddenberry was less involved in the day-to-day of the show after that point, perhaps that further explains why Nimoy stayed with the series after learning about Grace's assault.)
(...And now I'm wondering if the name "The Executive" was perhaps a subtle jab at Roddenberry's reduced responsibilities on
Trek, or perhaps a conscious clue on GLW's part.)
And looking in
Inside Star Trek: The Real Story to see what Herb Solow and Bob Justman had to say about Grace's firing, I find this on page 243 of my paperback:
"In discussions in early September, 1966, Roddenberry, Solow, and Weitzman agreed there was no artistic or financial justification to continue her very limited role in light of the show's serious budgetary problems. Strangely, Roddenberry evinced no interest in retaining his hand-picked yeoman, while Justman, opposed to 'losing her,' held out hope that she would return to guest star in future episodes. Roddenberry never contacted Whitney to give her the bad news. Her agent was formally advised by Desilu Buiness Affairs that her services were no longer required.
"(Years later, there was talk of a sudden personal rift between Roddenberry and Whitney that occurred just prior to her departure from the show. The rift supposedly guaranteed that she would never return to Star Trek. But she did return--in some of the Star Trek movies. And there was no appearance of any ill will between them.)"
And finally, the clincher for me:
8) The Executive gave Grace a polished gray stone that he made by way of apology. (Herb Solow and Bob Justman talk about Roddenberry's hobby of polishing stones in their book
Inside Star Trek and say that he often gave them out as gifts.)
When you think about it, there just isn't anyone else who ticks off all of those boxes.
I'm honestly not trying to convince anyone else of this - think what you want to think - but I know what I believe. The polished stone is just too distinctive and unusual of a detail for it to be a coincidence, IMO. I believe it was Roddenberry.
if it turned out if it turned out to be Roddenberry some people around here would be doing backflips.
Yes. Which is why I haven't talked about it here before.
I read Justman and Solow (Inside Star Trek) a long time ago, but I think I recall their prose as strongly suggesting it was GR. And they weren't too happy that Grace had cast a cloud of suspicion over several innocent men that she never cleared up.
She was having it both ways: fully stating her victimization, without openly naming which of a few men was the perpetrator, and that did some harm to them, not just good to her. If she wanted to come forward and be brave at all, she should have been braver.
I can see where Justman and Solow are coming from there - I would also be upset to be tarred with that brush. But I think it's incredibly unfair to Grace to say "she should've been braver," especially if GR was her assailant. Roddenberry was positively lionized by 1998 when she wrote her book. It was incredibly brave of her to say as much as she did.
I can understand why any executives who were not involved would be aggrieved but it's not like any of them went to bat for her at time she was let go, so my sympathies are limited.
That's a point. But I think it's unlikely that anyone else in the production besides Nimoy knew the extent of what had happened to Grace.
