Yet another prominent animal rights activist is being accused of treating women badly. This time, the spotlight is trained on Alex Hershaft, an 83-year-old Holocaust survivor, the founder of a pioneering farm-animal protection group and the organizer of the animal rights movement’s oldest and most important conference.

Andrea Jacobson and Cara Frye, who formerly worked for Hershaft, are urging him to cede control of the Animal Rights National Conference, which he has run for more than 35 years.

Hershaft told me that he’s made mistakes but that he is neither sexist nor abusive towards women.

Cara Frye, who worked at FARM for five years, said Hershaft occasionally insisted that staff members work at the FARM office–which was located in his Bethesda, Maryland, home–until well past midnight.

Another longtime FARM employee said: “He would watch porn on his computer. If I were working past 7 or 8 p.m., I’d hear moaning and spanking sounds.” One staff member stumbled across signage from sex parties held in his home.

Some of the most compelling evidence against Hershaft comes from Pattrice Jones, the co-founder of VINE Sanctuary, an animal sanctuary in Vermont. In an email, Jones told me that women and people of color have repeatedly asked Hershaft to put more women onto the plenary stage, but they have been rebuffed. When women organized their own discussion circles at the event, Hershaft chastised them.

Read the full article on Alex Hershaft by Marc Gunther at Nonprofit Chronicles