Neil deGrasse Tyson addresses sexual misconduct allegations

Asked what he’s learned in the year since those allegations surfaced, Tyson told “CBS This Morning,” he has “learned to care about the support that I’ve received from friends, from families, from a fan base that was there throughout the entire time.”

Tyson was accused of behaving inappropriately with two women in a Patheos article published last November. Those allegations resurfaced a separate claim from 2014.

Pressed on whether he was surprised that he had been accused, Tyson said, “Life is day to day. You don’t know what’s going to happen or who’s going to say anything about anything. What I do know is people – there’s an understandable urge for people to take sides, to have opinions, even in the absence of information or only partial information and the entire point of an investigation is to be thorough and to get to the bottom of everything. It doesn’t seem to — for some people that doesn’t matter, I suppose, but for due process, it matters greatly and for just the effort to get to whatever the truths that are out there.”

Tyson penned a public letter last December in which he wrote, “In my mind’s eye, I’m a friendly and accessible guy, but going forward, I can surely be more sensitive to people’s personal space, even in the midst of my planetary enthusiasm.”

“I have a lot of, sort of, spillage of personality,” Tyson said. “It’s like, hey, how are you doing? So the concept of personal space has evolved over the years, yeah.”

Tyson has a new book called “Letters from an Astrophysicist,” which contains more than 100 letters, Facebook posts and other exchanges with fans, detractors, and family members. He said that the fan base he relied on in the past year is represented “spiritually and emotionally and intellectually” in the book. “All I’m saying is that in this past year, I’ve learned to value that more than ever before.”