What Was the Washington Post Afraid Of?

By Irin Carmon

Jeff Fager. Photo: AP/REX/Shutterstock

The afternoon of March 7, 2018, was go time, or so we believed. Inside a glass huddle room at the Washington Post, its walls covered with headlines from journalistic coups of the past, we began dialing numbers on a speakerphone and pressing send on carefully drafted, bullet-pointed emails. For nearly four months, investigative reporter Amy Brittain and I, then a freelancer, had been working on a follow-up to our November front-page story about sexual-harassment allegations against Charlie Rose. In the wake of our story, Rose had been fired from his gigs as a CBS This Morning anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent, and his PBS show had been canceled.

This new article had 27 additional allegations against Rose and three instances in which CBS management had been warned about him, but it went further. Our editor, Peter Wallsten, had encouraged us to ask who had known about Rose’s conduct and protected him, and whether he’d been enabled by a culture — assuming we had the reporting to back it up, of course. Answering that question had led to the then–60 Minutes boss and former network chairman Jeff Fager, who had repeatedly championed Rose at the network. That was awkward because 60 Minutes had been the Post’s partner for a just-wrapped yearlong investigation of the roots of the opioid crisis.

The Post had nonetheless kept both Amy and me on the story and, to ensure the integrity of the process, reassigned us to editors on the national desk who had never worked with Fager. So the isolation of the huddle room wasn’t just to bar distraction. It was a firewall — between us and the reporters and editors who’d just spent months in the trenches with the very men we had found ourselves investigating.

By that day in March, our draft had passed muster with layers of editors all the way up to the Post’s legendary executive editor Marty Baron and his deputy, Cameron Barr, as well as the paper’s lawyers. Now it was time for Amy and me to find out what Fager and other CBS brass had to say about the fruits of our reporting.

Amy took a deep breath and pushed send on the email to Fager. “A longtime employee of CBS has told the Post that you approached her from behind at a company party and said, ‘Grab my dick. I’m hung like a horse.’ ” We told him we’d spoken to an eyewitness who’d confirmed it happened when Fager was the chairman of CBS News. We asked him about an allegation that he’d groped an employee at a holiday party, that he’d retaliated against a producer named Habiba Nosheen for filing a federal complaint calling 60 Minutes a hostile work environment for women, that many 60 Minutes staffers we’d interviewed “said the workplace culture there was a difficult place for women, including being subjected to groping and demeaning comments.”

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That afternoon, only one person from CBS got on the phone with us. We’d heard that 60 Minutes producer Ira Rosen had for weeks been calling Post reporters he’d previously worked with, demanding to know what we were doing. Amy told him now that three former junior producers had told us he made them uncomfortable by suggesting they flirt with sources and dangle sex for information or to twirl in front of him. One was Nosheen, whose complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had led to an inconclusive result that gave her the right to sue.

Rosen seemed unnerved by Amy, whose southern politesse can quickly give way to relentlessness. “You sound like you’re ready to argue with me, but you’re not ready to listen to me,” he said. He offered to show us emails and documents that Amy told him we’d already seen. Frustrated, he hung up — and called Marty Baron.

Within a couple of hours, Wallsten showed up in the huddle room and told us to come with him to Baron’s office. “Don’t be defensive,” he told Amy just before we went in. She had no time to ask him what he meant. Behind us, Barr raced to join the meeting.

I’d first met Baron when he showed up at the investigative editor’s office to edit our first story. I’d been struck by the thoughtfulness of his comments and how well Liev Schreiber had nailed his mannerisms in Spotlight. It had been thrilling for me to spend time inside the Post, revitalized by Baron’s ambition and Jeff Bezos’s money. I still felt like I had sneaked in through the back door, even though no one ever treated me that way. Indeed, when I’d come to them with information for the first Charlie Rose story, they’d paired me with Amy to investigate. I remained awed that mainstream news organizations wanted to devote resources to these stories.

Now Baron was furious: about the 24-hour deadline we’d given our subjects, about Rosen telling him, falsely, that Amy had refused to look at documents. I looked helplessly at Wallsten and Barr, who’d authorized the 24-hour deadline, but in Baron’s presence they hunched and murmured that, indeed, they shouldn’t have authorized us to ask our subjects to respond so quickly.

Rosen had told Baron that Nosheen was a disgruntled “crazy person” (though the evidence he offered quickly fell apart) and that he should be “paranoid” about our story — and to our shock, it seemed to have worked. We’d been carefully reporting for weeks and had spent hours vetting each claim and hours more working on our draft with a series of editors. Rosen was a mere footnote to our story, and even on that day I wondered whether it was a proxy war for a bigger fight to come over Fager, a far more powerful figure.

Later, Wallsten would apologize to us for not preparing us, and, pressed by Amy, for the fact that we were the only women in the room in a contentious conversation about reporting on sexual harassment. Unprompted, he would go to Baron to request that female editors be involved in our story. Baron agreed but added that all decisions about the story would be made strictly on the basis of journalism. (I’m not sure what else he expected the decisions to be made on.)

I’d believed, in the fevered months of #MeToo, that journalism could swoop in where other institutions had failed to hold big-league abusers accountable. But what would unspool that spring was a lesson beyond any one story or media organization. It was about the limits, despite undeniable progress, of journalistic institutions to tell these stories of sexual misconduct.

But all of this was to come. For now, as we left Baron’s office dejectedly, it dawned on us that we were nowhere near done with our story.

Fager himself had had no trouble meeting our now-irrelevant 24-hour deadline via email: “I don’t know how to respond to an anonymous claim that I said something so horrible…, except that it is not true. To attribute such a quote to me from an anonymous source is something I cannot imagine appearing in the Washington Post. It would certainly never appear on 60 Minutes unless it was on the record. It is not language I would ever use or have ever used in my life. But you have not even afforded me the basic right to know who my ‘accusers’ are.”

Going on the record — giving both your story and your name — is the journalistic gold standard for good reason, to prevent giving cover to people who would make up or exaggerate events. But journalists routinely grant anonymity when the news value of the information seems to compel it, when anonymity is weighed against the risks to the source, and when the information can be corroborated. By that point, we’d spent months begging women to go on the record. One of Fager’s accusers still worked at CBS; another was job-hunting. All of the women who talked about his conduct and the environment at 60 Minutes feared his power in the industry.

Still, we’d been surprised, in the ten days of editing numerous drafts, that no editor or lawyer had asked us to defend the anonymous sourcing. Yes, we had corroboration — an eyewitness to one of the stories, plus interviews with people our sources had confided in at the time of the incidents — but still, we’d expected someone to bring it up.

The calls from 60 Minutes kept coming. We knew Fager had contacted Baron back in December because Baron told us. But in the days that followed, at least two senior women on the show called Baron to say that Fager was being falsely accused and to express anger at the characterization of 60 Minutes as a hostile environment for women. One, who has already made her feelings on the subject publicly known, was Lesley Stahl. Both refused to speak to Amy and me directly.

We’d already interviewed around 40 current and former 60 Minutes staffers, starting with the ones who would help us answer what management had known about Rose and fanning out when the inquiry widened. Our draft had noted that five employees, “who declined to be named, praised Fager’s treatment of female employees, contrasting it with the Mad Men–like mentality of the past. They said Fager supported women’s careers, including those of young mothers.” Still, we gamely started calling more women at 60 Minutes.

We spoke with ten, who told us that anything we’d heard about Fager was concocted by aggrieved former employees, and even if it were true, it didn’t matter. “You said it’s groping. I have to ask you, does that really rise to the level of derailing a man’s career?” one demanded of Amy. Another said, “Groping isn’t a felony.” None of these women would go on the record. (Later, an unnamed producer would tell Ronan Farrow of this period, “There was this ham-handed effort to make women at the show say Jeff was a wonderful person. It was so obvious we were doing it with a gun to our heads.”)

No one knew what was next. But that weekend, a Post editor inadvertently located a new source. At a bar mitzvah, he was approached by a woman who said she’d heard the paper was investigating CBS. She didn’t know who we were focusing on, but she wanted to talk: Fager, she said, had groped and tried to kiss her at a company holiday party while he was chairman of the network.

Within a day, I was at her apartment, listening to her account and gathering text messages about Fager she’d sent the day Rose was fired. She still worked at CBS, where she said Fager was regarded as a god. We could use her story but not her name. That she had dropped from the sky and that she worked at the network but not at 60 Minutes seemed to rebut the suggestion, implied in the pushback to our story, that there was some kind of female cabal conspiring against Fager.

In the meantime, Wallsten told us we’d have a second chance to explain our reporting to Baron, and this time we would be prepared. In what I understood to be an extraordinary move, Amy and I created a spreadsheet with every single accuser and fact and where it came from, which we presented to five editors. But at the last minute, Barr arrived and told us it would be better if we didn’t attend the meeting with Baron.

Later, we were summoned to find out what Baron had said. He’d balked at the claim of a hostile environment for women at 60 Minutes. And yes, even though no one had raised the anonymity before we went to CBS, now someone, maybe more than one person, would have to put her name to a claim against Fager. “If a man’s career is going to be ruined,” one of the recently added female editors said, and then trailed off.

I reminded the editors that we’d been told many times by sources that our story would never run, that Fager was too powerful. I’d assured more than one woman that that’s not how things work at the Post. That she should remember Baron’s reputation, that she should watch Spotlight. No one responded.

Amy and I slunk back to our glass room, and she began to cry. I watched numbly as the male editors passed with their heads bowed. One of the women recruited to help edit us, deputy national editor Lori Montgomery, entered. She told us a little more about the meeting: At the same time as our mandate was to get an accuser to use her name, Baron had said that he understood why Fager’s defenders didn’t want to do the same — they feared running afoul of the #MeToo movement. And Baron had a hypothetical for the editors: What if someone wrote an article saying the culture of the Washington Post was hostile to women? “Then I would go on the record saying it’s been a great place for me but I can’t speak for anyone else, and I would put my name on it,” she told us she’d replied. Watching Amy’s distress, she began to tear up too.

That night, I turned it over in my mind. How could Baron not see the difference between women who asked for anonymity to challenge a powerful man versus those who sought anonymity to praise him? Or that some women could thrive in a culture other women found hostile, or that some people would do or say anything to defend a status quo that benefited them?

I didn’t believe the new requirements for our piece were due to friendship or some kind of corrupt arrangement related to the partnership. But I did think it was easier for even the most well-meaning editor to empathize with a newsroom leader, a fellow boss with potentially discontented underlings. It’s easier for a lot of us to believe that a man’s career matters more than the hypothetical losses of the women he might have harmed.

We were in relatively new journalistic territory after years in which sexual harassment and assault had barely been considered newsworthy. There are no fixed rules to decide which stories should be published, but editors ask questions like these: How powerful is the man being accused? How “serious” is the misconduct? Is there documentary proof of an act that may involve two people in a room? Is the complainant credible (a judgment that is often inflected by unexamined assumptions about class and race, not to mention gender)? How many accusers are there? When legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon wrote that “it typically took three to four women testifying that they had been violated by the same man in the same way to even begin to make a dent in his denial, [making] a woman, for credibility purposes, one-fourth of a person,” she was talking about a regime that she believed #MeToo had usurped. But that standard is alive and well in newsrooms, which must weigh breaking a story against legal threats from deep-pocketed people.

This uncertainty — about what’s newsworthy, what counts as enough or valid evidence — is something powerful men can leverage in their favor using an asymmetry of resources to apply whatever pressure they can. More was to come.

Our task was once again to cajole the women who’d accused Fager to use their names. And if anything, now they were less disposed to entertain the possibility. We were going back to the women after breaking a vow we’d been given the go-ahead to make, that the process would soon be over, that the story was going to be published. And we could hardly promise that there would be no consequences. CBS PR and Fager had begun feeding us information they claimed would taint the women who’d gone on the record in other parts of the story.

More than one victim of sexual misconduct who allowed me to publish her name has told me she felt liberated by it, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand why some women don’t want to. They weigh their own well-being against the public’s right to know, when exposure might not change anything at all. They’ve already been failed at least once by institutions, and now they’re being asked to put their trust in another institution — a journalistic one.

Over drinks in their apartments, over long and apologetic but entreating phone calls, not one woman budged.

We did, however, turn up more damning information about Fager: Previously, we’d heard rumors about a sexual-assault allegation against Fager that had led to a big settlement, and during the time we were begging our sources to use their names, we unearthed documents and multiple sources that confirmed its existence. The legal papers didn’t stipulate what Fager had been accused of, but the woman who’d made the allegation had confided in a friend before signing a nondisclosure agreement and the friend talked to us. Even as 60 Minutes producers had been dispatched to tell us there was no way Fager had ever laid a finger on anyone, the network had taken the allegations against Fager seriously enough to pay the woman nearly a million dollars for her silence.

On March 25, 60 Minutes aired the first interview with Stormy Daniels about her affair with President Trump and the NDA she’d signed, which Fager described publicly as “hush money.” We all thought that was pretty ironic, and Baron authorized us to contact both CBS president David Rhodes and then-CEO Les Moonves, asking if, having provided a platform for Daniels to break her NDA, they’d let the women whom CBS had paid off speak. Neither replied.

We’d tipped our hand on the settlement, which unleashed the next stage of resistance. Soon an email on Fager’s behalf landed in my inbox. Attorneys at Clare Locke, whose other clients have included Matt Lauer and Glenn Thrush, wrote that we had “already caused incredible damage to Mr. Fager and his reputation by ‘push polling’ these false allegations to current and former CBS News and 60 Minutes employees.” The letter, which misspelled Baron’s name and contained numerous typos, went on: “There certainly are former employees of CBS who, for reasons wholly unrelated to any misconduct by Mr. Fager, are incentivized to weaponize the ‘Me Too’ movement to make false allegations to embarrass the company or Mr. Fager. We are prepared, under appropriate circumstances, to provide information bearing on the credibly [sic] and veracity of any such source.”

As we tried to determine what this meant, Amy and I were running out of ways to tell to our sources that the Post hadn’t wavered. Wallsten assured us that he believed in the reporting and that he was making the case to get our story in the paper. “This is a story about a system,” he reminded us one day when we were panicking that our story would never run. “And the system has lawyers.”

We worked on a draft that included the settlement, along with the three separate incidents of groping. At last, on April 26, Baron signed off on our telling Fager that we were publishing at 8:30 the next morning and asking for any additional comment. We had the settlement documents, the friend of the woman willing to go on the record to describe the assault allegation, and two of the original three women’s accounts. (We decided to cut one of the groping reports, because the woman couldn’t remember the year.) We went through copyediting and drafted headlines.

But late that night, Amy summoned me back to the newsroom. Fager’s lawyers had asked for a call with the Post’s lawyers — for after the time we’d said we were going to publish. Although our lawyers had already approved our story, Fager’s legal team got their delay.

It was the final stage of attack. This time, the target was the woman with the settlement, whose name Fager knew. The next morning, our lawyers told us that Fager’s lawyers claimed to have documents in which the woman had told a different story, but when we asked for them, the Clare Locke team admitted they didn’t exist. Then came character assassination: With another publication date thrown out the window, we spent several days calling Fager lieutenants, supplied to us by his law firm, whose aim was to undermine the woman’s credibility, though only off the record. One person on the call list supplied by Fager’s lawyer was Bill Owens, who has since taken over 60 Minutes.

We were told that the woman had shared her medication, though no one could seem to remember if it was Klonopin or Vicodin, with two staffers who had asked her to lend them a pill, and she had been verbally reprimanded once for it; that she’d once been very drunk at a book party; and that she had gone to Fager’s father’s funeral. Assuming all this was true, I asked our editors what it had to do with the fact that the company had paid her a million dollars after she accused Fager of assault. I never got a good answer.

A second Clare Locke letter threatening to sue described our questioning as “accusatory and agenda-driven” and more of a “check the box exercise.” It also claimed, falsely, that one of us (without saying which one) had declared to a 60 Minutes employee, “[You] are not going to tell me anything bad about Jeff, are you?” The letter continued, “I’m sure you can appreciate the weight this testimony would have w[i]th a judge or jury in establishing actual malice.”

By May 1, the reporting had become a lawyer-to-lawyer affair. Editors forwarded a Dropbox link, furnished by the Clare Locke lawyers, of a dozen obsequious, even affectionate, emails the woman with the settlement had sent to Fager, her boss: “Tonight was a great and fitting broadcast. You are brilliant.” Thanking him for flowers: “You are wonderful.” She wished him and his family a happy Thanksgiving and signed it, “Miss you.”

“The emails give us pause,” Wallsten told Amy and me during a conference call. She was in the newsroom with him; I was out of town for an unrelated work event.

How, I demanded, were these emails, sent from a subordinate to a boss after an alleged assault, any different from correspondence used to discredit accusations against Bill O’Reilly, Clarence Thomas, and Bill Cosby?  “Let’s just quote from the emails,” I said, as we had done with similar ones in the first Rose story, alongside Fager’s denial. Let readers make up their own minds.

There was a silence in Washington. From inside the room, Amy, who had fought as hard as anyone for the reporting, messaged me. “I realize that you are fighting for us,” she wrote, “but I think it’s clear we’ve lost.”

Wallsten responded wearily but as if he hadn’t even heard me. He could see what would happen: CBS’s lawyers would leak the emails to “Page Six” or somewhere like that and smear her publicly. “This wouldn’t be good for her,” Wallsten said. “And it wouldn’t be good for the Washington Post.”

The Charlie Rose material — 27 new women, three instances of CBS being told about his conduct — had to publish soon because three of the accusers were running out of time to file a lawsuit they would later settle with the network. After weeks of additional reporting, Wallsten and his fellow editors, with Baron’s backing, unanimously decided to strip the Fager allegations from the article.

The gutted story, which barely mentioned the most powerful executive we’d been reporting on, ran on May 3.

By the time I walked into Cipriani on 42nd Street in mid-June for the annual Mirror Awards for reporting on media, I knew Fager and the 60 Minutes team were accepting a prescheduled honor for the show’s 50th anniversary. What I didn’t know was whether I would have the chance to say my piece. Amy and I had been nominated for a Mirror of our own, but the winner in our category would be announced over lunch.

The spring had been a victory lap for the show and Fager. He’d accepted a Fred Friendly First Amendment Award (since rescinded) and a Peabody Award on behalf of 60 Minutes, which the judges described as having “championing the ‘little guy’ in struggles against corrupt politicians, unscrupulous corporations, and uncaring, inaccessible institutions.” The show’s collaboration with the Post about opioids had won a separate award and would eventually score an Emmy, too.

Amy and I did win the Mirror Award for Best Story on Sexual Misconduct in the Media, and when we went onstage to accept it, I spoke: “The stories that we have been doing are about a system. The system has lawyers and a good reputation. It has publicists. It has a perfectly reasonable explanation about what happened. It has powerful friends that will ask if it’s really worth ruining the career of a good man based on what one women says, what four women say, what 35 women say. Indeed, the system is sitting in this room. Some more than others.”

I couldn’t see Fager from where I stood, but I knew he was there. We’d eventually hear he’d returned to his office livid. Later, I’d email Wallsten to tell him he had inspired my speech, if inadvertently.

“The system,” I said from the stage, “is still powerful men getting stories killed that I believe will one day see the light of day.”

That last prediction proved true. In July, Ronan Farrow broke the story in The New Yorker of sexual harassment and assault allegations against Fager and Moonves. The piece confirmed what we had found: Fager “allowed harassment in the division,” according to 19 current and former employees, and six former staffers told Farrow that Fager, while inebriated at company parties, “would touch employees in ways that made them uncomfortable,” though none went on the record.

Four days later, the CBS board of directors announced it had assigned two firms to investigate the claims against Moonves “and cultural issues at all levels of CBS.” In September, Farrow published a second story, this time with a former intern accusing Fager on the record of groping her. Three days later, he was fired after sending a threatening text to a CBS reporter assigned to ask him about The New Yorker story. The investigators would later say his dismissal was justified based on “certain acts of sexual misconduct,” according to the New York Times. The Times also reported that Moonves himself had confirmed our story, revealing to investigators that CBS paid nearly a million dollars to a woman who had “accused Mr. Fager of sexual misconduct,” the Times reported.

Over the past year, I’ve debated whether, at a time when journalism is under attack from all quarters, it is even worth breaking confidences to tell this story. I wanted to hash out what had happened directly with Baron, but he declined to speak with me. A Post spokeswoman said the paper “has a policy of not entering into a detailed, public discussion of the process of editing stories. Reporters and editors have traditionally respected that policy, which is especially pertinent when we are asked to discuss material that failed to meet Post standards for publication in the first place.” She did say that “the reporting throughout was vigorous, sustained, and fully supported by Post editors” and pointed out that five senior editors “unanimously agreed on what met our standards for publication and what did not, and they stand by their decision … Nor did any outside pressures determine what was published.”

I don’t believe there is just one reason the Post rejected the Fager story. I think it was a little of everything. The legal squeeze. The close relationship between the paper and 60 Minutes. The easy identification with a powerful executive in our industry as opposed to the people complaining about him. #MeToo fatigue, a growing sense in journalistic circles that the movement might be going too far. I doubt I’ll ever really know. But much of my job has involved asking people, mostly women, to truthfully tell their stories even when it might harm them or the institutions they care about. I figured the least I could do was to try to do the same.

Why would a journalist text to her boss “Miss you?”

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doro.wynant

10 MONTHS AGO

Because many women find that they have to curry favor with their bosses if they are to retain their jobs, grow in their jobs, or advance. They find themselves in the role of the all-accepting, super-encouraging mother, or the comforting sister, or the "go get em!" brash college best friend, etc.

It's 2019 -- far too late for people to pretend not to know about workplace culture. And, it's profoundly annoying that your response to a long piece about how one man's inappropriate behavior made the workplace difficult for many women, is to try to pick apart one email from one woman. Not surprising, but annoying and unacceptable.

It's 2019 -- far too late for you to pretend that you don't know that women have to put up with a massive amount of crud from male bosses, both figuratively and literally, like the intern whom Charlie Rose instructed to unclog his solid-waste-filled toilet.

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27mstach

10 MONTHS AGO

(Edited)

Was there any record of what Baron's response was to the Ronan Farrow story? Did he have the decency to apologize to the two journalists who worked so hard but were thwarted in their attempt to get their story published?

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teribuhl

10 MONTHS AGO

Thank you so much Irin for telling this important backstory! Good job NY Mag for printing it.

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arundelxvi

10 MONTHS AGO

Ma'am, this is an Arby's.

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donna.chang

10 MONTHS AGO

I can't overstate my admiration and respect for you and Amy Brittain in a profession that is becoming seriously corrupted. How shocking and bitterly disappointing that a hero from the Boston Globe would fail to comprehend the issue. It shows how much work there is still to be done. With journalists like you, we'll get there!

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Ferrer

10 MONTHS AGO

"This uncertainty — about what’s newsworthy, what counts as enough or valid evidence — is something powerful men can leverage in their favor using an asymmetry of resources to apply whatever pressure they can."

Well, NY Magazine would know. Isn't that the same rationale it used to help suppress the story about the blatant unscrupulousness perpetrated by multiple journalists, including its own writers and editors, against my boss, a female exposé author? *

It certainly would appear so.

* google: NY TIMES STAFFER HARASSES/ DEATH-THREATENS AUTHOR, FOR UNVEILING JOURNALISTIC MISDEEDS... MEDIA COLLUDES IN COVER-UP

(Documentary film coming soon!)

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carbona

10 MONTHS AGO

You lost me at "legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon". Seriously?

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MWnyc

VULTURE INSIDER

10 MONTHS AGO

Whatever you or I or anyone else may think of her work, MacKinnon is indeed a tenured law professor at a fully accredited university. So yes, she does count as a legal scholar.

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nomas

10 MONTHS AGO

Tough job. Good work. It is a paradigm shift and soon women will finally be seen as equals or the men who don't won't have power over them. Apologies, settlements, soul searching are all meaningless. This cultural attitude is ingrained in an older generation and needs to be ejected without a parachute.

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clarice4517

10 MONTHS AGO

Thank you for your efforts.

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HoneyBearKelly

VULTURE INSIDER

10 MONTHS AGO

Brava!

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Asensibleman

10 MONTHS AGO

Laws are for the little people. Ask Hillary and Barack about how that works.

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logic_would_help

10 MONTHS AGO

So sayeth the Deacon of The First Church of Our Lady of the Perpetually Resentful.

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Asensibleman

10 MONTHS AGO

Weak.

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penny.white

10 MONTHS AGO

Thank You for your courage. I have no doubt there are still many powerful men in the media spinning the Male Supremacy & Entitlement narrative. I have actually seen this in the Washington Post: I am a sex trade survivor, and the Post's friendliness toward the sex trade makes me very suspicious about the "buying habits" of its editors. In the era of #MeToo, I cannot help but notice that sex trade survivors have been erased from the narrative. Apparently, "enthusiastic consent" is just for "respectable" women, not low life's like me who ended up in the sex trade. Well, guess what: WE want enthusiastic consent, too. We don't like having to dissociate while being penetrated by men we aren't attracted to. We don't like having to rub Vick's vapo rub under our noses so we don't have to smell the man whose d--- we're sucking. Privileged women fail to understand a very important point: Sexual Consent Can Never Be Bought, Only Sexual Submission Can Be Bought. When sex is "work" it's abuse. Please support specialized Exit Services for women in the sex trade so that we have REAL choice. Also- please decriminalize sex workers, NOT the pimps and sex buyers who use and abuse us. We have the same feelings you do. We enjoy daily penetration by entitled strangers as much as you would. Please see us. We exist. #MeToo should be for #UsToo.

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Asensibleman

10 MONTHS AGO

'the Post's friendliness toward the sex trade makes me very suspicious about the "buying habits" of its editors.'

The Post is, and has always been, a CIA asset.

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averym

10 MONTHS AGO

At the very least it's an asset of the people named in this article.

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A REPORTER AT LARGE

AUGUST 6 & 13, 2018 ISSUE

LES MOONVES AND CBS FACE ALLEGATIONS OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT

Six women accuse the C.E.O. of harassment and intimidation, and dozens more describe abuse at his company.

By Ronan Farrow

In the tumultuous field of network television Moonves has enjoyed rare longevity as a leader.

In the tumultuous field of network television, Moonves has enjoyed rare longevity as a leader.Illustration by Oliver Munday; photograph by Peter Foley / Bloomberg / Getty

For more than twenty years, Leslie Moonves has been one of the most powerful media executives in America. As the chairman and C.E.O. of CBS Corporation, he oversees shows ranging from “60 Minutes” to “The Big Bang Theory.” His portfolio includes the premium cable channel Showtime, the publishing house Simon & Schuster, and a streaming service, CBS All Access. Moonves, who is sixty-eight, has a reputation for canny hiring and project selection. The Wall Street Journal recently called him a “TV programming wizard”; the Hollywood Reporter dubbed him a “Wall Street Hero.” In the tumultuous field of network television, he has enjoyed rare longevity as a leader. Last year, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, he earned nearly seventy million dollars, making him one of the highest-paid corporate executives in the world.

In recent months, Moonves has become a prominent voice in Hollywood’s #MeToo movement. In December, he helped found the Commission on Eliminating Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace, which is chaired by Anita Hill. “It’s a watershed moment,” Moonves said at a conference in November. “I think it’s important that a company’s culture will not allow for this. And that’s the thing that’s far-reaching. There’s a lot we’re learning. There’s a lot we didn’t know.”

But Moonves’s private actions belie his public statements. Six women who had professional dealings with him told me that, between the nineteen-eighties and the late aughts, Moonves sexually harassed them. Four described forcible touching or kissing during business meetings, in what they said appeared to be a practiced routine. Two told me that Moonves physically intimidated them or threatened to derail their careers. All said that he became cold or hostile after they rejected his advances, and that they believed their careers suffered as a result. “What happened to me was a sexual assault, and then I was fired for not participating,” the actress and writer Illeana Douglas told me. All the women said they still feared that speaking out would lead to retaliation from Moonves, who is known in the industry for his ability to make or break careers. “He has gotten away with it for decades,” the writer Janet Jones, who alleges that she had to shove Moonves off her after he forcibly kissed her at a work meeting, told me. “And it’s just not O.K.”

Thirty current and former employees of CBS told me that such behavior extended from Moonves to important parts of the corporation, including CBS News and “60 Minutes,” one of the network’s most esteemed programs. During Moonves’s tenure, men at CBS News who were accused of sexual misconduct were promoted, even as the company paid settlements to women with complaints. It isn’t clear whether Moonves himself knew of the allegations, but he has a reputation for being closely involved in management decisions across the network. Some of the allegations, such as those against the former anchor Charlie Rose, as reported by the Washington Post, have already become public. Other claims are being reported here for the first time. Nineteen current and former employees told me that Jeff Fager, the former chairman of CBS News and the current executive producer of “60 Minutes,” allowed harassment in the division. “It’s top down, this culture of older men who have all this power and you are nothing,” one veteran producer told me. “The company is shielding lots of bad behavior.”

In a statement, Moonves said, “Throughout my time at CBS, we have promoted a culture of respect and opportunity for all employees, and have consistently found success elevating women to top executive positions across our company. I recognize that there were times decades ago when I may have made some women uncomfortable by making advances. Those were mistakes, and I regret them immensely. But I always understood and respected—and abided by the principle—that ‘no’ means ‘no,’ and I have never misused my position to harm or hinder anyone’s career. This is a time when we all are appropriately focused on how we help improve our society, and we at CBS are committed to being part of the solution.” According to CBS, there have been no misconduct claims and no settlements against Moonves during his twenty-four years at the network. A statement from the company said, “CBS is very mindful of all workplace issues and takes each report of misconduct very seriously. We do not believe, however, that the picture of our company created in The New Yorker represents a larger organization that does its best to treat its tens of thousands of employees with dignity and respect. We are seeing vigorous discourse in our country about equality, inclusion, and safety in the workplace, and CBS is committed to being part of the solution to those important issues.”

The allegations are surfacing at a time when CBS is engaged in an increasingly acrimonious fight with its former parent company, Viacom, which acquired CBS in 1999 and spun it off as a separate entity seven years later. A holding company founded by the mogul Sumner Redstone still owns a majority stake in both Viacom and CBS, and Redstone’s daughter and heir, Shari Redstone, has sought to reunite the businesses. Moonves has resisted the move, and in May Redstone’s holding company and CBS filed lawsuits against each other. All of the women making allegations against Moonves began speaking to me before the current lawsuits, in independent interviews carried out during the past eight months. All said that they were not motivated by any allegiance in the corporate battle. But several felt that this was an opportunity to examine a workplace culture that many of the women in this story described as toxic.

Illeana Douglas, who later received an Emmy nomination for her role in HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” was introduced to Moonves in 1996. At the time, she was meeting with networks, looking for a deal to write and perform for television. Moonves, who was then the president of CBS Entertainment, seemed to take a personal interest in her. He told Douglas that he was a fan of her performances in the Martin Scorsese films “Cape Fear” and “Goodfellas,” and urged her to work with CBS. “There was the big sell—he was telling me, ‘You’re gonna get a house with a pool, you’re gonna love it, it’s a great life,’ ” Douglas recalled. She agreed to sign a holding deal with CBS, which promised to pay her three hundred thousand dollars to appear exclusively in the network’s programs.

CBS ultimately didn’t proceed with a pilot that Douglas wrote, but the network cast her in a comedy called “Queens,” as an eccentric native of the New York borough. In March, 1997, shortly before production of the pilot episode began, Moonves called Douglas’s manager, Melissa Prophet, and told her that he was concerned about Douglas’s attitude during a reading with her co-star, Penelope Ann Miller. Prophet relayed the concern to Douglas, who was surprised and confused: the reading, in front of a group of CBS executives, had elicited uproarious laughter. Moonves, she said, had taken her by the shoulders and congratulated her. Moonves had told Prophet that he wanted to meet with Douglas, alone, to insure that they were creatively aligned. (Prophet told me that she did not recall the conversation or setting up the meeting.) By then, Douglas had worked closely with Moonves for months. “He seemed more than just my boss,” she told me. “He was very much like a father figure.”

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When Douglas met with Moonves at his office, she began to raise concerns about the “Queens” script, but Moonves, she recalled, cut her off. “He interrupts me to ask me am I single,” she said. Douglas, whose nearly decade-long relationship with Scorsese was coming to an end, was caught off guard. “I didn’t know what to say at that point,” she told me. “I was, like, ‘I’m single, yes, no, maybe.’ ” She began talking about the script, but Moonves interjected, asking to kiss her. According to Douglas, he said that they didn’t have to tell her manager: “It’ll just be between you and me. Come on, you’re not some nubile virgin.”

Les Moonves and CBS Face Allegations of Sexual Misconduct

As Douglas attempted to turn the focus back to work, Moonves, she said, grabbed her. “In a millisecond, he’s got one arm over me, pinning me,” she said. Moonves was “violently kissing” her, holding her down on the couch with her arms above her head. “What it feels like to have someone hold you down—you can’t breathe, you can’t move,” she said. “The physicality of it was horrendous.” She recalled lying limp and unresponsive beneath him. “You sort of black out,” she told me. “You think, How long is this going to go on? I was just looking at this nice picture of his family and his kids. I couldn’t get him off me.” She said it was only when Moonves, aroused, pulled up her skirt and began to thrust against her that her fear overcame her paralysis. She told herself that she had to do something to stop him. “At that point, you’re a trapped animal,” she told me. “Your life is flashing before your eyes.” Moonves, in what Douglas assumed was an effort to be seductive, paused and asked, “So, what do you think?” Douglas told me, “My decision was to get out of it by joking my way out, so he feels flattered.” Thinking that reminding Moonves that he was her boss might discourage him, she told him, “Yes, for the head of a network you’re some good kisser.” Moonves frowned and got up. She scrambled to find her briefcase. “Well, this has been great. Thanks,” she recalled saying, moving toward the door. “I’ve got to go now.”

Moonves, she said, followed her to the door and blocked her path. He backed her up to the wall, pressing against her, with his face close to hers. “It was physically scary,” Douglas told me. “He says, ‘We’re going to keep this between you and me, right?’ ” Attempting to put him off with a joke, she replied, “No, sir, we won’t tell anyone that you’re a good kisser.” Moonves released her and, without looking at her, walked away. “It was so invasive,” she said of the threatening encounter. “It has stayed with me the rest of my life, that terror.”

Outside Moonves’s office, she began to cry. “My skirt is all twisted,” she recalled. “I’m standing in the hall and I thought of his family.” Moonves’s assistant, sitting nearby, asked whether her parking needed to be validated. Douglas told me, “I remember thinking, Does she know? Does this happen all the time?”

In her car, Douglas said, “I lost it. I felt sick.” Prophet, her manager, called and, as Douglas worked up the nerve to tell her what had happened, Prophet said that she had just got off the phone with Moonves. He’d said that he and Douglas had a great meeting and “had a lot of fun.” Douglas told me, “I thought, Oh, my God, he’s covered his tracks.” In that moment, she said, “I decided, just bury it.” Later that day, Douglas returned to the house she was renting and told a friend who was staying with her, the actor Craig Chester, about the incident. “She was trying not to cry, but her voice was shaking. I’ve never seen her that emotional before,” Chester recalled. “She said that he got on top of her and held her down and she couldn’t get away. If it was any other situation outside business, I would have said, ‘Let’s go to the cops.’ ” But, Chester said, “there was no talk about going to the police or anything like that, because it was obvious that it would be career suicide.”

The following week, Moonves showed up at the first day of rehearsals for “Queens.” “As soon as I saw him, I thought I was going to collapse. Everything came back to me. I was shaking,” Douglas told me. She felt that Moonves’s demeanor was intended to intimidate her. “He was eying me warily,” she said. Her distress was evident to her co-stars. “There was obviously something going on with her emotionally,” Penelope Ann Miller told me. “When she came in to test, everything was on. And then, after, on set, it was like she wasn’t there.” Last year, before the rise of #MeToo, Douglas told Miller what had happened. “Hearing her story, it all made sense,” Miller recalled.

After the second rehearsal, Moonves took Douglas aside. “ ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing out there? You’re not even trying,’ ” Douglas recalled Moonves saying. She took it as a reference to her failure to comply with his advances and to maintain her composure afterward. Douglas told me that she had “played by all the rules, I didn’t say anything, and now he was berating me.” On set, she struggled to keep her comedic timing, and cried in front of other cast members.

Several days into rehearsals, Moonves called Douglas at home. “It was, you know, ‘You make me fucking sick. You are not funny,’ ” she recalled. Moonves told her that she wouldn’t “get a fucking dime” of the money she was owed, and that she would “never work at this network again.” (In a statement, CBS said that Moonves acknowledges trying to kiss Douglas, but that “he denies any characterization of ‘sexual assault,’ intimidation, or retaliatory action,” including berating her on set and personally firing her from “Queens.”)

Prophet told me that Moonves and CBS Business Affairs called her to say that Douglas would be replaced on the show and that her deal would be cancelled. According to Douglas, Prophet called her and “said I’d burned all my bridges at CBS, that she was firing me.” (Prophet recalled firing Douglas and said that the two had a heated exchange. She said that she didn’t know about Douglas’s allegation, and denied the comment about burning bridges. “There are no bridges at CBS,” she said. “There is just Les Moonves.”) Douglas said that her agent, Patrick Whitesell, who was then at Creative Artists Agency, later called to say that the agency wished her well in future endeavors of her own. “I love the way C.A.A. fired me,” Douglas said. “They never told me I was fired. They just kept wishing me the best of luck.” (Whitesell told me that he had not been aware of Douglas’s allegation and did not recall that her departure from C.A.A. was related to the dissolution of her CBS deal.)

Distraught, Douglas called Scorsese and told him the story, saying that she wanted to hire a lawyer and sue Moonves. Scorsese said that he remembers Douglas calling him about the allegation and being shocked by it. Scorsese urged her to be cautious about taking legal action against such a powerful person, but agreed to refer her to his law firm; there, Douglas began working with an attorney named Bill Sobel. Sobel confirmed that Douglas had described the encounter with Moonves at the time, and his contemporaneous notes back up her account. “I believed Illeana,” he told me. “What happened to her was reprehensible.”

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Douglas told me that Sobel warned her that it was a matter of her word against Moonves’s. Sobel, who said that he had a frank conversation with Douglas about the risks of suing, ultimately called CBS to attempt to recoup some of her lost wages. (She had received a fifty-thousand-dollar advance payment for her appearance in the “Queens” pilot, but felt that she was owed the remaining two hundred and fifty thousand.) After a junior staff member at CBS Business Affairs told Sobel that Douglas had been fired because of her poor performance in rehearsals, and that the network intended to withhold her pay, Sobel suggested that he ask Moonves about the meeting he had had alone with Douglas. “My conversation was simply ‘Hey, ask Les what happened in the room, and he’ll probably want you to do the right thing here,’ ” Sobel told me. “I felt he knew what I was saying.”

According to communications and contracts reviewed by The New Yorker, the head of CBS Business Affairs, rather than the junior staffer, replied to Sobel with a new proposition. “When the head of the whole thing called me back,” Sobel said, “it was very clear to me that they took my comments about what happened in the room very seriously.” CBS proposed that the agreement be “settled out” for a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, and then agreed to pay Douglas an additional two hundred and fifty thousand to appear in a new miniseries.

Douglas and Sobel both saw the miniseries as cover for a settlement; she didn’t even know what the show was about. “I go from being sexually assaulted, fired for not having sex with Les Moonves, fired by everyone, to ‘We are going to pay you in full and we also want you to be on this miniseries,’ ” Douglas recalled. “My understanding is, this is what they were going to do in exchange for not suing.”

Shortly after the offer came, Douglas received a call from Moonves. “ ‘So, you’re gonna do the mini?’ ” she remembered him asking. Although she wanted accountability, she was still frightened, and said that she would do it. She recalled Moonves, sounding upbeat, remarking, “ ‘Tits and guns, baby. Tits and guns.’ ” (Douglas later learned that the miniseries, called “Bella Mafia,” focussed on the women of an Italian crime family and emphasized sex and violence.) Moonves asked Douglas if they were “O.K.,” and Douglas replied, “Yes, sir.”

In its statement, CBS said that the agreement with Douglas about “Bella Mafia” was intended to fulfill her over-all deal with the network, and was unrelated to her meeting with Moonves. “There were no funds added for settlement purposes,” CBS said. “The amount paid was half of what she was owed, which is not what one might do if concerned about a claim such as this.”

Jo An Kincaid, an executive producer on the “Queens” pilot and Penelope Ann Miller’s manager at the time, said that she was not consulted about Douglas’s dismissal. “One day she was just not there. Gone and replaced,” Kincaid said. “It was very unusual. I was an executive producer. There should have been an explanation.” In an e-mail, Judge Reinhold, one of Douglas’s co-stars, wrote, “Illeana was hilariously unique in her comedy and fun to work with.” He added, “We were all surprised and disappointed that she left.”

Douglas told numerous people about the incident over the years, and even published a lightly fictionalized version of it in a 2006 compilation, “Fired!” She also performed the story before audiences. “I didn’t exactly keep it a secret,” Douglas said. “People used to come up to me afterward and go, ‘I know who it is,’ and just laugh about it.”

Douglas appeared in “Bella Mafia,” and, afterward, C.A.A. resumed representing her. But she believes that the incident “derailed any future career I would have had at CBS.” In two instances, years later, personal connections helped her secure acting roles on shows that aired on the network, and a Web series of hers appeared on a CBS streaming service. But otherwise, in a career that has included extensive work with every other major network, she said, “I never auditioned or ever had any kind of television-show deal at CBS.” Like the other women I spoke to, she said that people around her discouraged her from publicly naming Moonves in this story. She told me that she was doing so because she wanted to protect other women, and that she wished she had been warned before her meeting. “In retrospect, of course, you say, ‘Oh, it’s all a crazy setup,’ ” she told me. “I was, I hate to say it, the perfect victim.”

Les Moonves and CBS Face Allegations of Sexual Misconduct

More than a decade earlier, in the spring of 1985, Janet Jones was attempting to break into the industry as a writer. The producer Mike Marvin liked an idea that Jones had for a screenplay, and helped broker a meeting between her and Moonves, who at the time was a vice-president at Twentieth Century Fox. It was Jones’s first pitch meeting in Hollywood. Moonves’s assistant scheduled a late-afternoon appointment at his office.

When Jones arrived, many employees were leaving for the day, but Moonves’s assistant was there. “I had my briefcase and my pants suit,” Jones recalled. “I was really prepared.” Moonves surprised her by asking if she wanted a glass of wine. She declined, sat down on the couch, and began pitching her screenplay. Suddenly, Jones told me, “he came around the corner of the table and threw himself on top of me. It was very fast.” Moonves, she said, began trying to kiss her. Jones said that she struggled, and then shoved Moonves away hard, yelling, “What do you think you’re doing?” Moonves, appearing startled, got up. “ ‘Well, I was hitting on you. I wanted a kiss,’ ” she recalled him saying. Jones began to leave. “He said, ‘Oh, come on, it’s nothing,’ ” she said. “ ‘Calm down, don’t be so excited.’ ”

When Jones got to the door, it was locked. She was terrified. “If you don’t open this door,” she told him, “I am going to scream so loud and so long that everyone on the lot is going to come over.” She remembered Moonves walking to his desk or to a nearby bureau to unlock the door, rather than doing so directly. She fled, noticing on her way out that the assistant had left. “That’s when I got really upset,” she told me. “I just thought, Oh, my God. This wasn’t like a little momentary boo-boo. It was this well-thought-out thing.”

Jones drove to the house of a friend, the artist Linda Salzman Sagan. There, Jones told me, “I just completely melted down, just crying and shaking.” Sagan told me that she remembers the visit clearly, and that Jones described the incident in detail at the time. “She was very, very upset,” Sagan recalled. “I had never seen her like that. I was really astounded by what she told me. I knew how powerful he was in terms of a career.” Jones also told her boyfriend at the time, Larry Jackson, who said, “She came home one day scared and in tears because she said Les had jumped her at a business meeting.”

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Mike Marvin told me that he remembers introducing Jones to Moonves, and that she was troubled by the meeting. He said that he confronted Moonves about it at a gathering, saying, “Whatever happened, that girl was upset.” Moonves, Marvin said, became furious. “We definitely had a screaming match over this,” Marvin told me.

Not long afterward, Jones received a call from Moonves’s assistant, who said that she had Moonves on the line. “My heart went into my feet,” Jones recalled. Moonves began shouting at her. “ ‘People’s reputations are important. Do you understand?’ ” she remembered him saying. “ ‘I’m warning you. I will ruin your career. You will never get a writing job. No one will hire you. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?’ ” Jones hung up the phone, then threw up. “I was just absolutely mortified. Does this mean he’ll be putting me on a list somewhere and I’ll never get a job?” she recalled thinking. “This person could stop me from doing this passion, this career I had spent my whole life putting together. It’s kind of hard to fathom that one person could do that, but he could.” (CBS said that Moonves has no recollection of the interactions with Jones.)

Jones told me that she found the threats more scarring than the original incident. She said, “The revenge behavior, the ‘I’ll get you for not kissing me, I’ll get you for not doing what the hell I want you to do’—it never quite leaves you.” Years later, she saw him at an industry event and, she said, “I almost fainted. I was still terrified.”

Two other women described Moonves forcibly touching or kissing them during business meetings. The producer Christine Peters was an industry veteran when she first encountered Moonves, in the early aughts. She had worked as a story analyst for the company behind “Rain Man” and “Gorillas in the Mist” before becoming a production head for Robert Evans, who had produced “The Godfather” and “Chinatown.” She became a close friend and confidante of Sumner Redstone, the owner of Viacom, to whom she was at times romantically linked in the press. (Peters, like the other women in this story, said that she had no interest in the battle over the future of Redstone’s empire.) After Viacom acquired CBS, Redstone enlisted Peters to help build a rapport with Moonves, who was the president and C.E.O. of CBS Television at the time. They had a series of dinners with Moonves and his wife in 2003 and 2004.

Peters produced the 2003 romantic comedy “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” which was based on a book she had acquired, and which ultimately grossed more than a hundred and seventy-seven million dollars. “I was proud to be bringing females into the seats and really addressing them,” she told me. In 2006, Moonves, who had become the chairman of CBS, had dinner with Peters and Redstone to discuss his plans to launch a film studio, CBS Films, which was founded the next year. Moonves was considering executives to oversee the endeavor, and Redstone suggested Peters. Moonves seemed excited about the idea.

When Moonves and Peters met at his office to discuss the prospect, Peters told me, she came with a detailed presentation on her business model, which focussed on female audiences. “It was: this is the demographic, here are the underutilized release dates, here’s why female buyers predominate,” she said. “I remember him being very enthusiastic, saying it made a lot of sense.” She was sitting on a couch and, as she continued her pitch, he sat down uncomfortably close. “He said, ‘This is really great,’ ” she recalled. “Then he just put a hand up my skirt.” Moonves, she said, slid his hand up her thigh and touched her underwear.

“I was in a state of shock,” Peters recalled. Immediately, she worried about how Moonves would react to a rejection. She tried to get out of the situation by gathering her documents and saying, “Oh, wow, oh, my God, it’s late, I have to be at another meeting. Can we finish this tomorrow? I’m so excited! So excited!” Moonves, she recalled, suggested that he walk her to her car. Fearing further advances, Peters said that she had a driver outside. She had come to the meeting with a colleague, who was waiting in the lobby. The colleague told me that Peters emerged earlier than anticipated, appearing shaken, and said that they had to leave quickly. An acquaintance of Peters’s told me that she recounted the story to him several years ago, describing an advance from a top executive and a job that she didn’t get afterward, without naming Moonves. Last year, Peters told him that the executive was Moonves. (CBS said that Moonves categorically denies any alleged touching or inappropriate conduct during the meeting.)

Peters told me, “I remember sitting in the car and just crying. I worked my whole life to be here and I just lost my opportunity.” Because of her long tenure in the industry, Peters said, “I expected to be taken seriously. I never in a million years saw that coming.” She said that she was surprised in part because she thought her relationship with Redstone would have put Moonves on guard. “I couldn’t understand why he would do that in light of the situation with Sumner,” she told me. In the end, she decided not to tell Redstone, because she worried about what the fallout might be. Like Jones, Peters told me that Moonves “was smart enough to not have anyone there. It was a setup.” (Twice in later years, Peters participated in group meetings that involved Moonves.)

A prominent actress who played a police officer on a long-running CBS program, who was too frightened of reprisals to use her name, said that she also attended a business meeting with Moonves that ended in unwanted advances. The actress had known Moonves for years. In the late eighties, at the height of her show’s popularity, Moonves, who was then at a production company called Lorimar, requested a lunch meeting at a restaurant. There, Moonves told the actress that he had long had a crush on her but had not said anything to her because she had been in a relationship with a mutual friend. She declined his advance but thanked him for lunch. “It wasn’t offensive,” she recalled. In 1995, when Moonves became president of CBS Entertainment, the actress called to congratulate him. “He said, ‘You should have fucked me when I asked you to,’ and I said, ‘No shit!’ ” the actress told me. They laughed.

Soon afterward, CBS Business Affairs informed the actress that her series deal with CBS was being terminated. She called Moonves and expressed shock. He requested a lunch meeting in his private dining room at the office. She told me, “I went in, I thought, to make a deal.” At the lunch, Moonves told her that he intended to focus on younger talent, and that she was too old. “Then he again said, ‘I’ve always been so attracted to you,’ ” she told me. “I was so upset. I said, ‘Jesus, Leslie, I’m gonna go.’ ” Moonves asked her to sit down. She did so, pushing food around her plate until she had to leave. Then, she told me, “I walked over and leaned to give him a kiss on the cheek.” Moonves, she said, grabbed her and forcibly kissed her: “He shoved his tongue down my throat. I mean shoved.”

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Appalled, she pushed him away. “He had approached me to go to bed with him twice, but he did it politely,” she said. “But this time he just stuck his tongue down my throat.” As she left, she began to cry. “No one had ever done that to me before,” she said. “I found it sickening.”

Like Douglas, the actress said that she never worked for CBS again. Almost two decades later, an executive at CBS contacted her about coming back to the network. It turned out that the executive wanted her to sign a book deal with Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS. (CBS said that Moonves has no recollection of making unwelcome advances toward the actress, and that he made no efforts to block future business between her and CBS.)

The actress thought that the consequences would be too great if she told CBS about the incident. “I never reported it,” she told me. “I just thought, Gee, there goes my career.” At an event not long afterward, she encountered a showrunner who has overseen multiple programs at CBS, and told her the story. The showrunner, who had also worked with Moonves, recalled that the actress was still hurt by the incident and told me that she was “not surprised” by the story. “I had already had to deal with misogynist bullying from him myself,” she told me.

Our research has proved that the chicken came not just before the egg but before anything else in the known universe.“Our research has proved that the chicken came not just before the egg but before anything else in the known universe.”

Two women told me that they rebuffed unwanted advances from Moonves in professional settings, and that they believed career opportunities disappeared as a result. Dinah Kirgo, who won an Emmy as a writer for “The Tracey Ullman Show,” first encountered Moonves in the early eighties, when he was the vice-president of development at Saul Ilson Productions, a partnership with Columbia Pictures Television. She and her sister and producing partner, Julie Kirgo, met with Moonves and others about a television deal. “We left the meeting very confident we had an over-all deal with Leslie,” Kirgo told me. The sisters told their agent to expect an offer from Moonves.

Instead, shortly after Kirgo got home, Moonves called her directly. “He said, ‘That was a great meeting, now we have to go out to dinner,’ ” she recalled. Kirgo replied that she and Julie would be happy to have dinner with him. “He said, ‘No, just you and me.’ He said, ‘You’re very expensive, and I need to know you’re worth it,’ ” Kirgo told me. “I was sort of in shock and I said, ‘Well, Leslie, I don’t think your wife would appreciate us having that kind of dinner.’ ” Moonves coldly ended the conversation. (CBS said that Moonves has no recollection of the meeting or the phone call.)

Kirgo and her sister never heard from Moonves again. Afterward, Kirgo’s agents told her they had received reports that she had a reputation for being difficult to work with. Kirgo told me that she had never heard complaints before, and that she believed saying no to Moonves had hurt her career. “It’s very insidious, what he did,” she said.

Julie Kirgo confirmed the details of her sister’s story and said that Dinah had told her about the call at the time. “It’s just kind of awful to feel that you have energy and talent and that’s being appreciated, and then suddenly to find out that that’s not where somebody’s interests lie at all. You feel betrayed,” she said. “It pisses me off to this day.”

In 1992, a former child star who asked to be identified only by her first name, Kimberly, was introduced to Moonves by a friend, who was a member of Moonves’s staff and told her that Moonves could help her get back into television. At a dinner meeting that the three attended, Moonves began by asking questions about Kimberly’s acting career. But when the friend went to the bathroom Moonves turned to Kimberly and said, in a perfunctory way, “Let’s go. Let’s just get a hotel room. Let’s just do this.” She was shocked. “I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ ” When she explained that she had a husband and a child, Moonves became angry and left. (The friend recalled making the introduction to Moonves, and said that her only motivation in doing so was to help Kimberly’s career. CBS said that Moonves has no memory or record of the meeting.)

“The power differential was so great,” Kimberly told me. “I was really scared, because I thought I was burning some sort of a bridge that was going to be great for me.” As a child star, she said, “I’d been taught that powerful people can hurt you, they can ruin you, they can ruin your career.” She said that the turn from business meeting to sexual overture seemed to be well practiced. “It was set up to be that way,” she said. “I thought, Wow, is this the way the world works and I just don’t get it?”

CBS is a multibillion-dollar corporation, with dozens of divisions, and Moonves is only indirectly involved with many of them. However, experts on sexual harassment told me that misconduct by a chief executive can reverberate across aspects of even the largest companies. “If you have a company with an abuser on the top, they typically surround themselves with people like them, who engage in similar behavior,” Debra Katz, a lawyer specializing in sexual harassment, told me. “It can put a set of enablers in place, who protect powerful people when they get challenged for misconduct, and who work to discredit and manage out women who come forward with allegations.”

Thirty current and former CBS employees described harassment, gender discrimination, or retaliation at the network. Many said that men accused of misconduct were promoted, even after the company was made aware of those allegations. Their stories match several that have already emerged in public reports. Earlier this year, Leslie Isaacs, a vice-president at Pop, the cable channel jointly operated by CBS and the film studio Lionsgate, filed a lawsuit alleging that CBS was aware of a hostile workplace at the channel. Her complaint described harassment and discrimination by male colleagues, including a vice-president who allegedly instructed female employees to “show your clients your tits.” Isaacs told me, “It wouldn’t be happening at Pop if it wasn’t covered up at CBS, and if CBS wasn’t complicit. They know, and it’s been tolerated.” (Isaacs has entered into a private mediation process with CBS. A Pop spokesperson said, “Pop engaged an independent investigator who conducted a complete investigation and found nothing to corroborate this alleged statement.” CBS said that it flatly denies any efforts to cover this up.)

In December, CBS confirmed that Brad Kern, the showrunner and executive producer of “NCIS: New Orleans,” had been the subject of sexual-harassment and gender-discrimination allegations. He had retained his position for more than a year after the company was made aware of the claims. (This season, Kern stepped down from his position as showrunner, but he remains a consulting producer. Last month, the company said that it was launching a new investigation—its third—into Kern’s behavior. CBS said that the allegations were investigated and resulted in disciplinary action but that the matter “merits further inquiry.”)

Other allegations have centered on CBS News. Last summer, Erin Gee, who worked at CBS for more than fifteen years, filed a lawsuit alleging that an executive director at “CBS Evening News” urged her to have sex with a co-worker with whom she was having difficulties in order to “break the ice,” and that she was demoted after complaining about gender discrimination. In May, a magistrate judge in New York criticized CBS for failing to save e-mails from the time of Gee’s allegation. “I find the conduct of CBS here to be shocking,” the judge, Sarah Netburn, reportedly said during a hearing. “It is hard to draw any other conclusion than that they were trying to avoid producing and saving those e-mails.” (The network has since reached a settlement with Gee, and her attorney declined to comment. CBS said that “the matter has been resolved.”) In 2015, a CBS reporter, Kenneth Lombardi, alleged in a lawsuit that a CBS News supervisor texted him links to pornography, and that a senior producer had grabbed his crotch. Lombardi claimed that when he complained to a manager she replied, “Never bring up gender discrimination again!” (An attorney for Lombardi said that he was not at liberty to discuss the suit. CBS said that the matter has been resolved.)

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In November, Charlie Rose was suspended after the Washington Post reported that eight women had accused him of sexual harassment, including groping. According to the Post, Rose has now been accused of sexual harassment by at least thirty-five women, and managers at the network were made aware of the allegations on at least three occasions. (Rose apologized in response to the initial allegations, but called the paper’s subsequent reporting on additional complaints “unfair and inaccurate.”)

“60 Minutes,” the news division’s flagship program, for which Rose was a contributing correspondent, has been a focal point of allegations. Some of those allegations involve Jeff Fager, who is currently the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” and whom Moonves appointed chairman of CBS News in 2011, a position he held until 2015. Six former employees told me that Fager, while inebriated at company parties, would touch employees in ways that made them uncomfortable. One former “60 Minutes” producer told me, “It was always ‘Let’s go say hello to Jeff, ’cause you have to pay homage to him, but let’s do it early in the evening, before he starts getting really handsy.’ ” In one incident, at which several employees were present, Fager allegedly made drunken advances to an associate producer, commenting on her breasts and becoming belligerent when she rebuffed him. (Fager denied the allegations, saying that “they never happened.”)

Others said that Fager protected men accused of misconduct, including men who reported to him. According to several people who were told about the incident at the time, a senior producer named Vicki Gordon alleged that another senior producer, Michael Radutzky, threatened to throw furniture at her and twisted her arm behind her back, causing her to scream. (Radutzky categorically denied the allegations, saying that they were fabricated.) The sources told me that Fager said he would address the matter with Radutzky directly, and instructed Gordon not to inform the CBS office of human resources. Later, Fager asked her to apologize to Radutzky, to mitigate conflict in the office. (Fager said, “I have never discouraged anyone from going to H.R.”) Radutzky, who left the network earlier this year, remained in his job for several years after the alleged incident. “It was common knowledge at ‘60 Minutes’ that Michael Radutzky was an out-of-control guy, especially but not exclusively toward women. We all saw it, almost on a daily basis,” David Gelber, a former producer, told me. “And yet Fager not only tolerated him—he elevated him to a position of leadership, even after Fager knew perfectly well how abusive he was.” (Radutzky strongly denied Gelber’s characterization of his behavior.) Sophie Gayter, a “60 Minutes” employee who alleged to the Post that Charlie Rose had groped her, told me that Fager “enabled the other men on the floor to do whatever the heck they wanted.” Fager, one network executive said, “would let people know he communicated with Les directly,” adding that “people took that to mean Les supported him completely.”

CBS, one former associate producer said, “is an old network. Everything in there feels old: the people, the furniture, the culture, the mores.” Many of the women described the atmosphere at CBS News specifically as a “frat house.” One former employee said, “I had several producers and editors over the age of sixty who would greet me by kissing me on the mouth. I had people touch my butt a couple times.” She added, “Fager seemed to encourage that climate. It wasn’t even that he turned a blind eye toward it.” Katie Couric, who was an anchor at the network and a contributing correspondent for “60 Minutes” from 2006 to 2011, when Fager helped force her out, told me that it “felt like a boys’ club, where a number of talented women seemed to be marginalized and undervalued.”

In a statement, Fager said, “It is wrong that our culture can be falsely defined by a few people with an axe to grind who are using an important movement as a weapon to get even, and not by the hundreds of women and men that have thrived, both personally and professionally, at ‘60 Minutes.’ ” He added, “A majority of our senior staff are women. All of them worked their way up the ranks and are now managers of our broadcast. Half of our producers and a majority of our associate producers are women. It is a challenging place to do well and promotions are earned on merit and are not based on gender.” Lesley Stahl, who has been a “60 Minutes” correspondent since 1991, told me, “This notion that ‘60 Minutes’ is an unpleasant, unwelcoming place for women isn’t true.” She said, “In my own experience, Jeff is supportive of women and decent to women.” Anderson Cooper, who has been a correspondent for the show since 2006, told me, “I work there part time, but in all the years I’ve been there I’ve never seen Jeff engage in any inappropriate behavior.”

Gayter and another junior female employee told me that their bosses asked them to complete the company’s mandatory online sexual-harassment training programs for them. “Many assistants did it for their bosses,” Gayter said. “We’d book their travel, do their expenses, and then do their sexual-harassment training.” Former employees told me that there were few avenues for them to register confidential complaints about discrimination and misconduct. “People say, ‘You could call H.R.’ Honestly, I’ve never met a single person from H.R.,” one producer said. “There’s no oversight.” Some said that they had witnessed retaliation against those who did attempt to speak out. At CBS News, “there was no one to turn to,” one former producer told me, saying that she had reported Charlie Rose’s behavior, and that the complaint resulted in no repercussions for Rose. “If it’s just behavior from the top, tolerated at the top, and there’s no one to talk to, what do you do?” she said.

A former journalist at “60 Minutes” named Habiba Nosheen told me that she had complained to management that Ira Rosen, a producer on the program, had subjected her to numerous sexual comments and suggested that she flirt with sources. Two other women told me that they had experienced similar conduct from Rosen. (In a statement, Rosen said that “CBS extensively investigated these complaints and found them to be false, misleading, and unsubstantiated.” He said, “I have always and continue to deny these allegations.”)

But seriously folks the way you raised me its no wonder I cant get a gig in a real night club.“But seriously, folks, the way you raised me it’s no wonder I can’t get a gig in a real night club.”

When Nosheen filed a written complaint and met with Fager about the allegations against Rosen, she said, he told her not to worry about the possibility that other women might be harassed by Rosen. She told me that Fager is “an enabler of this ‘Mad Men’ culture at ‘60 Minutes.’ ” Afterward, there appeared to be no repercussions for Rosen, and she was frozen out of assignments. Days after she made her complaint to Fager, he and two of his deputies called Nosheen into a meeting to go over criticisms of her work performance which she found specious. One involved a tense exchange with a co-worker that had happened a year earlier. The format of the meeting, she said, was highly unusual. “It was so obvious to me that they began to implement a strategy of retaliation,” she told me.

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In June, 2016, Nosheen filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She resigned a month later. “As an investigative journalist, every day I try to hold people in power accountable. I look people in the eye and ask them why they turned their backs when they witnessed something unethical happening,” she told me. “I knew I couldn’t look myself in the mirror and hold others accountable if I wasn’t brave enough to do the same in my own place of work.” An e-mail from a CBS lawyer shows that, after Nosheen left the network, CBS threatened to enforce a non-compete clause in her contract, which would prevent her from seeking employment elsewhere, unless she withdrew her E.E.O.C. complaint and signed a nondisclosure agreement. The E.E.O.C. ultimately issued a Notice of Dismissal and Right to Sue letter, saying that it was unable to conclude whether or not a violation of federal law had occurred and that it would be up to Nosheen to pursue the matter in civil court.

Another woman told me that she had spoken to CBS’s legal department about Rosen’s and Fager’s behavior. “I was shocked by the lack of seriousness and regard that CBS legal showed my story,” she told me. (In a statement, CBS’s chief compliance officer said, “It is the policy and practice of CBS to investigate all complaints and to promptly remediate any problems that are identified,” adding that “the policies against discrimination and harassment include anti-retaliation provisions, and anyone raising a complaint is assured that he or she will be protected from retaliation.”) The woman told me that she eventually left the network because of the atmosphere. “A lot of my memories of ‘60 Minutes’ are of other women coming into my office, closing the door, and just breaking down because of working as a woman at CBS,” she said. “Toward the end of my time there, I thought, God, I love the stories, I love the work, but this has to be easier somewhere else.”

The producer who talked about Fager’s behavior at parties told me that she, too, left the show because of “a very toxic culture toward women.” She said, “What makes me really upset was this was something I really loved doing, and I was good at, and won a lot of awards for. And I basically had to leave the business, because where else am I going to go? There were other places, but nothing of that stature.”

The New Yorker reviewed three six-figure settlements with “60 Minutes” employees who have filed complaints of sexual harassment or discrimination. The women who received those payments were required to sign nondisclosure agreements that prevented them from speaking about their experiences, with penalties for any breach. Several other women who have made allegations against CBS News declined to speak with me on the record, citing nondisclosure agreements. (The CBS chief compliance officer said, “On occasion, the resolution of allegations in the workplace has involved financial settlements,” adding that “settlements do not amount to admissions of guilt.”)

“The N.D.A.s are a silencer and a bully tactic,” Mo Cashin, who worked in several roles for CBS News, including as a broadcast manager, told me. “It’s unfortunate and hypocritical, particularly in the media, where it appears executives have more interest in protecting and oftentimes rewarding fellow senior employees who have a documented history of bad behavior than protecting their victims.”

Fager has tried to keep the allegations about the treatment of women at “60 Minutes” from surfacing publicly. According to the Times, in 2015 Fager took over the writing of a book about “60 Minutes” after the original author, Richard Zoglin, began asking people about the subject. In April, as two Washington Post reporters, Irin Carmon and Amy Brittain, were reporting an article about the allegations of harassment at CBS News, including complaints about Fager and Rosen, lawyers retained by Fager threatened to sue the Post, and presented testimonials about Fager’s good character. “There was this ham-handed effort to make women at the show say Jeff was a wonderful person,” one producer said. “It was so obvious we were doing it with a gun to our heads.” Fager’s lawyers also attacked the professionalism of the two reporters. In the end, the paper published a story that included complaints of harassment against Charlie Rose from dozens of women, but not allegations about Fager or Rosen. In a statement, the Post said, “The reporting throughout was vigorous and sustained and fully supported by Post editors. Nothing that met our longstanding standards for publication was left out. Nor did outside pressures, legal or otherwise, determine what was published.” CBS employees told me that they were alarmed by the attempts to kill the reporting. “The hypocrisy of an investigative news program shutting down an investigative print story is incredible,” one told me.

Fager said, “There’s a reason these awful allegations have not been published before—despite the efforts of a few former employees who did not succeed at ‘60 Minutes.’ It is because they are false, anonymous, and do not hold up to editorial scrutiny.”

The CBS chief compliance officer said, “CBS previously retained attorney Betsy Plevan of Proskauer Rose to conduct an independent investigation of alleged misconduct at CBS News. Ms. Plevan’s work is ongoing, and includes investigating allegations in this story. CBS has taken the allegations reported in the press seriously, and respects the role of the press in pursuing the truth, which is a role that is central to the mission of CBS News.”

In June, Carmon, in a speech accepting a Mirror Award for the Post’s reporting on Charlie Rose, warned that stories of abuse by powerful men in the news industry were still being suppressed. “The stories that we have been doing are actually about a system. The system has lawyers and a good reputation. It has publicists,” she said. “Indeed, the system is sitting in this room. Some more than others. The system is still powerful men getting stories killed that I believe will someday see the light of day.” Fager was seated in the audience, and later in the ceremony accepted an award on behalf of “60 Minutes.”

Habiba Nosheen, the employee who filed the E.E.O.C. complaint, said that she decided to report the harassment to the network after an e-mail appeared in her work in-box in March of 2016. It was a message to all CBS employees, from Moonves. “Simply put,” Moonves wrote, “CBS has a zero-tolerance policy towards discrimination or sexual harassment in our company or related businesses.” Nosheen told me, “I know it sounds ridiculous, but for a second I believed it.”

CBS is not the only network to face complaints of sexual harassment in recent years. In November, Matt Lauer, a co-host of “Today,” on NBC, was fired after being accused of sexual misconduct. Roger Ailes, the chairman and C.E.O. of Fox News, and the Fox anchor Bill O’Reilly both resigned after allegations were made against them. The actions of Ailes and O’Reilly have resulted in at least sixty-five million dollars in sexual-harassment settlements.

Experts told me that addressing patterns of harassment at a company as large as CBS generally depends on reform at the highest levels. “This sort of conduct is tied to over-all climate and oftentimes to how women are seen or valued within an entire organization,” Fatima Goss Graves, the president and C.E.O. of the National Women’s Law Center, said. “And there’s no question that the head of the organization sets the tone for the entire organization.”

For the women who have made claims against Les Moonves, his public stance as a supporter of the #MeToo movement and his role in the Commission on Eliminating Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace have been unnerving. Janet Jones told me that, when she heard that he was on the commission, “I thought, Oh, for God’s sake, he has no shame.” The commission is made up of, and funded by, industry leaders, and its members are not vetted. Illeana Douglas knew people who were associated with the commission, and considered telling them her story, until she saw that Moonves was also a member. “I don’t think that the fox should be guarding the henhouse,” she said. ♦