March 29, 2024

Les Moonves Obstructed Investigation Into Misconduct Claims, Report Says

Investigators wrote that they had received “multiple reports” about a network employee who was “on call” to perform oral sex on Mr. Moonves.

“A number of employees were aware of this and believed that the woman was protected from discipline or termination as a result of it,” the lawyers wrote. “Moonves admitted to receiving oral sex from the woman, his subordinate, in his office, but described it as consensual.”

The woman did not respond to the investigators’ requests for an interview.

Mr. Levander, Mr. Moonves’s lawyer, said Mr. Moonves had “never put or kept someone on the payroll for the purpose of sex.”

CBS declined to comment.

Mr. Moonves’s marriage in 2004 to Julie Chen, now the host of “Big Brother,” appears to have been a “bright line” after which his sexual misconduct seemed to have stopped, according to the report.

The report also details what CBS’s board and management knew about Mr. Moonves’s conduct, and how they reacted to it.

In one case, Dr. Anne Peters, who saw Mr. Moonves for a consultation in 1999, told the lawyers that he had tried to kiss her and masturbated in front of her. Dr. Peters said she had later told Arnold Kopelson, a film producer who was her patient and a friend, about the incident in an attempt to dissuade him from joining the CBS board in 2007.

“She recalls Kopelson responding that the incident had happened a long time ago and was trivial, and said, in effect, ‘We all did that,’” the investigators wrote. They added that Dr. Peters had tried to discuss the incident with Mr. Kopelson, who died in October, on several other occasions, and pushed him to come forward with the information after the #MeToo movement gained momentum.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/business/media/les-moonves-cbs-report.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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