Unscripted, page 24
“What?” Jones asked, startled.
“He has a bit of a reputation for coming on to women.” Marvin said he’d talk to Moonves about it.
When Jones finished the story, her friend hardly knew what to say. “God, what a jerk,” she finally said.
But what could Jones do? Moonves was far more powerful than Harvey Weinstein had ever been. It was one thing for stars like Angelina Jolie or Gwyneth Paltrow to accuse Weinstein. Who would be interested in hearing from a little-known writer like Janet Jones?
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The 2018 Consumer Electronics Show opened in Las Vegas on January 9, and Shari Redstone was one of the few prominent women in attendance for the annual tech showcase. All the keynote speakers were men. That didn’t stop the buzz about sexual harassment in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Shari got asked about it at every turn, and one name kept coming up: Les Moonves. Specifically, that Ronan Farrow was on his trail, working on a big New Yorker exposé.
Shari again reached out to Minow, who was teaching at the University of Hawaii that week. Shari emailed her that “there is a lot of noise here at CES,” specifically that Farrow was doing a #MeToo story on Moonves for The New Yorker. She said she didn’t know anything more specific and hadn’t heard any names of alleged victims.
Shari had also heard something about Moonves and Joe Ianniello at a meeting in Las Vegas, where both were wearing bathrobes—now a potent symbol of the #MeToo movement given both Weinstein’s and Charlie Rose’s propensity to confront women while wearing an open bathrobe. Again, Shari had few details.
This time Minow called another board member, Charles Gifford. He was skeptical. He told Minow that Shari was once again trying to undermine Moonves. For all he knew, Shari herself might be behind the rumors—or even planting a story with Farrow.
But Minow said it didn’t matter. Whatever was happening, the board had a “duty” to investigate, she insisted. Gifford said he’d consult with Gordon.
Board member Linda Griego had also heard that something about Moonves was about to break. Gil Schwartz, too, had heard that Farrow was working on a big piece. One reporter told him Shari had all but handed Farrow what he needed. Schwartz told Moonves, who was eager to blame Shari.
Schwartz continued to aggressively defend his boss. When he learned a reporter had been making calls about the #MeToo rumors, he pre-emptively attacked, writing on January 24: “You guys are fucking despicable,” and later: “All you’re doing is flailing around and digging up worthless trash. It’s pathetic. This is a human being you’re dealing with. I hope in the craven rush to not be beaten you don’t forget that you ostensibly have standards to publish. There have never been ANY settlements or complaints. No NDAs to find. Have some fucking ethics. Find a real story.”
Meanwhile Dauer was keeping the heat on Moonves, reporting more calls from the media—even one from the Times to Phillips’s husband’s hair salon in Toronto.
“I feel sick all the time,” Moonves texted Dauer.
The rumors came to a head at a special meeting of the nominating and governance committee that month. Shari couldn’t believe CBS wasn’t preparing for a potential public relations catastrophe for CBS and its leadership. Moreover, the renewed plan to merge CBS and Viacom assumed that Moonves would be chief executive of the new, much larger company. Anything that put Moonves’s viability in question threatened the merger.
The committee agreed to enlist Michael Aiello, the lawyer for the independent directors, and the head of the corporate department at the large New York firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges. Aiello would investigate the rumors and report back.
Shari assumed her dealings with the committee were confidential. But that wasn’t explicit, and Gifford and Gordon shared everything with Moonves in a flurry of emails and conversations.
In response, Moonves alerted them “at a high level” that there were “decades-old incidents that were consensual, but that women might point to,” which he wasn’t comfortable discussing. Gifford and Gordon assured Moonves that they didn’t need or want to hear the details themselves but advised him to tell Aiello everything.
Faced with the prospect of a formal board interview, Moonves hired Dan Petrocelli, who gained national fame after successfully representing the father of O. J. Simpson victim Ron Goldman. He also called on Ron Olson, one of Los Angeles’s most prominent trial lawyers and a longtime lawyer for Moonves who had negotiated his lucrative contracts.
Aiello interviewed Moonves on January 16—the first time he’d been formally questioned about any #MeToo allegations. Aiello and Olson both took notes. Other lawyers from Weil Gotshal also listened to the call.
“If there are any stories out there, we need to know,” Aiello began.
Moonves said there were two instances of possible concern, both now decades in the past, long before his employment by CBS.
In the first incident, a young actress had come in for a meeting when he was at Warner Bros. He didn’t know her. He said he had exposed himself and she “ran out of room,” according to a lawyer’s notes of the interview. “Victim didn’t say anything,” Aiello wrote, meaning she hadn’t complained.
“Let me take a step back,” Aiello said. “What does ‘exposed’ mean?”
This time Moonves said they’d engaged in oral sex and that it was consensual. Afterward he heard from her manager that the actress was “upset.” The New York Times had been making calls, and there was “buzz” about what had happened. “Friends were saying she wasn’t happy about it,” Aiello noted. Moonves hadn’t spoken to the actress herself, although he knew her name. The actress “has never been heard from since” and has “shut down,” according to another lawyer’s notes of Moonves’s comments.
There had been no threats of litigation, “no complaint ever made,” and “no payments ever made either public or private,” according to Aiello’s notes.
This was obviously a description of Bobbie Phillips.
The second incident, Moonves said, involved a female television executive who had recently filed a police complaint against him for sexual assault. But the incident dated to the 1980s, and the statute of limitations had expired long ago, which would prevent any charges being filed. In any event, the sex had been consensual.
The highly abbreviated account was clearly about Golden-Gottlieb. Despite the gaping holes in Moonves’s versions, Aiello was curiously uninquisitive. He didn’t ask for the names of the women, even though Moonves had said he knew them. He didn’t ask for the name of the actress’s manager or any other witness who could corroborate Moonves’s story. He didn’t follow up on an obvious inconsistency: How could the actress have fled after Moonves “exposed” himself—but also stayed to have consensual oral sex?
Nothing in Aiello’s notes suggests that Moonves volunteered anything about Dauer’s requests for work for Phillips and other clients or any efforts Moonves was making to accommodate him.
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The same day as the Aiello interview, Shari Redstone had lunch alone with Moonves at his office in Los Angeles. She laid out her long-term plans—CBS and Viacom would merge and then be in a stronger position to be acquired by another company. If necessary, National Amusements would give up its controlling interest once a deal was negotiated. As she’d said before, she didn’t want to be a media mogul—she was looking forward to focusing on her family and her other ventures. Was Moonves on board?
He said he was.
Moonves, she said, was essential to the strategy. What were his future plans, given that he was nearing seventy?
Moonves told her he was looking forward to the “next stage” of life and would probably leave in two years’ time. He said he understood she’d need to start thinking about a successor.
Shari also mentioned that some board changes would be necessary. After his offensive behavior toward her, Gifford was unacceptable. And she wanted to nominate Richard Parsons to the board. The grandson of a groundskeeper on the Rockefeller estate in Tarrytown, New York, the sixty-nine-year-old Parsons had retired as chief executive of Time Warner a decade earlier, served as chair of Citigroup for a few years, and then become a trusted adviser to many chief executives, as well as to Shari.
The choice of Parsons could hardly be faulted, but Gifford remained a sore spot with Moonves. Gifford was among his most loyal directors. An unusual provision in Moonves’s contract provided that he could resign for “good reason” and collect an enormous golden parachute if a current or former chief executive of a rival company was nominated to the board. He pointed out that naming Parsons would trigger that option.
Finally, there was the delicate issue of the #MeToo rumors, now the subject of Aiello’s investigation. Shari asked Moonves if there was any truth to them.
“Look me in the eyes,” Moonves told Shari. “There is nothing there.”
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After the interview with Moonves that day, Aiello briefed Gifford and Gordon. He assured them he hadn’t found anything they needed to be concerned about. He said nothing about any police report.
Aiello briefed the full committee on January 29, saying pretty much the same thing he’d told Gordon and Gifford: the board had nothing to worry about. Aiello said Moonves had brought up two incidents that were decades old, that occurred long before Moonves came to CBS. Moonves may have been “clumsy” and made some “unwanted advances,” but only before his marriage to Chen. Moonves was now happily married and by all accounts a model husband.
Minow asked for more detail about the two incidents. Aiello assured the committee members they “didn’t want to know” and he “didn’t want to go there,” reflecting a squeamishness about discussing sex that seems to have pervaded the investigation. There was a brief discussion of whether CBS needed to beef up its human resources operation, but the consensus was that it was already adequate. When someone asked about the rumored New Yorker article, Aiello assured them that Schwartz was “monitoring it” and “had his finger on the pulse” but wasn’t aware of anything concrete.
Minow questioned whether they’d done enough to get to the bottom of the rumors. Aiello assured her there was nothing left to investigate. (Further steps should have been obvious to anyone who’d watched an episode of CSI: interview the victims and get their version of the story, as well as potential witnesses. Aiello hasn’t publicly explained why he didn’t pursue anyone for corroboration, but he may have been concerned any inquiries would become public.)
Aiello cautioned the committee members to say nothing to other members of the CBS board, especially the nonindependent directors aligned with Shari. Given the suspicions about Shari, the committee members were afraid of leaks. In the current environment, news that the board had even looked into sexual allegations about Moonves could be devastating.
Shari subsequently asked Gordon what, if anything, Aiello had uncovered, but he told her only that Moonves had denied the allegations and so there was nothing to worry about. She was dubious. “Are you telling me a denial from Les is sufficient investigation that would pass legal review?” He insisted it was.
Shari went to Minow, who told her Aiello had said there was nothing more to investigate.
“Are you kidding me?” Shari replied. “I hope you got good legal advice,” she said.
Gordon told Shari she could talk to Aiello herself if she wanted more information, but she didn’t bother. She felt she’d get nowhere and had already done what she could.
That was basically the end of Aiello’s investigation. The full board never got a briefing, and most seemed only too happy to rely on Aiello’s conclusion and move on.
EPISODE 5
“This Is Insanity”
Despite her skepticism about Aiello’s investigation, Shari, too, was happy to leave the Moonves rumors behind and concentrate on the merger. Two years earlier, she had believed it was Viacom that needed CBS to rescue it. But now she felt the tables had turned. Under Bakish’s energetic leadership, she believed Viacom had a viable strategic plan. It had gone from virtually no digital presence to ambitious plans for its nascent streaming service. CBS, meanwhile, seemed stuck in a vanishing media world where all that mattered were Nielsen ratings. Its CBS All Access streaming platform seemed an afterthought.
On February 1, both CBS and Viacom announced they had appointed special committees of independent directors to “evaluate a potential combination.” As before, Shari and her nonindependent board allies were excluded, though there was no doubt about what they wanted. National Amusements, the Redstone-owned controlling shareholder of both companies, issued a statement that a combination “has the potential to drive significant, long-term shareholder value.”
A few days later Moonves and Shari showed their solidarity by sitting together in the CBS box at Super Bowl LII in Minneapolis, both cheering for Shari’s Patriots over the Philadelphia Eagles, who nonetheless won, 41–33.
But the merger news was quickly overshadowed by renewed speculation about Moonves, as rumors intensified that the long-awaited New Yorker story was about to drop. Even Dauer heard them, texting Moonves: “Have you heard of Ronan Farrow?”
The New Yorker typically came out on a Monday, with media copies circulating Sunday night. On Saturday, February 10, Klieger raised the issue with Shari: It seemed incredible that the topic of Moonves and a potential #MeToo problem hadn’t even been mentioned to the full board. The concern wasn’t so much whether any published allegations were true, but how would the board respond? Would the board put Moonves on leave? What statement would the board make? Klieger suggested he take up the issue with Bruce Gordon.
Shari texted Klieger: “I don’t have a problem calling Bruce, but if I raise the issue they won’t even speak to me or invite me to any meeting. What a waste of my time.”
“This is a board responsibility and I have no qualms about raising the issue myself,” Klieger responded. “It puts us in an awful position and creates massive exposure for the whole board.”
Klieger scheduled a call with Gordon about a “sensitive matter” for Sunday morning. “This is insanity that we haven’t met to consider this,” he said. Gordon hardly seemed enthusiastic but conceded the board should meet by telephone later that day given The New Yorker’s publication schedule.
At 2:00 p.m. Klieger got a curt email from Gordon: “There will not be a board call today.”
Klieger called him for an explanation. Gil Schwartz had found out that the much-anticipated New Yorker article wasn’t about Moonves, Gordon said, so there was no need for any emergency meeting. The board could take the matter up in the regular course of business.
On February 16 Farrow’s latest New Yorker exposé hit newsstands. Schwartz had been correct: the story had nothing to do with Moonves. It was about Donald Trump, his long-ago affair with the Playboy centerfold Karen McDougal, and her more recent dealings with the National Enquirer.
All the air went out of the Moonves rumors.
The reprieve did curiously little to buoy Moonves’s spirits. He was still seething over his conviction that Shari was spreading rumors as part of a campaign to destroy him. He called Klieger to complain about it. Afterward Klieger texted Shari: “Just got a call from Les. He is genuinely concerned (paranoid) that you’re behind the false rumors being spread against him and this is a less-than-direct way to get him out of the company. I assured him you were also upset about the rumors and had nothing to do with them. . . . I think he felt better after talking to me but is being worn down.”
Shari and Moonves spoke later by phone. He was upset that Shari had gone to the nominating and governance committee about the rumors. Why hadn’t she come to him with her concerns rather than raising them with a board committee? Why was she doing this to him?
Shari said it wasn’t that she believed the allegations, but the board had to be prepared. Afterward she reported to Klieger that Moonves was “upset, but I think we’re fine.”
She also said it was obvious someone on the nominating and governance committee had leaked what she thought were confidential discussions to Moonves, likely either Gordon or Gifford.
“I actually think Bruce [Gordon] did me in,” she wrote to Klieger. “Talk soon but I will never call anyone on the board again except you.”
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There was more good news for Moonves that month when the Los Angeles County district attorney declined to bring any charges with respect to Golden-Gottlieb because of the statute of limitations. That seemed to be the end of the police complaint, but Moonves knew he wasn’t out of the woods yet—not with Dauer still nipping at his heels.
Dauer was finally getting some traction with CBS. Peter Golden, the head of casting, contacted Dauer to schedule an audition for Phillips for a new CW crime drama series, In the Dark. LaRue read for a part on the CW series Charmed. And Moonves scheduled meetings with two more Dauer clients, Joshua Morrow and Philip Boyd.
Dauer reciprocated by offering Moonves one of his prized possessions: an autographed photo of Babe Ruth. “I’m pretty sure it will be in safekeeping with your family for a long time,” he texted. “Let’s get the Babe to you.”
Moonves tried to beg off, but Dauer wouldn’t take no for an answer—he said the photo was already off his wall and in his car, and Moonves should hang it in his office.
Moonves gave in.
Dauer even offered Moonves “a home on Catalina Island for two years free. If you are interested, I can do that.” He added, “It’s in a gated community.”
Moonves ignored that.
Despite the promising auditions and readings, by late March none of Dauer’s clients had landed a role at CBS, and Dauer was getting impatient. He texted Moonves to say Bobbie Phillips was nagging him, asking, “Is there anything at CBS?”
