Mogul: Les Moonves [CBS]

Julie Chen-Moonves and the Meaning of a Wife’s Loyalty

By Doreen St. Félix

September 24, 2018 The New Yorker

The CBS personality Julie Chen has come out, unequivocally and proactively, in support of her husband, Leslie Moonves, who recently left CBS after allegations of sexual misconduct.Photograph by Matthew Eisman / Getty

What’s in a name? For Julie Chen, the CBS personality, who is married to Leslie Moonves, it is a code of fealty. Earlier this month, four days after Moonves resigned from his position as the chairman of CBS, following multiple allegations of workplace sexual abuse, Chen made known, in no uncertain terms, the degree of her marital commitment: “I’m Julie Chen-Moonves. Good night,” she said at the end of the September 14th episode of “Big Brother,” the reality-TV competition that she has hosted for CBS since 2000.

The sign-off, which Chen repeated on Wednesday, her second day back on the show, gave her return to television duties a defiant edge. Chen and Moonves first became involved in the early two-thousands, when Moonves was still married to his first wife. They wed in 2004, but Chen used only her maiden name at work, and casual viewers of her shows would not necessarily have known of her connection to the network’s head. Her persona on “Big Brother,” and on CBS’s “The Talk,” the women’s daytime panel show that she anchored from 2010 until her departure, this month, has depended on an assertive froideur. Quasi-journalistic, Chen plays the glamorous moderator, analyzing cultural flash points but rarely entering the fray. Her new flare of passion suggests that she has now found a cause. A source close to her told CNN that Chen “has decided that her main focus needs to be clearing her husband’s name.” (In a statement announcing his resignation from CBS, Moonves called the allegations “untrue” and “not consistent with who I am.”)

The humiliations of a wife who “stands by” her husband are well known to Americans, but the momentum of #MeToo has made the role particularly vexed. A wife whose husband has behaved badly is presumed to be a conscious or unconscious accomplice, a delusional victim, or, most injuriously, a fool. How did she not know? The sexism of our culture still makes it beyond comprehension that we could hold a man accountable for his misdeeds without also doling out some blame to the caretakers around him, who we believe should be responsible for his moral maintenance. “It feels very unjust,” Rebecca Traister wrote in her excellent 2016 essay “Why Should Wives Have to Answer for Their Husbands’ Behavior?” “But for wives, answering for a husband’s misdeeds has long been part of the bargain.” Yet it also seems too simple, in this moment, to unilaterally blame male influence for the maneuvers of women who choose to use their voices to invalidate those of other women. The public-facing loyalty of the abuser’s wife destabilizes the #MeToo movement’s core vision—that women should be able to speak and be believed.

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Unlike Georgina Chapman, who filed for divorce from Harvey Weinstein after last year’s torrent of exposés, or Melania Trump, who barely seems to register the sexual-misconduct accusations against her husband, Chen has come out, unequivocally and proactively, in support of Moonves. “Right now, I need to spend more time at home with my husband and son,” she said, during a pretaped farewell message that aired on her final episode of “The Talk,” last week. On Twitter, she has called Moonves “a good man and a loving father, devoted husband and inspiring corporate leader” and a “kind, decent, and moral human being.” And it may seem this way, from her vantage point. One thornier aspect of #MeToo consciousness-raising involves convincing not just men but other women that they might not know everything about a man they know well—that nearness does not guarantee transparency, that a man who is evil during the day might be patient when he returns home at night, that the powerful can apply a vile and discriminating calculus to who will suffer abuse and who will not. (This is what is so useless about the statement signed by sixty-five female acquaintances of the embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, calling him a “good person.”)

“Patriarchy has no gender,” bell hooks wrote. Traister, writing about Camille Cosby and Hillary Clinton defending their husbands, identified “how the length of some public marriages means that they must comprise and account for dramatic shifts in cultural assumptions about gender, sex, and power.” Chen, at forty-eight years old, is of a different, purportedly more progressive generation. She was born in Queens, and became enamored with evening news shows as a child. She first arrived at CBS, as an intern, in 1990, five years before Moonves joined. She returned in 1999, as an anchor for “CBS Morning News.” Unlike Camille Cosby, Chen has a robust public identity; unlike Hillary Clinton, she was not forced to assume her husband’s last name in her professional life. Chen and Moonves enjoy a modern strain of union in which the wife is permitted to have loud charisma and ambition, and a measure of independence. And yet, almost overnight, the modern-seeming marriage shows us its archaic bones. It is Chen who has so far been the mouthpiece for defending Moonves’s reputation, and it may be she who will broker a future rehabilitation campaign.

Chen can continue hosting “Big Brother,” because it is a show that shuts off the outside world. There, she can exist as a pretaped master of ceremonies, commiserating with evicted contestants, reviewing surveillance feeds with the tittering in-studio audience. “The Talk,” which films live, does not allow this sort of detachment. It trades on caffeine and opinions, on civil disagreement and innocuous gossip painlessly intertwined. Before Chen’s departure, Joy Behar, a host of “The View,” observed that Chen’s personal life might be interfering with “The Talk” ’s vaguely feminist atmosphere. “What topics can they do?” Behar said. “They can’t talk about the #MeToo movement without her coming clean about her husband.” During Chen’s hiatus in September, her co-hosts extended good will toward her, but wondered aloud about the network’s slowness to address the terror that Moonves allegedly inflicted on the workplace culture. “The Talk,” like other female-centric talk shows, is the product of the sentimental notion that all women can ultimately cast away their differences in the service of natural sorority. In the video announcing her exit, Chen’s voice cracked as she spoke of the “sisterhood” between herself and her fellow-hosts. The panel had a palpable chemistry. Now Chen is choosing a prior engagement.

Doreen St. Félix has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2017.

From <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/julie-chen-moonves-and-the-meaning-of-a-wifes-loyalty>

As Leslie Moonves Negotiates His Exit from CBS, Six Women Raise New Assault and Harassment Claims

By Ronan Farrow

September 9, 2018 The New Yorker

Six additional women have accused the television executive of sexual misconduct, as the board of the CBS Corporation weighs the terms of his departure.Illustration by Oliver Munday; source photograph by John Blanding / The Boston Globe / Getty

Update: Three hours after the publication of this story, CNN reported that Moonves would step down from his position at CBS. Later the same day, CBS announced that Moonves had left the company and would not receive any of his exit compensation, pending the results of the independent investigation into the allegations. The company named six new members of its board of directors and said it would donate twenty million dollars to organizations that support the #MeToo movement and workplace equality for women. The donation will be deducted from any severance payments that may be due to Moonves.

Members of the board of the CBS Corporation are negotiating with the company’s chairman and C.E.O., Leslie Moonves, about his departure. Sources familiar with the board’s activities said the discussions about Moonves stepping down began several weeks ago, after an article published in the The New Yorker detailed allegations by six women that the media executive had sexually harassed them, and revealed complaints by dozens of others that the culture in some parts of the company tolerated sexual misconduct. Since then, the board has selected outside counsel to lead an investigation into the claims.

As the negotiations continue and shareholders and advocacy groups accuse the board of failing to hold Moonves accountable, new allegations are emerging. Six additional women are now accusing Moonves of sexual harassment or assault in incidents that took place between the nineteen-eighties and the early two-thousands. They include claims that Moonves forced them to perform oral sex on him, that he exposed himself to them without their consent, and that he used physical violence and intimidation against them. A number of the women also said that Moonves retaliated after they rebuffed him, damaging their careers. Similar frustrations about perceived inaction have prompted another woman to raise a claim of misconduct against Jeff Fager, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” who previously reported to Moonves as the chairman of CBS News.

One of the women with allegations against Moonves, a veteran television executive named Phyllis Golden-Gottlieb, told me that she filed a criminal complaint late last year with the Los Angeles Police Department, accusing Moonves of physically restraining her and forcing her to perform oral sex on him, and of exposing himself to her and violently throwing her against a wall in later incidents. The two worked together in the late nineteen-eighties. Law-enforcement sources told me that they found Golden-Gottlieb’s allegations credible and consistent but prosecutors declined to pursue charges because the statutes of limitations for the crimes had expired. Early this year, Moonves informed a portion of the CBS board about the criminal investigation.

The terms of Moonves’s potential departure have yet to be settled. Last week, news reports had circulated that he might leave with an exit package of nearly a hundred million dollars. Several of the women expressed outrage that Moonves might be enriched by his departure from the company. Jessica Pallingston, a writer, alleges that Moonves coerced her into performing oral sex on him when she worked as his temporary assistant, in the nineties, and that, after she repelled subsequent sexual advances, he became hostile, at one point calling her a “cunt.” “It’s completely disgusting,” she said of the reports of Moonves’s potential exit package. “He should take all that money and give it to an organization that helps survivors of sexual abuse.”

In a statement, Moonves acknowledged three of the encounters, but said that they were consensual: “The appalling accusations in this article are untrue. What is true is that I had consensual relations with three of the women some 25 years ago before I came to CBS. And I have never used my position to hinder the advancement or careers of women. In my 40 years of work, I have never before heard of such disturbing accusations. I can only surmise they are surfacing now for the first time, decades later, as part of a concerted effort by others to destroy my name, my reputation, and my career. Anyone who knows me knows that the person described in this article is not me.” Moonves declined to specify which three encounters he considered consensual.

In separate statements, the CBS board of directors said that it “is committed to a thorough and independent investigation of the allegations, and that investigation is actively underway,” and the CBS Corporation said it “takes these allegations very seriously,” and called the board’s investigation “thorough” and “ongoing.”

Golden-Gottlieb worked with Moonves at the television production company Lorimar-Telepictures in the nineteen-eighties. She was already an industry veteran who had held senior positions at NBC, MGM, and Disney. Golden-Gottlieb, who is now in her early eighties and retired, told me that the first incident in which Moonves assaulted her occurred in 1986, when he was in charge of movies and miniseries at Lorimar and she was the head of comedy development there. Moonves, she recalled, came into her office in the middle of a workday and suggested the two of them go out for lunch. Instead of taking her to a nearby restaurant, she said, Moonves drove her to a secluded area. When Golden-Gottlieb began to ask if he was having trouble finding a parking space, she said that Moonves “grabbed my head and he took it all the way down onto his penis, and pushed his penis into my mouth.” She said he held her head in place forcibly. “He came very quickly,” she recalled. “You sort of just go numb. You don’t know what to do.” Distraught, Golden-Gottlieb demanded that Moonves take her back to the office. When she got there, she said, she vomited. “It was just sick,” she told me. She didn’t report the incident at the time because she was a single mother supporting two children and feared for her career. “I realized he was the new golden boy,” she told me. “I just kept quiet.” But the incident, she said, “never left me.”

Golden-Gottlieb continued to work with Moonves, who was later promoted to more senior positions within Lorimar. She said that she had avoided being alone with Moonves whenever possible in the period after the first assault. In early 1988, she told me, she entered Moonves’s office to discuss a work matter, and he said that he was going to get a glass of wine. He left briefly and, when he returned, she said, he was not wearing pants, and was aroused. She turned away, embarrassed, and ran out of the room. The following day, Moonves approached her in her office and berated her for not sending a memo to another executive. When she told Moonves that she didn’t typically share her memos with that executive, he became enraged, she recalled. “He reaches over and pulls me up and throws me, I mean hard, against the wall,” she told me. Afterward, she said, she collapsed and “couldn’t get up.” She recalled “lying on the floor, just crying.”

After she rebuffed Moonves, Golden-Gottlieb said that Moonves retaliated against her professionally, moving her into ever smaller offices. “Every two days, he’d find a darker space, or a place downstairs, or something,” she recalled. She told me that her career in the entertainment industry suffered, which she attributed to his influence at Lorimar and, later, CBS. “He absolutely ruined my career,” she said. “He was the head of CBS. No one was going to take me.”

Golden-Gottlieb told several acquaintances about the incidents with Moonves. One, a veteran showrunner, recalled feeling stunned when Golden-Gottlieb, in a social setting about a decade ago, recounted her claim that Moonves had exposed himself to her. “This is the head of a network,” he said. Golden-Gottlieb struck him as “a professional person. She didn’t seem like the type of person to make things up.” Golden-Gottlieb said that, even years later, she is still frightened of Moonves. But she said that her determination to pursue criminal charges was galvanized by the women speaking about sexual harassment and assault as part of the #MeToo movement. “They gave me courage,” she said. “I saw everyone coming out; I had to.”

Sources familiar with the CBS board’s activities said that Moonves was informed of Golden-Gottlieb’s complaint to the Los Angeles police in the fall. He did not disclose the existence of the criminal investigation to a number of CBS board members until several months later. The full board was not informed, and Moonves was allowed to continue running the company. “They don’t care about me. I can’t do anything for them,” Golden-Gottlieb told me. “The whole world is only about money, nothing else."

Jessica Pallingston had worked for several years as an assistant to various Warner Bros. executives, first employed directly by the company and then through an outside contractor, when she was assigned to assist Moonves for several days, in the spring of 1994. A description of the assignment noted that Moonves, then the president of Warner Bros. Television, would work out of his hotel room. Pallingston, who was thirty-four at the time, had studied writing at Oberlin College and hoped to break into the industry. She considered working for Moonves a significant opportunity, so she accepted the assignment.

On her first day of work, Pallingston arrived at Moonves’s suite at the Regency Hotel about ten minutes before her appointed start time of 10 A.M. Moonves, she recalled, came to the door in a bathrobe and then departed and returned fully clothed. He sat in a large chair at one end of the suite’s living room while she took another opposite him. Moonves began asking about her career ambitions, and she told him about her writing. “He was very charming,” she recalled. Moonves began asking personal questions, including questions about whether she was single and her sexual orientation. He offered her wine, which Pallingston accepted, and poured himself a glass, which he drank quickly. “I was at work, and I didn’t want to be drunk,” she recalled, “but at the same time I wanted to behave and do what was expected of me.” Then Moonves asked her for a massage. Pallingston crossed the room, and Moonves placed her hands on his neck and shoulders, briefly instructing her on how to do it before telling her to sit back down. “I guess I was terrible, because he said, ‘Never mind,’ ” she recalled. “He was really frustrated. He said, ‘Haven’t you ever given a massage to your boyfriends?’ ” Moonves, appearing irritated, began asking more sexual questions. She recalled him asking if she was afraid of men, and then if she liked powerful men. Frightened and beginning to shake, she said that she did, and Moonves told her to come to him. Pallingston told me that “it was uncomfortable, but I was trying to act like I was tough and cool, like I could handle it all.” She remembers Moonves saying, “I could help you with your writing. I could help you, and if you do something nice for me I could do something nice for you.”

Moonves, she said, then kissed her, shoving his tongue down her throat “like he was trying to reach my stomach.” Then “he said, ‘I want you to suck my cock.’ ” She recalled mumbling “O.K.,” and Moonves grabbing her head and forcing it onto his penis. “He kept his clothes on. He had Calvin Klein underpants. He pushed my head down, hard,” she said. “It was very violent, very aggressive. There was real hostility in it.” Eventually, she said, he told her to lie down on the couch. “I was really scared and nervous,” she said. “I started getting a panic attack.” She tried to leave the room, and he told her to sit down. “I remember sitting in the chair shaking and really messed up,” she said. Moonves began groping her breasts and, she said, “kept saying, ‘C’mon, let’s fuck.’ ” Pallingston, who has a history of anxiety and panic attacks, said that her shaking intensified so much that it became clearly visible to Moonves. “I said, ‘I can’t do this,’ ” she told me. “He said, ‘O.K.’ He didn’t try to push it.” She collected herself and, after her panic attack subsided, Moonves departed for a meeting. Before leaving, she said, “He took my hand and shook it and said, ‘You did a great job.’ ”

Pallingston spent several more days working as Moonves’s assistant, during which, she said, he “was a little gropey, but not much,” occasionally rubbing her shoulders, making her uncomfortable. The following spring, however, after she was assigned to work with Moonves again when he made a similar trip to New York, he immediately offered her wine and began groping her breasts. “His hands were on my neck, and then he started reaching down my bra,” she said. Panicked, Pallingston lied and said that she’d gotten engaged. “I figured it was a way to get him to stop,” she said. Moonves, sounding skeptical, asked whom she was marrying, and she gave a false name. “By this time I was just a little tougher,” she told me. “And that pissed him off.” Moonves grew “cold as ice, hostile, nasty,” she recalled, “because I turned him down.” During the remainder of their time working together, she said, Moonves would bark orders at her, sometimes using obscenities. At one point, he threw a pillow at her to get her attention. On another occasion, he had loud phone sex in front of her. “It was, like, ‘I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna fuck you.’ And I’m just sitting there listening, trying to act like I was all cool.”

The following year, she said, Moonves, then at CBS, was hostile toward Pallingston, when he called the executive she was working for at Warner Bros. As she connected the phone call, she recalled, Moonves ordered her to get the executive on the line, addressing her as “you cunt.” Pallingston told me that her experiences with Moonves worsened a decades-long struggle with anxiety, depression, and controlling her anger. Her career in television “sort of fell apart.” She continued to pursue writing, eventually publishing several books, but abandoned her ambitions of working full-time in television. “It played a number on my head, especially in terms of self-worth, professionally,” she said, of Moonves’s behavior.

Pallingston said that, for many years, her feelings of shame led her to minimize the story when she recounted it to friends and colleagues. "I wouldn’t tell people the whole story, or I’d make it sound like we were having an affair,” she told me. “It was way too embarrassing to be honest about it, because I believed anyone who put themself in that situation was an idiot, or weak.” A former colleague, who worked with Pallingston at Warner Bros. in New York and asked not to be named, said that she remembered being troubled when Pallingston told her, at the time of the first incident, about Moonves’s offer to help her career in exchange for sexual favors. She said that Pallingston stopped short of disclosing whether she complied. Another friend, Deborah Perron, said that shortly after she and Pallingston met, in the fall of 2016, Pallingston told her about Moonves’s proposition over wine and aggressive kissing, but was reluctant to say more. “It was disturbing,” Perron recalled. “This is within an hour, and he was her boss, and she was scared.” Last year, with the rise of the #MeToo movement, Pallingston recounted the story to Perron in full. “I said, ‘Wait a second,’ ” Pallingston told me. “I don’t have to be embarrassed.”

Other women described experiencing various forms of unwanted kissing or touching by Moonves. Deborah Green was a freelance makeup artist regularly working for CBS in the early aughts when she says an encounter with Moonves reduced her work at the network. She was assigned to apply Moonves’s makeup and style his hair ahead of a promotional video shoot. Green had worked with Moonves once before without incident. When she returned with Moonves to his office to remove his makeup, he pointed to his shoulders and asked for a massage. Moonves had complimented a ring on her finger, and she had mentioned that it was a gift from her boyfriend. Green told me that she assumed she had made clear to Moonves that she was not interested in any sort of overture. She was further assured, she said, when Moonves began asking about her boyfriend.

Then, catching her off guard, he stood up, turned around, and forcefully grabbed her, kissing her hard. “He stuck his tongue down my throat,” she told me. “It was like a forceful hold.” Green recalled shoving Moonves back, shocked. He appeared dismayed and abruptly turned and left, shutting himself in an adjoining bathroom. Shortly afterward, he opened the door and flatly instructed her to “pack your bags and leave.” Green said she held back tears as she left the building, then cried as she drove from the CBS offices to her home. For several days, Green said, she struggled with whether to report the incident. “I didn’t want my livelihood to be jeopardized,” she said. Shortly after, she spoke to her father, who confirmed to me that the two discussed the incident and the risks of filing a complaint. Green decided to remain silent. “Knowing that Les is powerful is why I didn't speak out at the time,” she recalled. “I was a makeup artist who had no voice.”

Two weeks later, Green said, she called the CBS employee who usually assigned her work for the company. “I called and left a message and didn’t get a return call,” she said. She did continue to work for CBS television programs, including its soap operas, but was never hired again by the print-and-publicity department to work with the company’s executives.

In the late nineteen-eighties, Deborah Morris was a junior executive working at Lorimar. One evening, she told me, Moonves asked her to come to his office to discuss several projects. The two spoke about work matters briefly before Moonves asked, “What do you want?” Confused, Morris asked what he meant. Moonves, as she recalled the conversation, said, “You know, where do you live? What kind of stuff do you want?” He mentioned televisions and cars as examples. “I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t think anybody could be that corrupt,” she said. “It was something you saw in the movies or on TV. And later I realized this absolutely does exist.”

Moonves offered her a glass of wine. She declined but he insisted. “It’s just a little glass of wine. Come on,” she recalled him saying. As Moonves began to drink, Morris, growing nervous, excused herself to get a cigarette from her office. Walking back, she noticed a security guard and thought she could call for help if necessary. “I went back to his office. What a fool,” she told me. She sat on Moonves’s couch and, “all of a sudden, he was next to me,” she told me. “He said, ‘How about a kiss?’ I said no. And he said, ‘No, come on, how about a kiss? It’s nothing. How about a little kiss?’ ” Moonves drew closer to Morris and, she said, “although he’s not a big person, there was something looming in his actions. He knew how to win people over. And then that would turn very quickly to, if you didn’t give him what he wanted, this threatening feeling from him.” Morris said she then “bolted.”

Morris, along with three friends and relatives she confided in at the time, said that Moonves continued his advances over the following months. One night, Morris said, Moonves offered to drive her to her car as they walked out of the office after dark. The two were in his Porsche, with Morris in the passenger seat, when, she said, “all of a sudden he stops the car and grabs me.” Holding Morris by both shoulders, Moonves pulled her toward him in what she took to be an attempt to force a kiss. “My left arm swung and hit him across the chest,” she said. “It was just instinct.” Moonves stopped, appearing momentarily shocked. Morris scrambled out of the car and ran. Immediately after the incident, Morris told her best friend at the time, her sister, and her sister’s husband, what had happened. All three confirmed her account.

After that encounter, Morris said, Moonves refused to speak to her, and she was frozen out of meetings at Lorimar. “I was hung out to dry,” she said. “And that was pretty much the end of my career. I wasn’t going to get a reference.” Morris discussed the possibility of filing a formal complaint against Moonves with acquaintances in the company’s legal and human resources departments without naming her harasser. Both discouraged her. “Who’s going to believe you? You’re no one,” she recalled her contact in the legal department saying. Morris added, “And these were both women.” Morris left the entertainment industry and moved to the Bay Area, later taking jobs in technology and health care. Morris said that Moonves’s response to last month’s allegations of sexual abuse, proclaiming his commitment to the principle of “no means no,” had frustrated her. She had told Moonves no numerous times, but said he continued his advances. “His statement was incredible. Absolutely incredible. It made me sick,” she told me. “He’s cunning. He’s calculating. And he’s a predator.”

In 1990, the writer Linda Silverthorn arrived for a business meeting with Moonves at Warner Bros. at nine in the morning. Silverthorn had recently secured a feature screenwriting credit, for “Beverly Hills Brats,” a comedy starring Martin Sheen, and was looking for a development deal for further writing projects. Six years earlier, when she was an assistant, and he was a vice-president at Twentieth Century Fox, Moonves had propositioned her, offering to help her career, and the two had consensual sexual encounters in his office over the course of about a month. After he discussed his wife and children during one liaison, Silverthorn said, she stopped the encounters. The two had friendly interactions at industry events in the intervening years, and Silverthorn believed that she could turn to Moonves as a professional contact. She told me that she had made it clear to Moonves that she was inquiring about professional opportunities.

Silverthorn told me that Moonves shut the door, took several swigs of coffee, grabbed her, and pulled her up from the chair where she was seated. Before making conversation, “he kissed me while we were standing up. Coffee was on his breath,” she recalled. “And then he just pulled his penis out” and moved it towards her hand. Silverthorn, who was in a long-term, committed relationship at the time, said she was in shock. She said that she “manually manipulated him, and just got it over with.” Afterward, she said, Moonves told her the studio didn’t have any opportunities for her. She departed the meeting and never contacted Moonves again. “It was unwelcome, it was unwanted,” she said. Their encounters, six years earlier, she told me, didn’t “allow him to just grab me and pull his penis out on me when I’m there for a legitimate business meeting at nine o’clock.”

Silverthorn said that she had struggled with whether to report the incident in order to protect others from what she thought was a practiced routine. She told several people over the years and discussed with her daughter the possibility of speaking publicly. “She was disturbed by what went down,” her daughter, Persephanie, a clinical psychologist, told me. “She was active in screenwriting at the time. It was a completely professional meeting, and that was completely unprofessional behavior.”

Other new allegations against Moonves relate to women who worked with him as massage therapists. Two former senior members of the staff at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C., told me that, in the late nineties and early aughts, massage therapists at its spa repeatedly complained of sexual misconduct by Moonves. “I just remember he always had to have a female; it always had to be in his suite,” Debra Williams, the spa director at the time, told me. “And it was quite a few times that those women would come back and say, ‘I’m never going up there again.’ ” The massage therapists, who worked as contractors, told Williams that Moonves would remove his towel, expose himself, and proposition them. “They would come to me in my office just kind of shaken,” she recalled. She said that she struggled with what to do, given Moonves’s position and prominence in the entertainment industry. “I was, like, ‘Damn, this guy runs CBS. This is a big deal,’ ” she told me. Eventually, Williams said, she reported Moonves to the hotel’s rooms director at the time, who asked to remain anonymous but confirmed that Moonves had been the subject of the complaints. (His wife also recalled him mentioning the matter at the time.) The rooms director said that he contacted Moonves and warned him that, if the behavior didn’t stop, “We’re not gonna be able to offer you services anymore.”

Deborah Kitay, who formerly worked as a massage therapist in Los Angeles, told me that Moonves harassed her when she gave him massages at his office and home in the late nineties. “Bottom line is, every time I went in there for about a year and a half to two years, he would ask me to work higher up his leg in a way that was clearly sexual,” she told me. On one occasion, she said, as she drew closer to his penis, he asked her to “touch it.” On another, Moonves threw off the sheet covering him and exposed himself to her. She said she repeatedly told Moonves that she didn’t “do that kind of work,” and brought up his wife in the hope that it would discourage him. She said that Moonves continued to proposition her, until she told him that she was attracted to women. “I’m actually bisexual,” she said, “but I thought if I told him that, he’d leave me alone. And it worked.” She called the experience “very stressful,” but said that she always stopped short of terminating their sessions, fearing that the fallout from embarrassing Moonves might harm her career. Kitay told her romantic partner at the time, Jael Greenleaf, who remembered Kitay raising the issue repeatedly over the course of several months. “She was upset by it, and sort of flabbergasted.” Kitay also called her brother David, a film composer, about the situation. Moonves “did all kinds of things that made her feel very uncomfortable,” David recalled. “It was offensive and disgusting and sad.”

Kitay told me that her experience with Moonves caused her to decline further work on male clients, and ultimately contributed to her decision to leave massage therapy. Years later, she was convicted of a count of wire fraud for participating in a deceptive real-estate scheme. Knowing that her criminal history might be publicized, Kitay only stepped forward when she heard about Moonves’s statements regarding consent. “It was a weekly thing,” she said of Moonves’s alleged sexual advances. “And I said no every time.”

In the weeks since the disclosure of earlier allegations against Moonves and complaints about a broader culture of harassment at CBS, a tense atmosphere has emerged in parts of the company, employees told me. At CBS News, the situation has been particularly fraught, with employees being asked to speak to law-firm investigators as their superiors, accused of misconduct, continue to work at the company.

Last month, six former employees said that Jeff Fager, the “60 Minutes” executive producer and former CBS News chairman, had touched employees at company parties in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. Others said that Fager protected men accused of misconduct, including men who reported to him. CBS announced that Fager would remain in his current position until an investigation by an outside law firm was completed. In a speech to staff last month after returning from vacation, Fager addressed the allegations. In a statement for this story, Fager said, “I have encouraged everyone at 60 Minutes to speak to the lawyers reviewing our culture with the hope that our entire staff would have a voice, and the truth would come out about our workplace. It was at the center of my talk to the staff when we returned from vacation because I believe that a fair and open investigation will determine 60 Minutes is a good place where talented women and men thrive and produce some of the finest broadcast journalism in America.”

In a new allegation against Fager, Sarah Johansen, a producer who was an intern at CBS in the late aughts, said that he groped her at a work party. Johansen told me that she felt compelled to speak because she simply “can’t believe he’s back there.” Johansen told me that, when she was growing up, outside a small town in Denmark, “I had really idolized ‘60 Minutes’ since I was young. I can’t possibly overstate how much it meant to me, even just to be an intern.” She said that, upon arriving at the program, she was thrilled by the work but troubled by the culture. Like several others, she used the term “boy’s club” to describe the atmosphere. “I really felt like this was one of the most sexist places I’ve ever worked,” she said.

Johansen said that she had contact with Fager on only two occasions. The first, she said, was at a work party at a bar near the CBS News offices in Manhattan. She was in a group of co-workers when, “all of a sudden, I felt a hand on my ass,” she said. “The hand belonged to an arm which belonged to Jeff Fager.” Another producer told her it was colloquially referred to by women on the team as “the Fager arm,” which several said they were mindful to avoid at parties. “I was shocked,” Johansen said. “His hand should not be anywhere near his intern’s ass.” She said the contact was “more like a stroke. It wasn’t just a ‘Hey, what’s up?’ ” She didn’t think Fager was propositioning her, and interpreted the move as “a power trip.” She told me, “When he grabbed my ass, it was just, like, ‘Welcome to “60 Minutes.” You’re one of us now.’ ” She recalled making eye contact with Fager, laughing and walking away quickly. But she was troubled enough by the incident that, shortly afterward, she told a male producer, who corroborated her story. On the one other occasion when Johansen interacted with Fager directly, she and a fellow-intern invited him to lunch. She was excited that he accepted. “What does that say about me that he does that and then I still say, Ohh, I want to have lunch with the big boss?” she asked. “I hate myself for that. But I just wanted to be a producer.” Fager declined to comment on the allegation.

The initial allegations also included claims by nineteen current and former employees that Fager had tolerated harassment in the division. A number described the environment at “60 Minutes” under Fager’s leadership as “a frat house.” One producer, Habiba Nosheen, said that the program had a “Mad Men” culture. She and several others said that senior male members of the “60 Minutes” team asked about their sex lives and suggested they flirt with sources. One former employee said older male producers at the show greeted her by kissing her on the mouth and touching her rear end, and told me that Fager “seemed to encourage” the climate.

With Fager back at work, “people are now worried about reprisals, since the articles didn’t do much, it seems,” one “60 Minutes” producer told me, referring to the story in the New Yorker and a subsequent article in the Washington Post accusing Fager of tolerating abusive behavior by other male producers. “Until the networks change the power structure at the top, I won’t feel safe speaking out,” another producer told me.

In several recent high-profile cases, media companies have quickly fired figures accused of sexual harassment “for cause,” and withheld severance packages otherwise guaranteed by their contracts. At NBC, Matt Lauer, the former anchor of the “Today” show, was fired for cause hours before harassment allegations against him were disclosed by Variety. CBS fired Charlie Rose the day after the Washington Post published claims against him. But Moonves, who many on Wall Street laud for boosting CBS’s profits, occupies an unusual position of power. His current employment contract, which was reviewed by The New Yorker, lays out a number of grounds for firing him, including violating the company’s sexual-harassment policies. But the contract also allows him to depart of his own volition, with generous compensation, for a range of reasons, including any diminishment of his responsibilities, or, if, at any time, a majority of the CBS board members change. That proviso has given Moonves sway over the makeup of the board—the group now responsible for investigating him. The vast majority of board members are allied with Moonves in an ongoing legal battle between Shari Redstone, the president of the holding company that controls Viacom and CBS, who has sought to merge the companies, and Moonves, who has resisted that effort. (None of the women who made allegations about Moonves in this story were familiar with, or linked to, the corporate battles at CBS.)

The board appointed two law firms, Covington & Burling and Debevoise & Plimpton, to investigate the allegations against Moonves. A number of individuals whom the firms have asked to interview said that they were concerned about the independence of the two firms, given the large amount of legal work they do for CBS. “If you knew how much money these firms were making from the mergers and acquisitions and the business side of CBS, there’s no way you’d think they’re impartial,” one former executive who occupied senior positions on the CBS and Viacom legal teams told me. (Representatives for both law firms declined to comment.)

The sources familiar with the board’s current discussions said that one point of contention was the portion of Moonves’s exit package that could be “clawed back” if investigators find that he committed misconduct. They said that, at most, half of Moonves’s pay could be withdrawn. Golden-Gottlieb, one of several women in this story who has volunteered to speak to investigators, said that she had little faith that Moonves would face meaningful consequences. “He’s going to get away with it,” she told me. “But I want to be there. I’m not going to be a shadow anymore.”

Ronan Farrow, a contributing writer to The New Yorker, is the author of “Catch and Kill” and “War on Peace.” His reporting for The New Yorker won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for public service.

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From <https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/as-leslie-moonves-negotiates-his-exit-from-cbs-women-raise-new-assault-and-harassment-claims>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Moonves

Leslie Roy Moonves[10] was born in Brooklyn, New York City to a religious Jewish family, the son of Josephine (Schleifer) and Herman Moonves,and grew up in Valley Stream, New York. His mother was a nurse.[15] He has one sister, Melissa Moonves Colon, and two brothers, including entertainment attorney Jonathan Moonves. He attended Valley Stream Central High School and went to Bucknell University, graduating in 1971. In his sophomore year, he decided that his science courses were unfulfilling and switched his major from pre-medical to the Spanish language (a subject he found vastly more enjoyable) and acted in a few plays; following graduation in 1971 he moved to Manhattan to pursue an acting career where he eventually graduated from the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. He landed a few parts, playing tough guys on Cannon and The Six Million Dollar Man, which he described as "forgettable" TV roles before deciding on the career change. He also worked as one of casting director Caro Jones' first office assistants early in her career.

"unscripted" book by James Stewart

https://deadline.com/2023/02/sumner-redstone-legacy-new-book-movie-fan-corporate-monster-1235261920/

Sumner Redstone: the other media baron who inspired Succession was more toxic and dysfunctional than Logan Roy

Published: May 21, 2023 4:00pm EDT

https://theconversation.com/sumner-redstone-the-other-media-baron-who-inspired-succession-was-more-toxic-and-dysfunctional-than-logan-roy-204035

She Won’t Be Manageable’ They Said. Now She’s in Charge.

Her father doubted her much of her career. Les Moonves launched a bid at CBS to overrule her. That was before sexual misconduct allegations came to light. Now Shari Redstone controls the media empire.

By James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams

James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams, New York Times reporters, are the authors of the forthcoming book “Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy,” from which this article is adapted.

Published Feb. 9, 2023

Updated Feb. 10, 2023

On Sunday, May 13, 2018, Leslie Moonves, the chairman and chief executive of CBS, faced a difficult decision, perhaps the most agonizing of his long and celebrated media career: whether to pull the trigger on a coup against the Redstone family, which controlled CBS.

“This is NUCLEAR,” Mr. Moonves wrote that afternoon to Bruce S. Gordon, a former president of the N.A.A.C.P. and a close confidant on the network’s board.

The philandering and increasingly infirm 94-year-old Sumner Redstone, the patriarch who assembled CBS, the Paramount film studio and a bevy of cable networks under the Viacom umbrella into a multibillion-dollar media and entertainment empire, had let Mr. Moonves run CBS as he saw fit.

But now Shari Redstone, Mr. Redstone’s daughter, was solidifying her hold. She had managed to separate her father from the growing influence of his two live-in companions, one purportedly his fiancée, with a nine-carat diamond to prove it. Ms. Redstone had recently stocked the Viacom board with her allies, who had then replaced the company’s long-serving chief executive with her choice for the job — something that Mr. Moonves feared would soon happen at CBS.

After Mr. Redstone divided his empire into two publicly traded but Redstone-controlled companies — CBS and Viacom — in 2006, Mr. Moonves had led CBS out of last place in the ratings and made it the most consistently watched broadcast network. But now Ms. Redstone wanted to merge the much healthier CBS with a floundering Viacom, and was consulting with Mr. Moonves — meddling, in his view — on a regular basis.

As Mr. Moonves had implored one board director: “Help me here. Shari is driving me crazy.”

He showed no sign of this to Ms. Redstone, with whom he continued to discuss the merger. But while she thought he was open to her ideas, Mr. Moonves and his supporters on the CBS board had secretly plotted a board vote to strip the Redstones of their voting control and block the merger. Then CBS would immediately sue in Delaware to prevent Ms. Redstone, her father and the family trust that controlled their assets from replacing CBS board members or otherwise nullifying the board’s action. This was the “nuclear” option — a legal gambit with profound implications for every public company with a controlling shareholder, which includes many of the biggest media and tech companies.

“After filing there can’t be a deal,” Mr. Moonves continued in his message to Mr. Gordon. Referring to Ms. Redstone: “She won’t be manageable.”

“She’s not manageable now,” Mr. Gordon responded.

Today Shari Redstone ranks among the most powerful executives in Hollywood. As nonexecutive chair she oversees Paramount Global, the company that emerged from the combination of CBS and Viacom, home to such hits as last summer’s “Top Gun: Maverick” and the current streaming series “Yellowstone.”

Mr. Moonves, by contrast, was fired from CBS after more than a dozen women, including his own doctor, accused him of sexual misconduct; was denied $120 million in severance payments; and retreated in disgrace to his homes in Beverly Hills and Malibu, Calif. Initially a reluctant participant in her father’s business empire, intimidated by the big names attending the annual media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, Ms. Redstone not only survived the “nuclear” option but emerged on top.

A trove of documents and testimony helps explain how she did it — in part through her own “mettle,” as her father might have put it, and in part thanks to some startling revelations that Mr. Moonves did his best to conceal from a board of directors who showed little interest in thoroughly investigating his past.

This account is drawn from our forthcoming book, “Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy,” and based on scores of interviews with participants conducted over three years. Many were on a not-for-attribution basis because of litigation and nondisclosure agreements. We reviewed numerous texts and emails exchanged among Mr. Moonves, CBS executives and board members, including those quoted above.

Through a spokesman, Mr. Moonves declined to comment. Ms. Redstone responded to questions either directly or through a spokesperson, and participated in fact-checking.

‘Does not have the requisite business judgment’

That Ms. Redstone would ever be in a position to challenge Mr. Moonves — or any of her father’s other handpicked male executives — once seemed unfathomable to anyone who knew the family’s dynamic. The irascible Mr. Redstone had belittled and marginalized his daughter (and had driven his son, Brent, to abandon the business and family entirely and retreat to a Colorado ranch). 

Mr. Redstone had long disparaged his daughter to Viacom executives, board members — practically anyone who would listen. He pelted her with profanity-laced emails and faxes, according to several former Viacom executives who were copied on the missives. When his longtime lawyer and confidant, George Abrams, among those who saw the messages, begged Mr. Redstone not to use such hurtful language, he erupted, insisting he’d call his daughter whatever he pleased.

By 2007, father and daughter were barely speaking, communicating through faxes and lawyers. Fissures within the family were so widely known within CBS that employees would joke that the Redstones gave each other subpoenas for Christmas.

In a letter to trustees of his family trust that year, Mr. Redstone stated bluntly that “Ms. Redstone does not have the requisite business judgment and abilities to serve as chairman.”

He took his disparaging views public in a letter to Forbes that July: “While my daughter talks of good governance, she apparently ignores the cardinal rule of good governance that the boards of the two public companies, Viacom and CBS, should select my successor.”

‘If there are any stories out there, we need to know’

When he was healthy, Mr. Redstone seemed certain that his daughter should not succeed him. That all appeared to change as his health, ability to speak and mental capacity deteriorated, especially after he ejected his romantic companions from his Beverly Hills mansion.

Over time, he increasingly depended on his daughter for his care and to interpret his wishes. Ms. Redstone emerged as his heir apparent, a powerful executive in her own right and the de facto chairman of her father’s companies. This was the situation deemed intolerable by Mr. Moonves and his allies.

As the CBS board contemplated the “nuclear” option in early 2018, Mr. Moonves was well aware that far more was at stake than just the Redstone family’s corporate control.

After articles in The New York Times and The New Yorker about Harvey Weinstein’s serial abuse of women ushered in the #MeToo era, which encouraged sexual assault victims to speak publicly, rumors began circulating that Mr. Moonves would soon be another major media executive to be felled by accusations of misconduct. Ms. Redstone heard those rumors, too.

“There is a lot of noise here at CES,” she emailed another board member, referring to the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2018.

According to another widespread rumor, Ronan Farrow, who had written the Weinstein exposé for The New Yorker, was at work on an article about Mr. Moonves.

Not all CBS directors were eager to get to the bottom of the rumors, but after Ms. Redstone’s prodding, they hired Michael Aiello, a partner at Weil Gotshal & Manges, to interview Mr. Moonves about any potential accusations that could become public. Little did Ms. Redstone realize that her own future would turn on revelations about Mr. Moonves’s past sexual misconduct.

“If there are any stories out there, we need to know,” Mr. Aiello began a call with Mr. Moonves on Jan. 16, 2018, according to a lawyer’s notes of the interview that were reviewed by The Times.

Mr. Moonves said there were two instances of possible concern, both decades in the past, long before his employment by CBS.

In the first, a young actress had come in for a meeting when he was at Warner Bros. He didn’t know her. He said that he had exposed himself and that she “ran out of room,” according to the notes.

“Let me take a step back,” Mr. Aiello said. “What does ‘exposed’ mean?”

This time, Mr. Moonves said they had engaged in consensual oral sex. Afterward, he heard from her manager that the actress was “upset.” The manager said that he had gotten calls from The Times, and that there was “buzz” about what had happened.

The second incident, Mr. 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. In any event, he said, the sex was consensual.

That was pretty much the end of the investigation. No one asked Mr. Moonves the names of the women, let alone tried to hear their accounts.

Mr. Aiello assured the board that while there had been times when Mr. Moonves might have been “clumsy” and made “unwanted advances,” there was nothing to worry about. Asked by one director for details about any incidents, Mr. Aiello seemed squeamish. He said that the board “didn’t want to know” and that he “didn’t want to go there.”

Mr. Aiello declined comment for the book and didn’t respond to requests for comment on this article.

Later that month, Ms. Redstone had lunch alone with Mr. 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 compete or be acquired by another company. As she had 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 Mr. Moonves on board?

He said he was.

Mr. Moonves, she said, was essential to the plan. There was also the delicate issue of the #MeToo rumors. Ms. Redstone asked Mr. Moonves if there was any truth to them.

He told her to look him in the eyes. He assured her there was nothing to be concerned about.

‘A public war for 6 months’

In May, as the “nuclear” option loomed, Mr. Moonves was clearly worried about Ms. Redstone’s concerns. Even if he thought he had done nothing wrong, sexual abuse accusations alone — should they ever become public — were potentially ruinous to him and fatal to any lawsuit against the Redstones.

Mr. Moonves anguished over the decision, even trying to back out of the carefully orchestrated attack. In a series of texts produced in the Delaware litigation, he wrote to CBS’s head of communications, his close ally Gil Schwartz, on May 13:

“I can’t do this. I do not want to file. It will be a public war for 6 months. I am not emotionally prepared for this. I would rather leave. Sorry.”

It fell to Bruce Gordon, the board confidant, to coax Mr. Moonves back. Mr. Gordon wasn’t entirely surprised that Mr. Moonves was wavering. But he was convinced that a merger was not in the interest of CBS shareholders and had to be stopped. 

The CBS board convened by phone that day to consider the attack on the Redstone family. With the meeting in progress, Mr. Gordon texted with Mr. Moonves, alternately sympathizing and cajoling: “I really don’t think you want to do this. You are destroying your credibility.”

“I am not ready for the fight,” Mr. Moonves replied. “I can’t do it. 6 months of attacks. No.”

Mr. Moonves agonized that if he supported the board vote to dilute the Redstones’ voting power and to file the ensuing lawsuit, Ms. Redstone would attack him with all the ammunition she could muster. If he didn’t, he’d lose the support of the board members still loyal to him.

“I am sick either way,” Mr. Moonves added. “I have never felt worse.” He continued, “A public spectacle.” Ms. Redstone “wants to run it. Let’s let her.”

Minutes later, Mr. Gordon texted Mr. Moonves that it was time for him to join the board call.

“I think we will add you on momentarily. You ready?”

Somehow Mr. Gordon had talked him back from the brink. Mr. Moonves had done another about-face and was ready to go ahead.

“Less is more,” Mr. Gordon advised him. “Leave us the flexibility to work details this week.”

Mr. Moonves joined the board call in progress just after 3 p.m. In minutes of the meeting reviewed by The Times, he said the board members had his full support in its decision to block the merger and sue the Redstones.

The board members on the call essentially had to choose between Ms. Redstone and Mr. Moonves and believed Mr. Moonves to be essential to the health of the enterprise. It voted unanimously that a merger with Viacom was not in the interest of CBS shareholders except for the Redstones.

The board members voted unanimously to go ahead with the plan.

After the vote, Mr. Gordon checked in with Mr. Moonves.

“You ok?” he texted.

“Yes,” Mr. Moonves answered. It was only about 5:40 p.m., but he was already drinking. “On my third vodka and second egg roll. Go time.”

As the evening went on, Mr. Moonves was still worrying about Ms. Redstone in texts to Joseph Ianniello, CBS’s chief operating officer and a close ally. “She will come after me big time. I know you have my back!!! She threw us under the bus when not under pressure. Now??? Wow … She will be enraged.”

An hour and a half later, Mr. Moonves threw down the gauntlet.

“Mattresses tomorrow am,” he texted Mr. Ianniello, in a reference to “The Godfather.” “And take the gun. We need it.”

The next morning, May 14, Ms. Redstone was at her apartment high in the tower of the Pierre Hotel in New York. Central Park sprawled outside her windows, its landscape a vivid green with spring foliage.

At 9:30 a.m. she received an email saying there would be a special CBS board meeting that Thursday. That was the first that Ms. Redstone had heard about any special board meeting.

She called one of her lawyers, Christopher Austin at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in New York.

“What’s this about a board meeting?”

“I’m afraid it’s worse than that,” Mr. Austin replied. “You’ve been sued. In Delaware.”

“What?”

Mr. Austin outlined the claims: Ms. Redstone was plotting to replace the CBS directors. She had violated her duty to shareholders. Her fellow board members wanted to strip her, her father and her family of their control. As she saw it, they wanted to steal the company her father had built.

Ms. Redstone wandered through the apartment in a daze. She had just decided to drop the merger idea if Mr. Moonves didn’t support it. For all their difficulties, she believed she and Mr. Moonves were friends.

At least that’s what she had thought.

In Los Angeles it was just after 6:30 a.m., so Ms. Redstone texted Rob Klieger, her lawyer and fellow CBS director.

“I’ve been sued in Delaware. Call me. They’ve declared war.”

‘I am frankly ashamed’

CBS won Round 1 of the court battle, gaining a temporary restraining order preventing the Redstones from rewriting the bylaws or replacing the board members. But a new factor in the continued tenure of Mr. Moonves was looming outside the courtroom.

The rumor that Ronan Farrow was working on a Moonves article for The New Yorker turned out to be true. On July 27, the magazine published an exposé featuring the accounts of six women: “Les Moonves and CBS face allegations of sexual misconduct.”

After reading the article, Ms. Redstone could barely contain her anger and frustration. All of it had come as a shock, notwithstanding the months of rumors.

She and Mr. Klieger were astonished that no one from the board or CBS had called them after the article came out. Yet the independent directors, those not aligned with Ms. Redstone and for the most part staunch supporters of Mr. Moonves,  had gone ahead without consulting them and issued a public statement saying Mr. Moonves had the board’s “full support.”

Ms. Redstone fired off a letter to her fellow directors.

“I am frankly ashamed to sit on a board with independent directors who have demonstrated such blind allegiance to senior management and repeatedly failed to act in the best interests of the company, its employees and its shareholders,” the letter began. (The letter was reviewed by The Times.)

She was especially critical of the board’s previous investigation of the rumors about Mr. Moonves. Mr. Aiello’s interview had seemed, to her, perfunctory at best. How could the board have expressed its support for Mr. Moonves when it had done almost nothing to investigate?

“While rumors and allegations are not fact, they do require board action, particularly given the intensity with which they were circulating,” she wrote. “The board does not discharge its obligations by asking the C.E.O. if he engaged in any misconduct and taking his word for it when he says he did not.”

She added that she had nothing to do with the New Yorker’s investigation: “I have never spoken to Ronan Farrow, nor have I spoken with any of the women who have leveled accusations against Les.”

‘We all did that’

The board convened by phone on Monday morning, July 30, in executive session, which meant Mr. Moonves was excluded. Mr. Klieger and Ms. Redstone participated from offices at Cleary Gottlieb.

By then, sexual misconduct allegations had led to the firing of media celebrities like Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose. CBS itself, like many companies, had issued public statements that such conduct wouldn’t be tolerated. Despite this, a cadre of CBS directors had no interest in discussion and had already made up their minds to support Mr. Moonves, according to the accounts of several directors who were at the meeting.

Arnold Kopelson, who won a best-picture Academy Award for producing “Platoon,” was especially ardent in his support for Mr. Moonves, dismissing the New Yorker incidents as ancient history. He kept repeating that it was pilot season, when CBS most needed Mr. Moonves’s golden touch.

At another point, according to those in the room, he insisted, “We all did that,” referring to the allegations against Mr. Moonves. Mr. Kopelson subsequently emailed all his fellow directors: “I don’t care if a hundred women come forward. Les is our leader and we have to stand behind him.” (Other directors confirmed these remarks; Mr. Kopelson died not long after these events. The Times reviewed a copy of his email to the directors.)

There was also considerable talk about the likely negative reaction on Wall Street if Mr. Moonves was suspended, given that he was closely linked with CBS’s success.

The directors didn’t have to stay until midnight to resolve their differences. They seemed only too happy to embrace a suggestion from Mr. Klieger, the Redstone lawyer and board member, to wait until they heard from the outside lawyers hired for an independent investigation — anything to delay removing Mr. Moonves. The meeting adjourned in less than an hour.

Amid intense speculation about Mr. Moonves’s fate, CBS issued a statement saying that the board was “in the process of selecting outside counsel to conduct an independent investigation” and that “no other action was taken on this matter at today’s board meeting.”

Few were satisfied, either on Wall Street or beyond.

But unlike Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer or Charlie Rose, Mr. Moonves had survived.

‘Naïveté about what he needs to disclose’

In the wake of the New Yorker article, CBS directors had finally agreed that the company needed an independent investigation. But even then, the warring factions couldn’t agree on a firm. So they compromised by hiring lawyers from two different firms — Mary Jo White, a former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission and a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, and Nancy Kestenbaum, a former federal prosecutor and a partner at Covington & Burling.

Their investigation focused less on the instances uncovered by The New Yorker and more on the two that Mr. Moonves disclosed when Mr. Aiello interviewed him the previous year: the actress, Bobbie Phillips, and the television executive, Phyllis Golden-Gottlieb.

Only now did the lawyers learn that more than 20 years after the alleged incident, the actress’s manager, Marv Dauer, had been pressuring Mr. Moonves for months to cast Ms. Phillips, and that Mr. Moonves had approached CBS’s casting head about the matter. Ms. Phillips had even been offered a part without having to audition or submit a tape.

This revelation came as a bombshell to the lawyers. A 30-year-old allegation of a sexual assault was one thing. But the casting conversation had just happened. It suggested that Mr. Moonves had wanted to cover up the incident, using company resources to silence a potential threat. And he hadn’t told them about it.

Ms. White and Ms. Kestenbaum briefed members of the board. They gave an account of an interview they had with Mr. Moonves the previous day, touching on the police report, the actress and the incidents reported in The New Yorker, according to notes of the meeting reviewed by The Times. Ms. Kestenbaum summed up Mr. Moonves’s response: “There were times when he would feel an attraction, think it was mutual, make an overture, and if he got rebuffed, he would leave it alone.”

Ms. White continued, “Our sense is that whatever occurred, you don’t see that after he gets married. Appears to have a 14-year period without this activity. We asked him what else might be out there. He said there was a time when I was dating, there could be something there, but all consensual. He mentioned an encounter with a female doctor, which was rebuffed. Wouldn’t give the name or any details.”

Then Ms. Kestenbaum mentioned the revelations about the actress and her manager. Mr. Moonves’s lawyer “described this scenario as a shakedown,” Ms. White said, according to the notes.

“In our view, this raises serious concerns both with respect to candor and forthrightness and the fact that Les took steps with human resources of CBS,” Ms. Kestenbaum added.

Ms. White said the “other risk is what I would call naïveté about what he needs to disclose and what is risk,” adding, “No one heard about the actress and getting her a job.”

She seemed especially concerned that while Mr. Moonves recognized the personal risk — “his stomach is churning” — he didn’t recognize the larger risk to the company that needed to be disclosed.

Ms. Kestenbaum continued: “In light of recent events, with the casting director, we are recommending that there be a change in status. We now think there is something new. Troubling.”

“This is a deal breaker,” she concluded.

‘And now the end is here’

This was effectively the end of Mr. Moonves’s career at CBS. He was fired on Sept. 9, 2018. With him gone, the “nuclear option” lawsuit collapsed just days later, when both sides agreed to dismiss the case. CBS and Viacom merged in 2019, and were renamed Paramount Global.

Ms. Redstone had finally prevailed. But the empire she now controlled was beset by new competitive threats and upheavals in the media landscape.

There’s no question that combining CBS and Viacom allowed the company to gain greater scale. But Wall Street analysts were skeptical. And by the measure that Sumner Redstone cared most about — the stock price — the merger has failed to stem the company’s decline. The combined market capitalization of Viacom and CBS was $30 billion when the merger was announced in 2019. Paramount Global’s valuation is about half that. It was up against competitors that were many times larger: Amazon (market capitalization of over $1 trillion), Netflix (about $160 billion) and Walt Disney (about $200 billion).

While its competitors seized the opportunities presented by the digital revolution, Viacom and CBS lost precious years to their internal struggles. It’s safe to say the intracompany warfare before 2018 delivered the worst possible outcome — neither a merger of CBS and Viacom nor a sale to someone else.

It’s not clear to what extent Mr. Redstone understood or was able to savor his daughter’s win. Peter Bart, who was a longtime editor of Variety and close to Mr. Redstone, was granted a rare visit in 2019.

“His withered hand signaled a greeting, or the semblance of one,” Mr. Bart reported in a column for Deadline Hollywood. “His eyes flickered weakly, but his effort at conversation was reduced to a grunt, mixed with an occasional scream of rage and frustration over his limitations.” Mr. Redstone was bedridden, being fed intravenously, and “a team of nurses and conservators stand by for needed assistance,” Mr. Bart observed.

On the morning of Aug. 11, 2020, Mr. Redstone’s nurse called Ms. Redstone to tell her she thought the end was near.

Ms. Redstone told the nurse to put warmers on her father’s hands and to hold him. She kept the phone line open so her father could hear her talk.

Over the next several hours, she reviewed his life’s accomplishments. She promised to take care of the family and to nurture the business empire he had created. “It will be here forever,” she assured him. “I love you,” she said over and over.

Finally the nurse told her that Mr. Redstone had quietly stopped breathing.

He was 97. National Amusements, the family’s holding company, announced his death, describing him as “the self-made businessman, philanthropist and World War II veteran who built one of the largest collections of media assets in the world.”

Despite the father and daughter’s late-in-life reconciliation, Ms. Redstone could never be certain she had gained her father’s love or approval given his impaired faculties.

Just after Mr. Redstone died, Ms. Redstone reached out to Tad Jankowski, her father’s friend and longtime business colleague, for reassurance. Had she done the right thing? she wondered, citing the changes on the Viacom board and the firing of Mr. Moonves. Would her father have approved? Had he really loved her?

What could he say? Mr. Jankowski emphasized that Mr. Redstone had loved a fight and loved to win. Ms. Redstone had never given up. He would be proud of her.

Mr. Redstone’s remains were flown to his hometown, Boston. Ms. Redstone and two of her children accompanied the hearse to the family plot at Sharon Memorial Park. Because of the pandemic, no one else was present except for Ms. Redstone’s ex-husband, a rabbi, who conducted the burial ceremony.

The gathering was so intimate that Ms. Redstone felt no need to restrain her emotions. She knelt so close to the grave her children worried she might fall in. Between bouts of crying, she told her father everything she had ever wanted to say to him.

Finally she stopped. “Is there anything else?” she asked.

Her daughter reminded her that Mr. Redstone had asked that Frank Sinatra’s recording of “My Way” be played at his funeral. Ms. Redstone had always cringed on the many occasions her father insisted on listening to it. But now she asked her daughter to pull up the lyrics on her phone. Ms. Redstone began singing:

And now the end is here

And so I face that final curtain

She struggled through the five verses, each ending with the refrain:

“I did it my way.”

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of one of the attorneys hired by CBS directors to do an independent investigation of allegations against Les Moonves. She is Mary Jo White, not Mary Beth White.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

James B. Stewart is a columnist at The Times and the author of nine books, most recently “Deep State: Trump, the FBI and the Rule of Law.” He won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism, and is a professor of business journalism at Columbia University. More about James B. Stewart

Rachel Abrams is a senior producer and reporter for the television documentary series “The New York Times Presents.” She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting that exposed sexual harassment and misconduct. More about Rachel Abrams

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 12, 2023, Section BU, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Redstone Family Drama. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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