Unscripted, p.31
Unscripted, page 31
The significance of Wednesday wasn’t clear to Dauer. Maybe Moonves would come up with a better part than “Erica.” He hoped so.
Dauer briefed Phillips on his conversation with Moonves and managed to make matters worse. After he repeated Moonves’s comments—that if she talked, “I’m finished,” and that she was the only one who could bring him down—she started to panic. She wondered: Would Moonves consider other ways to keep her quiet once he realized that getting her a part hadn’t worked? She wouldn’t put it past him, given what he’d already done to her. She no longer felt safe.
Moonves brooded over the latest developments. He called Peter Golden, who confirmed Phillips had declined the offer. There was little more Moonves could do given the pending investigation and the fact that Phillips had hired a lawyer. Finally, at 6:00 p.m. he called one of his lawyers, Ron Olson, and disclosed that the actress’s manager from all those years ago had been pressuring him to find her a part and that the actress herself—the one who had given him a blow job in his office at Warner Bros.—had hired a lawyer.
At 9:45 p.m. Olson, joined by Moonves’s lawyer Dan Petrocelli, reached Aiello, who had conducted the interview with Moonves in January and advised the board it had nothing to worry about. Petrocelli told him a few things were going to emerge during Moonves’s interview on Monday. First was an incident involving a doctor: he’d made a “pass” at her years ago, which she rejected.
Then Petrocelli turned to the subject of the actress, still not disclosing any names. Moonves had had a sexual encounter with her in his office. He’d said that in January. But now there was more: “Fast-forward to last December 2017,” as Aiello described what Petrocelli told him. “This talent agent said this woman was making noises and maybe Les could get her some work so that she doesn’t complain. Les, according to Dan, didn’t do anything at the time and didn’t hear anything more,” according to Aiello’s notes of the call.
Aiello continued, “Around the time of the Ronan Farrow article, the talent agent called and repeated the 2017 conversation, and [Moonves] said he’d find her something so she doesn’t complain. According to Dan, Les asked his casting person if there was something for her. I didn’t write it down—but I think she was Canadian, from Canada, and the production person called someone in Canada to see if there was anything for her. They offered her a small scene, $1,500 dollars, she passed on it, nothing happened.” Then she had hired a lawyer.
Petrocelli gave a similar account to Tu, CBS’s chief legal adviser.
This was such a drastically abbreviated account of what had actually happened—a version in which Moonves and the “agent” had had only three exchanges—that it suggests Moonves made the fundamental mistake of failing to tell his own lawyers the full truth about what had actually happened.
Aiello also briefed Bruce Gordon on the disclosures.
All of this set the stage for the pivotal interview of Moonves by the Debevoise and Covington lawyers, which took place in person at Debevoise’s offices in New York at 8:51 a.m. on Monday, August 13.
“Moonves wants to fully cooperate,” Petrocelli began. “He has a contractual duty to cooperate. He has an interest in a prompt and fair resolution of this. He is a supporter of this process.” But “Klieger and Redstone have taken direct aim at Moonves. Klieger himself, who is a trial lawyer, is also a member of the committee that is liaising with you, which is totally inappropriate.” As a result, he instructed Moonves to withhold some information, for fear that Klieger and Shari would use it against him.
The first incident Moonves discussed in any detail was the police report filed by Phyllis Golden-Gottlieb. Moonves said, “It was oral sex and it was consensual,” and when asked for more detail, said, “We had a drink at a bar. In my car, we started kissing. Her claim was that it happened at lunch in a parking lot in broad daylight.” He added, “We were friends. She was flirty. I knew her in previous jobs. One may have claimed she was chasing me more than I was chasing her. Maybe. It was thirty-two years ago.”
Contrary to his assurances to Gil Schwartz that he’d told two board members about the police report, Moonves told the lawyers he hadn’t told anyone on the board—or anyone else, except his wife—because he deemed it “personal.”
Asked if there were other incidents, Moonves mentioned the “actress” and her “manager,” but Petrocelli advised him to withhold their names. Moonves said the manager had called him in December.
“Do you remember so-and-so?” the manager had asked, according to Moonves.
“Yes,” Moonves replied.
“She is making noises about you.”
Moonves explained that “I had a meeting with her. She performed oral sex on me. Her claim was different than that. That’s what he’s telling me. He said, ‘Remember when she came to see you? After she came to see you, she said she was unhappy, back then.’ ” The manager had added, “You know actresses.”
“I don’t know why. It was all fine,” Moonves had told him. “But from her point of view, it wasn’t. That was the end of it. I didn’t hear from her again, until this past December. He said, ‘She’s making noises. Some of her friends are talking to her.’ ”
A lawyer asked how the encounter had ended.
“The oral sex was completed. I remember pleasantries. She left,” he said.
As the questioning continued, Moonves speculated that Shari had triggered the investigation by Aiello based on a preposterous rumor that during a meeting in Las Vegas, he and Ianniello had come on to women while wearing bathrobes, the newly potent symbol of the #MeToo movement.
“Five years ago, we had a meeting in Vegas,” Moonves explained. “Nothing happened.” But Shari “called an emergency meeting to discuss me and Ianniello and sexual harassment. There were stories explained to us that made no sense about me and Joe being in bathrobes and beating up people.” He added, “I was probably in shock when I heard it.” He added, “Aiello said what Shari did was almost criminal.”
Moonves told the lawyers the only incidents that concerned him were the two he had reported to Aiello—the police report and the actress whose manager had called. The “six stories in The New Yorker never entered my mind,” he said.
The lawyers spent relatively little time on those incidents or the substance of the New Yorker article. They’d already pretty much decided that the incidents were too old to be relevant to whether Moonves needed to be immediately suspended.
Moonves did score a few points in his defense. Illeana Douglas had told The New Yorker that Moonves had retaliated by getting her agent at CAA to drop her. But Moonves explained that her agent had dropped her because Martin Scorsese, her then-boyfriend, had moved to another agency, and CAA was representing her only as a favor to Scorsese. It had nothing to do with any retaliation by Moonves. And the idea that he’d locked Janet Dulin Jones in his office was absurd—he said his office didn’t have a lock or remote switch. Perhaps Jones had been confused. The door did have a magnetic catch that had to be released by pushing an adjacent button. But he hadn’t been trying to lock anyone in.
Still, even if correct, these were relatively small details in a long article. As Moonves had acknowledged in his statement to the magazine, there had been incidents where his behavior had been inappropriate.
After nearly four hours, the interview started to wind down. Moonves again expressed his concerns about leaks and took a swipe at Klieger.
“Rob Klieger doesn’t just want to win a lawsuit,” he maintained. “He wants to destroy me. It’s really bad. And he’s capable of doing virtually anything. Any of this information can and will be used against me.”
“Why?” White asked.
“He works with Shari. He’s better able to do it than she is. I’m not a weak person. It’s really worn me down. I don’t trust him at all. It’s not enough to win the game. You have to destroy your opponent.”
EPISODE 6
“This Is a Deal Breaker”
The next day Dan Petrocelli spoke again to Aiello and reported that Moonves had been interviewed by the lawyers, and “we had a good conversation.” Aiello asked if the issue of the actress and her manager had come up. Petrocelli answered in a way Aiello considered “odd”: it had come up, but Moonves hadn’t provided any “details” because “I have a real concern about confidentiality,” Petrocelli told him.
Unsure about exactly what Petrocelli had or hadn’t disclosed, Aiello decided he’d better tell White and Kestenbaum about his talks with Moonves’s lawyers. He described their recent phone call and said Petrocelli had brought up the incident involving the doctor in a previous phone call. Moonves had tried to kiss her, but he “didn’t remember any of the more salacious stuff,” Petrocelli had said. “That was the extent of that.”
Then he summarized the incident with the actress, adding crucial details about Moonves’s interactions with her “agent”: “This weekend, I don’t know if it was Saturday or Sunday—the talent agent again called Les,” Aiello told them. “He said the woman was very unhappy with the small part. She hired an attorney. No other details.” He repeated that there were just three contacts between Moonves and the agent: one in December; the next about the time of the Farrow article; and the third the past weekend, when Moonves learned she was unhappy and had hired a lawyer.
This revelation about an “agent” came as a bombshell to the lawyers. A thirty-year-old allegation of a sexual assault was one thing. But this had just happened. It suggested Moonves had succumbed to pressure to cover up the incident, using company resources to silence a potential threat. And he hadn’t told them about it. If Moonves was covering up this, what else might he be hiding?
The lawyers were shaken. They called for an immediate follow-up interview with Moonves, which was set for Wednesday afternoon.
At 4:00 p.m. White and Kestenbaum briefed the special committee: Gordon, Klieger, and Griego. They gave an account of the previous day’s interview with Moonves, touching on the police report, the actress, and the incidents reported in The New Yorker. Kestenbaum summed up 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.”
White continued, “Our sense is that whatever occurred, you don’t see that after he gets married. Appears to have a fourteen-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 Kestenbaum mentioned the revelations from Aiello about the actress and her manager. “Petrocelli described this scenario as a shakedown,” White said.
“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,” Kestenbaum added.
White said that, “until we heard this example,” the lawyers were inclined to leave Moonves in place as chief executive while the investigation continued “and speed up getting to the end line on ultimate findings of the investigation. We have a different view now.”
Kestenbaum noted that given Moonves’s tendency to act on a sexual attraction, “there could well be more” incidents.
White went on, the “other risk is what I would call naivete about what he needs to disclose and what is risk. No one heard about the actress and getting her a job. Petrocelli has recognized that Les needs to be disclosing here. He did disclose late to both Larry and Weil what happened here.” She seemed especially concerned that while Moonves recognized the personal risk—“his stomach is churning”—he didn’t recognize that there was a larger risk to the company that needed to be disclosed.
She paused, and Gordon urged her to “keep going. You concluded that for the reasons you just stated, you weren’t going to recommend a change of status, but changed your mind.”
Kestenbaum answered. “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.
* * *
—
Moonves’s follow-up interview with the Debevoise and Covington lawyers began at 4:28 p.m. on August 15, also by phone. It focused almost entirely on the Moonves-Phillips-Dauer saga. Moonves faced what must have been the agonizing challenge of reconciling what had actually happened; what he’d told his lawyers; what he’d told Aiello in January; and what he thought he could still conceal.
Moonves walked through the narrative, mentioning the first call from Dauer the previous December. “It didn’t make me feel good,” he acknowledged, in what was surely an understatement. “That was a time of great fear. I was concerned about it. He did mention she’s an actress and always looking for work.”
What did Dauer mean by that? Kestenbaum asked.
“See if you can find anything for her.” He added, “I didn’t respond. I left it there. Frankly, I didn’t do anything about it for many months.”
Moonves said there was unlikely to be any record of the call: “We don’t log the telephone calls.”
Moonves minimized his interactions with Dauer. “He would call me about various actors. One day he asked if I would meet two of his clients.” As for the actress, he’d ask, “ ‘Is there anything going on out there? Any potential roles for her?’ These were all phone calls—there were a couple lunches thrown in. And that would basically be it. He’d call about her and some of the other clients. That would be it.”
There was no mention of texts.
Pressed for more detail about his interactions with Dauer, Moonves responded, “Purely a guess, maybe five or six phone calls. He would generally call me. He called me about other things also. He was a big baseball fan. He sent over an autographed baseball for my son. We probably also communicated by email or text. It wasn’t a lot of contact.”
“We’d be interested in those,” Kestenbaum said.
Moonves said he understood.
By the time of his second meal with Dauer, “there was more of a sense of urgency about ‘You haven’t gotten her anything,’ ” Moonves said. “I hadn’t done a single thing during this whole time to attempt to get her a job.”
“Did you think he was threatening you?” Kestenbaum asked.
“No. I thought her manager was just trying to relay what was going on,” Moonves said.
But after his lunch with Dauer on July 13, “I called Peter Golden and told him to look for something for her. I felt increasing pressure. I told Peter there is this actress. I mentioned #MeToo and didn’t give him specifics and said, ‘Can you find something?’ ” Moonves continued, “He understood what I was talking about. He attempted to find her work. When you say #MeToo . . . He understood this was a woman who was potentially making an accusation.”
White wondered why Moonves would have told Golden that.
“I told him because it was sort of true that after lunch with Marv, there was more pressure to find her something because I didn’t want her to go public with the story.”
The next Moonves heard was that the actress had rejected a part and hired a lawyer. He said he hadn’t been involved, but “I heard the money was too low and part too small. No idea what the part was. It was a CBS program and it never happened. I didn’t follow up on it.”
“Did you wrestle with whether it was appropriate to find her a part?” White asked.
“Yes,” Moonves answered. “However, I’ve done this a hundred times, not with accusers, I would call Golden a hundred times to look for something. Yes, this was somewhat unusual. I did think about whether this was appropriate.”
“What was the thinking?” White asked.
“Is she going to come out with a bad story about me or try to get something done here?” Moonves said. “I realize the circumstances were not great. I thought it was relatively minor. I do this a lot, asking Golden for parts.”
Moonves said he didn’t remember if he’d told Aiello about the manager during their January interview, but he thought he would have, given that the call from Dauer had come just weeks earlier.
And Moonves addressed his curious failure to bring up the manager at Monday’s session. The “reason I didn’t bring it up on Monday is because we were going chronologically. Big events happened in July.” He said he’d already told Aiello and Tu and assumed they would be passing along the information.
* * *
—
The next day Petrocelli told Aiello that he’d gotten a letter from Eric George, a trial lawyer in Los Angeles who was representing Bobbie Phillips. He had bad news: George was threatening to sue both CBS and Moonves.
White and Kestenbaum briefed the special committee on the second Moonves interview four days later, focusing on Moonves’s effort to get work for Phillips. Kestenbaum said they were “willing to give Moonves the benefit of the doubt about the issue of his candor with us about this incident at Monday’s interview, although neither he nor Petrocelli made sufficiently clear that Moonves was omitting important information related to the incident with the actress and her manager.” But, she continued, “Moonves seemed to find it reasonable to seek work for the actress to keep her from coming out with a ‘bad story.’ As I previously mentioned during our meeting on Wednesday, his lack of judgment and awareness in this area is potentially a risk factor.”
