The New Yorker’s account of sexual harassment allegations against CBS’s chief executive, Leslie Moonves, has many disturbing echoes of what has become a long list of predatory behavior by corporate executives.
But among everyone caught up in the #MeToo movement, only Mr. Moonves was so bold — or so reckless — as to start a civil war against his company’s controlling shareholder knowing, as he must have, about multiple media investigations into his behavior.
CBS’s board knew — or should have known — about potential problems with Mr. Moonves’s past behavior long before the news broke last week. Rumors had proliferated almost immediately after The New York Times and The New Yorker published their prizewinning exposés of the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in October. They intensified after Charlie Rose, a host of “CBS This Morning,” was fired in November.
By December, CBS executives had been told that reporters for The Times and The Wall Street Journal were asking around about sexual-harassment allegations involving Mr. Moonves, according to a person close to CBS. By early this year, CBS officials had spoken to a number of reporters about the allegations, this person said.
Rumors that The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow, author of the magazine’s piece on Mr. Weinstein, was about to break a story on Mr. Moonves swept through the ranks of CBS executives and board members. The rumors were so insistent that Shari Redstone, the CBS board member and vice chairwoman, who effectively controls both CBS and Viacom, asked Mr. Moonves point-blank whether there was any substance to the allegations, according to two people familiar with the conversation. Mr. Moonves said the allegations were false, they said.
Ms. Redstone also raised concerns about Mr. Moonves’s rumored behavior with other CBS directors, these people said. It isn’t clear what steps, if any, the board took to look into the matter. Ms. Redstone never got a response from the board.
Nonetheless, CBS’s board of directors decided to proceed with a lawsuit against the network’s controlling shareholder, Ms. Redstone’s holding company, seeking to strip it of its voting rights. In my interviews, I have found no evidence that directors even discussed Mr. Moonves’s potential vulnerability before making such a momentous decision.
This is especially surprising considering that the CBS board has some illustrious members. They include Martha Minow, a former dean at Harvard Law School; former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen; Bruce S. Gordon, a former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and Joseph A. Califano Jr., a former secretary of health, education and welfare.
CBS now says it is appointing an outside law firm to investigate Mr. Moonves and the broader culture at CBS.
A CBS spokesman declined to comment on behalf of the directors, and a spokeswoman for Ms. Redstone declined to comment. Mr. Moonves said in a statement that he might have made some women uncomfortable by making advances, but “I have never misused my position to harm or hinder anyone’s career.”
A critical part of the board’s investigation should be whether Mr. Moonves was truthful with CBS’s directors, including Ms. Redstone, and whether the board sufficiently dug into the rumors.
“If a board member asks a C.E.O. questions and the C.E.O. is less than candid, then that in itself is reason for termination,” said Charles M. Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.
“A company shouldn’t terminate someone simply because there are rumors,” Mr. Elson continued. “And we don’t know exactly what was asked and answered. But if a board member asked Moonves if something was going on and he said no, that’s misleading even if the allegations turn out to be false. That’s grounds for termination, because once someone misleads you, you can never trust them again.”
As it turned out, the rumors this spring inside CBS about an impending New Yorker article didn’t pan out — Mr. Farrow’s article, published on April 12, was about President Trump and The National Enquirer. Nor did The Times or The Wall Street Journal follow through with an article about Mr. Moonves’s alleged harassment. That may have given Mr. Moonves and CBS a false sense of security. On May 17, the CBS board authorized the lawsuit against Ms. Redstone’s holding company.
It’s hard to believe the board would have authorized the suit — whose goal, in part, was to protect Mr. Moonves in the face of a perceived threat from Ms. Redstone — if it had reason to believe that Mr. Moonves was facing serious accusations of misconduct.
“If you’re about to start a war, you don’t want the general leading the charge to be leaving the battlefield,” Mr. Elson said.
Last week, while most CBS directors were told that the New Yorker article was imminent, Ms. Redstone and two others appointed by her holding company were in the dark, according to the two people. Despite months of rumors, CBS hadn’t retained a law firm or begun any formal inquiry to determine the merits of the accusations.
That - yet-to-be-selected law firm will now have to ask some tough questions. One of the toughest is for Mr. Moonves, who decided to bet the company on a lawsuit when he, better than anyone, knew what skeletons were in his closet: What were you thinking?
