What happened to Leslie Moonves?

Broadcasting giant CBS and former Chief Executive Leslie Moonves, who was ousted from the company in 2018 amid allegations of sexual harassment, have settled their contentious dispute over the longtime television executive’s exit package.

“The disputes between Mr. Moonves and CBS have now been resolved,” ViacomCBS said Friday afternoon in a statement.

In the joint statement with ViacomCBS, Moonves said he would donate the entire settlement award to charity. The amount was not disclosed.

The media company declined to discuss details of the settlement, but the company did not have to make any payments.

After an exhaustive four-month investigation, the company’s board of directors in December 2018 stripped Moonves of his $120-million severance over allegations of sexual misconduct.

The board had hired two law firms in August 2018 — Covington & Burling and Debevoise & Plimpton — to investigate Moonves’ conduct and CBS’ corporate culture.

The firms were retained days after the New Yorker magazine published an investigation that detailed allegations of misconduct against the executive by multiple women. Moonves, who resigned under pressure in September 2018, denied wrongdoing and contested the findings. He filed to have the matter resolved in arbitration, leading to the settlement announced Friday.

As part of the agreement, Moonves received some compensation from Covington & Burling, sources said.

The law firm’s handling of private information about individuals — including those who had accused Moonves of sexual harassment — became a major sticking point.

Leaked documents detailing findings of the investigators were funneled to the New York Times and became the basis of a series of stories. The leaks, which sources said were traced to Covington & Burling, weakened CBS’ case against Moonves. People who participated in the review, including Moonves, had been granted confidentiality. But some of the accusers’ identities soon became public.

ViacomCBS did not name Covington & Burling in the statement. Instead the company referenced a “contractor to CBS.”

“The cost of the settlement will be borne by the contractor,” Moonves and ViacomCBS said in the joint statement. “Mr. Moonves has decided to contribute the entire settlement amount to various charities. There will be no further comment regarding this settlement by Mr. Moonves or CBS.”

Covington & Burling declined to comment.

On Friday, Debevoise & Plimpton defended its conduct in the investigation.

“Debevoise is not party to any agreements with any parties concerning its work for CBS, and no one connected to the firm leaked any confidential information related to our work for CBS,” said a Debevoise spokesperson.

Moonves’ final contract, which was due to expire this year, made him eligible to receive an exit deal valued at about $180 million, but after the scandal, the CBS board said he would not be paid the severance money. In 2019, Moonves filed papers to have the matter decided in arbitration.

The agreement resolves a lingering dispute about the payments to Moonves, which was scheduled to go to arbitration hearings this summer.

A whopping amount of money that has been held in trust for potential payout to former CBS chief Leslie Moonves is going back to the company.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed Friday, ViacomCBS said that $120 million that has been held in trust for Moonves since he departed under duress in 2018 would “revert to the company.” The large entertainment conglomerate had previously set aside the cash as part of a potential severance payment to the longtime TV executive. CBS and its sibling Viacom merged in late 2019.

Moonves left his job as chairman and CEO of CBS Corp. in the wake of multiple allegations from women made in two articles published by The New Yorker accusing him of a series of incidents of sexual misconduct. Moonves declined the claims, and entered into arbitration with CBS over compensation he was owed as part of his departure from the company. “The disputes between Mr. Moonves and CBS have now been resolved, and on May 14, 2021, the parties dismissed the arbitration proceeding,” ViacomCBS said in its filing.

The cost of any settlement due Moonves “will be borne” by a CBS contractor, the executive and the company said in a joint statement. “Mr. Moonves has decided to contribute the entire settlement amount to various charities. There will be no further comment regarding this settlement by Mr. Moonves or CBS.”

CBS had placed the large sum in what it called a “grantor trust” that would be paid to Moonves “in the event that the Board determines that the Company is not entitled to terminate Mr. Moonves’s employment for cause, or in the event of a final determination in arbitration that the Company is not entitled to terminate Mr. Moonves’s employment for cause.”

An additional $20 million that would have been earmarked for Moonves’ severance was slated to be distributed to ” one or more charitable organizations that support the #MeToo movement and equality for women in the workplace,” according to a company statement in 2018. Those groups were designated by Moonves in consultation with CBS.

CBS in late January of 2018 announced it felt there were grounds to dismiss Moonves for cause. But the executive had the right to dispute its determination through an arbitration proceeding which he did in January of 2019. ViacomCBS did not reveal the results of the arbitration proceedings or say what caused them to end.

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CBS shareholders have reached a $14.75 million settlement in their securities lawsuit against Leslie Moonves and the network regarding how it dealt with the sexual misconduct allegations against the disgraced former chairman-CEO and how his previous #MeToo comments affected the company’s financial performance.

In a legal filing obtained by Variety on Monday, investors in CBS Corp. — which now, re-merged with Viacom, is called Paramount — wrote, “Lead Plaintiff and Defendants have negotiated, at arm’s length and with the assistance of an experienced and neutral mediator, a proposed settlement of all claims in this Action for $14,750,000 in cash. This resolution, which falls well within the range of possible approval, involved a thorough investigation, extensive motion practice, consultation with an expert on damages and loss causation, and a formal mediation involving rigorous and extensive negotiations.”

Representatives for CBS declined to comment on Monday.

The initial lawsuit was filed in August 2018, one month before Moonves stepped down from his longtime post at CBS after more than a dozen women accused him of sexual harassment. He has denied the allegations.

The CBS investors alleged in their suit that “throughout the putative class period, September 26, 2016 through December 4, 2018, inclusive, Defendants and Former Defendants made numerous materially false and misleading statements and/or omissions regarding the Company’s policies and corporate governance, the importance of key personnel, including Moonves, and other statements made to news media, which caused the price of the Company’s common stock to trade at artificially inflated prices, until the market learned of the false and misleading nature of the statements, and the Company’s stock price significantly declined.”

In January 2020, a federal judge in New York allowed the shareholder lawsuit against CBS Corp. to proceed based on the specificity of statements made by Moonves at a 2017 Variety conference. Judge Valerie Caproni of the Southern District of New York dismissed other claims in the securities fraud suit against CBS Corp. that asserted that CBS’ top leaders and board members should have known and acted on rumors of sexual misconduct allegations against Moonves as part of their fiduciary duty to protect the company controlled by Shari Redstone.

But Caproni allowed the suit to proceed based on statements Moonves made about the #MeToo movement and the then-recent firing of “CBS This Morning” host Charlie Rose after numerous women came forward with allegations of misconduct, some of which involved employees of his now-defunct PBS interview series “Charlie Rose.”

At Variety‘s November 2017 Innovate summit held in Los Angeles, Moonves spoke with now-co-editor-in-chief, then-business editor Cynthia Littleton about the state of the company, a conversation that included a discussion of the #MeToo movement and the allegations that led to Rose’s abrupt removal from “CBS This Morning.”

Moonves asserted that the shocking allegations then unfolding against Harvey Weinstein — the convicted movie mogul now in the midst of a criminal trial on sexual assault charges — and Rose had led the industry to “a watershed moment” and that “it’s important that a company’s culture will not allow for this. … There’s a lot we’re learning. There’s a lot we didn’t know.”

The judge ruled that Moonves’ statements at Variety‘s conference crossed the line because the executive must have known at the time that serious allegations of sexual misconduct from his past could easily surface.

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.”