96
The System
ANOTHER RONAN FARROW special dropped in July of 2018. The eye-popping New Yorker piece detailed Les Moonves’s alleged pattern of vile behavior toward actresses, writers, and producers; if they rebuffed him, he actively set about derailing their careers. People like Illeana Douglas, who’d been cast in a CBS sitcom called Queens and was summoned to Moonves’s office, where, Farrow wrote, he lunged at her, pinned her down, and thrust himself against her. When she broke free, he warned Douglas to keep it to herself. （A moment from the story I’ll never forget: When a visibly shaken Douglas leaves the office, her skirt askew, Moonves’s assistant asks if she needs her parking validated.） Ultimately, he fired the noncompliant Douglas from the sitcom, which she saw as retaliation. Moonves later admitted he had tried to kiss her, but denied everything else.
Then there was the medical appointment at UCLA where, according to the article, Moonves grabbed the doctor and tried to force himself on her; when she pulled away, he stood by the exam table and proceeded to jerk off. Can anyone explain to me the impulse among so many otherwise smart, functional men to whip it out and do their business in front of women? I mean, what the hell?
As for Jeff Fager, Amy Brittain and Irin Carmon interviewed dozens of women for a Washington Post investigation into the culture he had fostered at 60 Minutes. Now it was time to give Fager the chance to respond to a particularly repellent allegation: that he once said to a woman at a company party, “Grab my dick. I’m hung like a horse.”
As Carmon tells it, CBS pushed back hard. The editor of the Post, Marty Baron of Spotlight fame, received several impassioned calls from people like Lesley Stahl and producer Ira Rosen （who’d had his own brushes with MeToo）， claiming Fager had been wrongly accused. CBS threatened to sue, and Baron insisted the reporters’ sources go on the record. When none were willing, the story was scrubbed of any references to Fager. （The Post would later refute Carmon’s claim that the paper had succumbed to external pressure, calling it “baseless and reprehensible.”）
It was a big blow to the two reporters, although Carmon got the last word, in dramatic fashion. Accepting an award for their reporting on Charlie Rose, she said from the podium:
The stories that we have been doing are about a system. The system has lawyers and a good reputation. It has publicists. It has a perfectly reasonable explanation about what happened. It has powerful friends that will ask if it’s really worth ruining the career of a good man based on what one woman says, what four women say, what 35 women say. Indeed, the system is sitting in this room…The system is still powerful men getting stories killed that I believe will one day see the light of day.
Jeff Fager—aka the system—was, in fact, sitting in the room.
Farrow’s New Yorker piece made good on Carmon’s belief—calling Fager out, describing how he enabled the bad behavior of male executives （including Michael Radutzky, who once threatened to throw a chair at a producer. Lori Beecher told me he’d backed her up against a wall until his face was an inch from hers and unloaded on her at the top of his lungs）。 Fager enabled the serial sleaze of Charlie Rose and others and got “handsy” with female staffers at parties after one drink too many （a high-ranking producer once told me about being in a cab with Fager when he asked her to “touch it,” apparently not talking about his elbow）。 I’d later learn they handed out NDAs at that place like candy on Halloween—part of the settlement for complaints about sexual harassment. Not a great look for a supposed bastion of truth-telling.
Ultimately, what took Fager down wasn’t the crime but the cover-up （also ironic—you’d think the head of a legendary investigative unit would know better than to make that mistake）。 With the internal probe underway, Fager sent the following text to Jericka Duncan, who was covering the story for the CBS Evening News:
If you repeat these false accusations without any of your own reporting to back them up you will be responsible for harming me…Be careful. There are people who lost their jobs trying to harm me.
Duncan read the veiled threat on the broadcast.
By year’s end, Fager was out, and so was Moonves. No wonder Les couldn’t recognize Fager’s misogyny—they were cut from the same cloth.
I think a lot about the onion that was 60 Minutes. The whole experience is a huge source of disappointment to this day. Whenever I hear that ticking stopwatch on TV, I wince, remembering Don Hewitt saying I was the future of the show…until I wasn’t.