Charlie Rose Loses Two Jobs After Sexual Harassment Claims
by EG
Both CBS News and PBS have cut ties with interviewer Charlie Rose after several women have come forward with sexual harassment claims against him. The women describe a long-standing pattern of inappropriate behavior on the part of Rose toward women who worked for him, and others have backed up those claims.
Charlie Rose has been terminated by CBS News, network president David Rhodes announced Tuesday. The decision comes just one day after a Washington Post report detailing a pattern of coercion and harassment of women who worked — or aspired to work — on Rose’s eponymous nighttime talk show.
On Monday Bloomberg and PBS, which distributed Rose’s show, announced that they would cease to do so. At CBS News, Rose was a longtime correspondent at 60 Minutes and in 2012 was the lynchpin, along with Gayle King, in the network’s revamped morning show, CBS This Morning. Norah O’Donnell joined the show shortly after its launch in January 2012, and it has delivered its biggest morning audience to CBS News in 20 years.
In his statement Tuesday, Rhodes said that despite Rose's "important important journalistic contribution" to CBS, "there is absolutely nothing more important, in this or any organization, than ensuring a safe, professional workplace — a supportive environment where people feel they can do their best work. We need to be such a place."
Rose, 75, is the latest in a string of powerful men in the entertainment and news industries to be outed as an alleged serial harasser. For CBS News executives there was little choice but to part ways with Rose.
Some staffers at the network were in a state of shock over the disclosures, although Rose has been a target of multiple journalistic investigations in the wake of the bombshell disclosures about disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
It’s unclear who CBS News will tap to replace Rose. The network recently announced that Jeff Glor, a veteran of the network and a frequent fill-in anchor on CBS This Morning, as the new permanent anchor of the CBS Evening News. He is set to begin in mid-December. On Tuesday morning, King and O'Donnell anchored the show themselves, leading with the revelations about Rose.
The Washington Post report detailed the accounts of eight women who worked for Rose between the late 1990s and 2011. The reporting showed a pattern of behavior that included "unwanted sexual advances…including lewd phone calls, walking around naked…groping [women's] breasts, buttocks or genital areas."
Rose owned his program through his company Charlie Rose Inc., and none of the women worked for PBS or Bloomberg. The show was based at Bloomberg’s New York City headquarters.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.
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