27 More Women Accuse Charlie Rose of Harassment
After being accused of sexual harassment by eight different women and losing his positions at CBS News and PBS, Charlie Rose may have been staging a comeback. According to Page Six, Tina Brown said she was approached to produce a series from Rose, who wanted to interview other men accused of sexual misconduct. (She passed.) Now, in a brand-new investigation, 27 more women have accused Rose of harassment, putting his alleged misconduct back in the spotlight.
Back in November, CBS News fired longtime anchor Rose one day after eight women accused him of sexual harassment in an investigation by The Washington Post. His PBS show, Charlie Rose, was also dropped. Now, an additional 27 women have come forward saying Rose sexually harassed them over a period of 30 years. And the allegations, in a new report from the Post, are disturbing.
The newspaper interviewed 107 current and former employees at CBS News, and 24 others who worked with Rose at other companies. Fourteen CBS News employees and 13 employees of his other programs said Rose harassed them. And despite complaints to managers from 1986 through 2017, nothing was done about it.
In response to this new report, CBS said they received no human resources complaints against Rose, but they have mandated in-person sexual harassment training and started a working group to analyze the workplace environment. CBS News issued the following statement to the Post:
“Since we terminated Charlie Rose, we’ve worked to strengthen existing systems to ensure a safe environment where everyone can do their best work. Some of the actions we have taken have been reported publicly, some have not. We offer employees discretion and fairness, and we take swift action when we learn of unacceptable behavior.
That said, we cannot corroborate or confirm many of the situations described. We continue to look for ways to improve our workplace and this period of reflection and action has been important to all of us. We are not done with this process.”
Rose responded to the latest report with just one sentence: “Your story is unfair and inaccurate.” Back in November, he issued a statement apologizing for “inappropriate behavior.”
Here are some of the most shocking allegations from the new Post report:
He allegedly harassed women as early as the 1970s.
Joana Matthias, who was a research assistant at NBC News in 1976, told the Post Rose exposed his penis to her and touched her breasts while they worked together. “This other personality would come through, and the groping would happen,” she said.
By 1986, when he was working at CBS News, Annemarie Parr, who was working as a news clerk, said Rose once asked her, “Annemarie, do you like sex?” and “Do you enjoy it? How often do you like to have sex?” Parr told the newspaper she reported it to her boss, who laughed and said she didn’t have to be alone with Rose anymore.
Rose reportedly answered his door naked.
Beth Homan-Ross, who worked as an assistant producer in the 1980s for CBS’s show Nightwatch, where Rose was an anchor, was part of a lawsuit claiming the network was “offensive and hostile” to female employees. The lawsuit was settled in 1987 and the terms were kept confidential.
Homan-Ross told the Post when she would deliver materials to his house, he’d open the door naked, holding a towel, and would ask her to come into the bathroom while he took a shower. “It was a sexual land mine everywhere you stepped,” she said.
He reportedly groped a contributor during a commercial break.
In January 2012, when Rose was hosting CBS This Morning, Rose reportedly drew an unnamed contributor close during a commercial break, grabbed her buttock, and whispered to her, “Damn, you look good on TV.”
An assistant said he encouraged her to have sex with a female coworker.
At his PBS show, Charlie Rose, assistant Brooks Harris said Rose told her he hired her because he liked tall women, and also encouraged her to have sex with another woman, Sydney McNeal, in the office. “[Working for Rose] “made me question my intelligence, dignity and worth as a human being almost every day,” McNeal told the Post.
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