Report says Les Moonves 'deliberately lied' to attorneys investigating his misconduct

Former CBS CEO Les Moonves was ousted in September after a series of stories in which women alleged sexual harassment or misconduct on his part. CBS then launched an investigation into Moonves behavior which would be used to determine whether he was eligible to receive a settlement. The final report hasn’t been released yet but the NY Times has seen it and Tuesday it published a preview. The report claims that Moonves “deliberately lied” to investigators.

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The report, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times, says Mr. Moonves “engaged in multiple acts of serious nonconsensual sexual misconduct in and outside of the workplace, both before and after he came to CBS in 1995.” The report includes previously undisclosed allegations of sexual misconduct against him.

The lawyers who conducted the inquiry wrote that they had spoken with Mr. Moonves four times and found him to be “evasive and untruthful at times and to have deliberately lied about and minimized the extent of his sexual misconduct.”…

Mr. Moonves told lawyers for CBS in January, and again in August, that an unnamed actress had accused him of sexually assaulting her in the 1990s. But he did not disclose that the manager had pushed him to find her work, or that Mr. Moonves had used CBS resources to do so. Investigators also discovered that Mr. Moonves had deleted many of his hundreds of texts with Mr. Dauer, and handed over his son’s iPad instead of his own.

The 59-page report also contains allegations of misconduct which haven’t been made public before, several of which are pretty shocking:

Investigators wrote that they had found that Mr. Moonves “received oral sex from at least 4 CBS employees under circumstances that sound transactional and improper to the extent that there was no hint of any relationship, romance, or reciprocity (especially given what we know about his history of more or less forced oral sex with women with whom he has no ongoing relationship).”…

Investigators wrote that they had received “multiple reports” about a network employee who was “on call” to perform oral sex on Mr. Moonves.

“A number of employees were aware of this and believed that the woman was protected from discipline or termination as a result of it,” the lawyers wrote. “Moonves admitted to receiving oral sex from the woman, his subordinate, in his office, but described it as consensual.”

The woman did not respond to the investigators’ requests for an interview.

Mr. Levander, Mr. Moonves’s lawyer, said Mr. Moonves had “never put or kept someone on the payroll for the purpose of sex.”

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That’s quite a denial. He doesn’t deny it happened only that this woman was kept on the payroll for that purpose. Yeah, okay. That’s convincing.

The final report will be handed over to the CBS Board next week but a final decision on what to do isn’t expected until next month.

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