Disgraced former news anchor Charlie Rose may want to put that reported comeback on hold. Permanently.
Also, CBS News has a lot of explaining to do.
Rose was tossed from his lofty media perches at CBS, PBS and Bloomberg News in November 2017 after 17 women accused him of various acts of sexual misconduct, including inappropriate comments, groping, lewd calls, walking around naked in front of colleagues, and making one colleague watch a sex scene with him from the movie “The Secretary.”
If you can believe it, there’s much, much more where that comes from, according to the Washington Post.
Another 27 women have come forward to allege sexual misconduct against Rose. The list of new accusers includes 14 women who say they worked with Rose at CBS, and another 13 women who claim they worked with him at various other media organizations. The allegations, which date back as far as 1976, are more of the same: Lewd remarks, inappropriate advances, and a lot of groping. So much groping.
That’s not even the worst of it: Rose appears to have enjoyed a network of ready and willing enablers at both CBS and PBS, according to the Post report, which includes interviews conducted over a five-month period with 131 women who’ve worked with the former anchor.
No fewer than three CBS managers were reportedly informed about Rose’s predacious inclinations. They turned a blind eye to it all. Yvette Vega, the longtime executive producer of Rose’s PBS show, was also reportedly alerted to his actions. She also did nothing, which is consistent with earlier reports alleging she tolerated and even hushed up the accusations. She has all but confessed to this, saying in a statement earlier this year that she wished she did more when she had the chance. Institutional negligence, it seems, runs deep at Rose’s former places of employment.
Rose, for his part, responded to the Post story with a simple statement that read, “Your story is unfair and inaccurate.” He declined say what, exactly, was unfair and inaccurate.
Talk about timing. Here Rose was, getting all ready to stage his big post-#MeToo comeback, glitzy press and all, and the Post goes and digs deeper into his reported history of abuse and misconduct. Life is just unfair, you know?
More seriously, though, how stupid does this plush Hollywood Reporter profile on Rose look now that the Post has published an additional report detailing additional acts of sexual misconduct?
The Hollywood Reporter talked about Rose earlier this year as “one of TV’s most feted journalists,” who one associate says is “focusing on trying to understand, [both] events and other people’s perception of them.” Rose is a “struggling man,” the profile added. When Rose, whose “journalistic accomplishments remain unassailable,” was fired last year from CBS and PBS, he left a “gaping hole.
Never forget that this Rose profile ends with this absurd quote: “[Rose is] one of the best interviewers in our lifetime, and he is now asking questions of himself.”
Stop. My heart bleeds.
