CBS Continues to Payout Settlement Money at 60 Minutes
/CBS crown jewel was more than a bit rusty behind the scenes.
The New York Times is out with a story about CBS’s flagship news show 60 Minutes and it is ugly to say the least.
The story basically says that 60 Minutes Executive Producer Jeff Fager, who was recently fired was a pig, but not as big of a pig as Don Hewitt the man that helped invent 60 Minutes.
The Times says that CBS continues to pay out a settlement to a woman who claimed that Mr. Hewitt sexually assaulted her on repeated occasions and destroyed her career. The settlement, reached in the 1990s, has been amended multiple times, including this year. In total, CBS has agreed to pay the former employee more than $5 million.
It’s all part of the report that CBS has hired investigators to present to them about the environment inside CBS.
The Times writes that the investigators’ report will be presented to the CBS board next week, during a period of reckoning for the company. CBS forced its longtime chief executive, Leslie Moonves, out of his job in September after he faced numerous allegations of sexual misconduct, which he has denied.
As for Fager, the Times writes that investigators wrote that Mr. Fager had behaved inappropriately with colleagues in several instances. They said they believed that he had “engaged in some type of sexually inappropriate conduct” toward a CBS employee who alleged in 2009 that he had groped her. Another CBS News employee alleged that Mr. Fager had tried to kiss her with an open mouth at a corporate event about six years ago. The report also said a female employee had been instructed to drive him and other producers to a legal brothel while reporting a story in Nevada.
“This is the first I am hearing some of these allegations about my personal conduct,” Mr. Fager wrote in an email to The Times. “I’m surprised and devastated to hear them from The New York Times since I was not given the opportunity by CBS investigators to respond to their accuracy.”
CBS declined to comment on the draft report, as did a representative for the board.
