Open Secrets

This article by Reah Bravo, a former employee of Charlie Rose, is remarkable and courageous. First of all, good on her for calling out the ridiculous hack apologias of the anti-#MeToo movement:

From Catherine Deneuve to Andrew Sullivan, many have expressed concern that amid the #MeToo movement’s fervor we are not accurately accounting for how significantly the actions and circumstances of accused men have varied. Clearly, they don’t all deserve the same predatory label? Or complete career banishment? I certainly don’t believe so. Nor do I know of any woman who thinks so. But I do believe that Charlie Rose’s case falls toward the worse end of the spectrum. His misdeeds were systematic and they were enabled at the highest of levels.

[…]

Why did I even once put up with it? Or as Daphne Merkin bluntly asked in The New York Times of the #MeToo movement: “What happened to women’s agency?” I’ve turned over this question in my mind so constantly in the last six months, I feel I could write a book on the subject. But perhaps most significant—even more significant than my career aspirations and my dependence on a paycheck—was that Rose’s advances occurred in a professional environment of madness, anxiety, and utter exhaustion. One can function in such an atmosphere for only so long before ceasing to operate at one’s best, most lucid self.

But Katie Roiphie wrote THE MOST SUCCESSFUL HARPER’S ARTICLE IN YEARS!

That last sentence is also really crucial. Bravo observes that Rose’s sexual harassment was part an parcel of his abusive and manipulative management style:

Of all my assignments for Charlie Rose, the one that came with the oddest sense of happiness was when he asked that I unclog the toilet in the master bedroom of his Bellport home. It was brimming with feces and had left the upstairs smelling like a factory farm. My yellow dish gloves were flimsy and it was impossible to move the plunger without excrement slopping from the bowl. But I confidently reassured myself, “No man would ask this of a woman with whom he wanted to have sex.”

It was the summer of 2007, and as an intern at Rose’s PBS show I was learning about the man’s narcissism, temper, and licentiousness. I was at his Bellport estate because he had hired me to organize and alphabetize his library—two floors of an entire guesthouse cluttered with books. The work left my arms sore and my neck stiff, but it paid well. Rose’s executive producer had also been encouraging after sensing that I found this opportunity, as initially presented to me by Rose, dubiously incongruous with the work I was or wanted to be doing at the show. One-on-one time with the boss was essential to becoming part of the team, she told me. She cannot have been innocent of what that involved.

[…]

I would soon endure a great deal more. Not long after he told me to unclog his brimming toilet, he asked me to join him in looking at the moonlight, clutching me from behind as I did. He would call me late at night to berate me over the phone for my benighted background report on Bill Clinton or Sergei Lavrov or whichever upcoming interview was causing him anxiety, and he would call me at sunrise to tell me that he, breathing heavily, was thinking about me. The man who had enthusiastically interviewed Gloria Steinem some ten times would introduce me to his airport driver, not as someone who had helped prepare him for the lucrative speaking engagement from which he was returning, but as a table dancer he’d picked up the night before. He would get on top of me in an airplane, grope me in cars, and emerge naked in my presence.

[…]

Rose used to drive between his Manhattan and Bellport residences with an awkwardly large TV hooked up on the passenger-side floor of his Mercedes, so that he could spend the commute watching his own program. He laughed when I asked him about the safety of such multitasking. But he scowled when I later questioned him on the appropriateness of our late-night work dinners. He said that if I couldn’t handle the hours, I wasn’t up for the job. Every producer at the show had frequent dinners with him, he lied.

He himself appeared to believe his lies, despite obvious evidence to the contrary. Either that or the truth simply didn’t matter. Dinners, meanwhile, rarely incorporated work. He would talk mostly about himself, his accomplishments, and his admirers, occasionally pausing to cue my validation. Staff meetings were often no different.

While the worst of Harvey Weinstein’s behavior only recently became public, that he was a horrible boss wasn’t even a secret to the public, and yet treated as normal. But the abusive treatment of employees is bad in itself, and also helps to create the conditions in which sexual predators can flourish. A system that treats some men — including a risibly narcissistic (the detail of his watching his own show while driving is amazing) middlebrow hack like Rose — as gods is also part of the problem.

And this is what’s so infuriating about the “durr, due process, durr, what happened to agency?” response to people like Bravo — people who have never cared about protecting ordinary employees from this kind of systematic exploitation suddenly affecting concern for process when powerful harassers who are almost always guilty of even more than has already been revealed is really disgusting.