Gale King: I Feel "Sick to My Stomach" Over New Charlie Rose Accusations

Sorry, I have to ask: Are you really saying you had no idea this was going on?

Or is this an attempt at insulating oneself from accusations of complicity?

Women talk, I've heard it said. They don't talk to me, certainly, but I do hear they talk among themselves and sometimes to men who bother to take a shower every now and again.

Twenty-seven women is a lot of women. It's difficult to believe they all kept this silent, or that management didn't hear rumors or even direct reports.

On this one: Tried?

How hard did he try? Probably not that hard if your date remained with you. I mean, no homo and all, but Charlie Rose seems to be, on a surface level, to be more of a catch than sad Jon Podhoretz.

More details from The Washington Post report:

The new allegations follow an earlier Post report on Rose's behavior at his namesake PBS program, in which eight women accused the TV star of making lewd phone calls, walking around naked in their presence, or groping their breasts, buttocks or genital areas. Rose issued an apology. His PBS show was canceled and he was fired from CBS News.

...

The new allegations against Rose date to 1976, when, according to a former research assistant, he exposed his penis and touched her breasts in the NBC News Washington bureau where they worked.

Although many of these women are anonymous to avoid retaliation (retaliation for telling #TheirTruth -- in a liberal industry? Shocking!), some put their name under their accusations:

"I had been there long enough to know that it was just the way things went," said Sophie Gayter, now 27, who worked at "60 Minutes" in 2013 when, she said, Rose groped her buttocks as they walked down an office hallway to a recording studio. "People said what they wanted to you, people did what they wanted to you," Sophie Gayter said of her time at "60 Minutes."

Note Gayter is accusing Charlie Rose, but she's also saying "people" -- including other people than Charlie Rose, one assumes -- did this.

A Culture of Harassment?

...

The first instance identified by The Post in which a CBS News employee said a manager was told of Rose's conduct was in 1986, when he was filling in as an anchor on "CBS Morning News."

There, Annmarie Parr, a 22-year-old news clerk, delivered a script to Rose. He had made "lewd, little comments" about her appearance before, Parr said, but that day Rose took it further. "Annmarie, do you like sex?" she said he asked her. "Do you enjoy it? How often do you like to have sex?" She said she laughed nervously and left.

Parr said she reported Rose's comments to her boss -- a senior producer whom she declined to name -- and said she didn’t want to be alone with Rose. The producer laughed, Parr said, and told her, 'Fine, you don’t have to be alone with him anymore.'

That same year, seven women sued CBS claiming that the workplace on the network's overnight broadcast "Nightwatch" was "offensive and hostile" to female employees.

Rose wasn't named in the lawsuit but he was a co-anchor of the show. So, do the math.

And executives -- at least one -- did know, according to claims:

When Susan MacArthur was interviewing in the late 1990s for a job to be Rose's assistant, she said, a CBS News executive told her to "steer clear" because of the host’s history of "questionable behavior."

"She looked me dead in the eyes and said, 'You are going to be working alone with this man and being alone with this man in his hotel, and you need to think really hard about whether you want to do this,'" MacArthur said, declining to name the executive. MacArthur heeded the advice and stopped returning Rose's calls.

Here's one of his interns, signing her name to the accusation:

On the plane, Collins said, Rose insisted she drink wine and began to "paw" her. Collins became drunk, she said, and threw up in the plane's bathroom.

Rose squeezed her breast during the car ride from the airport, Collins said. She said he insisted that they work in his hotel room, where he told her, "I want you to ride me." She quickly left his room....

Back in New York, Collins said she shared concerns about Rose with Yvette Vega, the executive producer of Rose's PBS show, who she said replied that he was harmless. Vega did not respond to a request for comment.

Charlie Rose issued a statement to the Washington Post: "Your report is unfair and inaccurate." Then he invited the Post to take a shower, exposed his penis to it, and offered it a Complimentary Mustache Ride.

Some claims of sexual harassment are debatable, even if you assume they're true -- men and women do like each other romantically some times, and it's long been the species assumption that the man should initiate any romantic overture.

But these allegations do not seem to fall into the category of flirtation-taken-too-far or even clumsy passes. According to these accusers, this stuff is just straight-up groping or overt sexual overtures made in the workplace to an inferior that wouldn't pass muster even in the Free Love 70s.

I cannot believe the gall of these people to preach to us as if they were Televangelists every single day while some of them were pulling shit like this, and many of them were practicing the art of tactical ignorance.

One angle: I remember that Howard Stern and Robbin Quivers were reminiscing about their days in Washington, DC radio. Rose was at that time based in DC. The radio duo were talking about Charlie Rose's reputation as a ladies' man, or really, a Lothario.

Several questions:

1, assuming the exploits they were talking about were consensual, why did Rose feel the compulsion to also harass and paw women at work?

2, maybe let's not assume that Rose's reputation as a ladykiller was based on entirely consensual encounters. Did Stern and Quivers hear about Charlie Rose's "cocksmanship" from Charlie Rose himself? Was Charlie Rose depicting himself as Don Juan when in reality he was molesting women against their will?

Worth asking, I think!

posted by Ace of Spades at 02:58 PM

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