Workplace issues at CBS’ “60 Minutes” reportedly date back decades, not just under recently ousted executive producer Jeff Fager’s reign.
The late Don Hewitt, who created the legendary news program in 1968 and stayed on as producer for 36 years, paid out more than $5 million to a woman who accused him of repeated sexual assault, according to the New York Times.
The settlement made with Hewitt, who died in 2009, was made in the 1990s and has been redone several times, including this year, the Times reported. The initial agreement was for $450,000 and has since been adjusted to $5 million, with $75,000 payments annually.
Hewitt’s settlement is just one of the discoveries made by investigators who have been doing a deep dive into CBS’ underbelly after Les Moonves’ resignation following multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.
Investigators have also been digging into the conduct of Fager, who left the network in September after multiple allegations of sexual assault.
Fager, however, said he was fired “because I sent a text message to one of our own CBS reporters demanding that she be fair in covering” a story.
Several women accused Fager of drunkenly touching in “ways that made them uncomfortable,” including a former intern who claimed he groped her at a work party in the late 2000s.
Nineteen other employees told the New Yorker that he allowed harassment to run rampant at CBS, calling it a “top-down” culture of misconduct.
The “top” is Moonves, the former CBS CEO, who was forced out in September after more than a dozen allegations of sexual harassment and abuse dating back to the late ‘80s.
Investigators said that Moonves was “evasive and untruthful at times and to have deliberately lied about and minimized the extent of his sexual misconduct” during interviews with lawyers and allegedly destroyed evidence, according to an internal CBS report acquired by the Times.
CBS and Moonves are currently negotiating a $120 million exit package.
