LESS MOONVES
CBS chief out amid latest sex claims
Bye-bye, Les. CBS boss Les Moonves was forced to resign yesterday a f ter a bombshell report citing six women brought to 12 the number a cc us i ng him of sexual or physical abuse.
CBS Chairman Les Moonves was forced to resign Sunday amid a bombshell report citing six more women accusing him of everything from forced sex acts to physical violence — and it will likely cost him a fortune.
The 68-year-old former TV titan had been on his way out, with a walkaway payday that had already been knocked down from $180 million to $100 million due to allegations of misbehavior.
But the process accelerated within hours of the publication of a report detailing six other women’s sexual-misconduct allegations against him.
The new allegations published by The New Yorker brought his total number of accusers to 12, making his departure imminent — and the massive payout unlikely, sources said.
“The $100 million being discussed last week for Leslie is off the table,” an industry insider told Deadline Hollywood.
The exit package being discussed was down to about $25 million by late Sunday, according to the online magazine.
“Board members are looking at these New Yorker claims, and there are now talks of him leaving for cause, which changes everything,” the industry insider said.
A source told The Post that Moonves could wind up with nothing, depending on the findings of two law firms hired by CBS to probe the allegations.
Moonves and CBS said in a joint statement Sunday night that, regardless, they “will donate $20 million to one or more organizations that support the #MeToo movement and equality for women in the workplace.”
“The donation, which will be made immediately, has been deducted from any severance benefits that may be due Moonves following the board’s ongoing independent investigation,” the statement said.
Among Moonves’ latest accusers was TV exec Phyllis Golden-Gottlieb, who alleged that he assaulted her several times, including forcing her to perform a sex act, in the 1980s when he was in charge of movies and miniseries at Lorimar-Telepictures.
Moonves, then in his mid-30s and married to first wife Nancy Wiesenfeld, asked Golden-Gottlieb to lunch and drove her to a secluded area, she said.
He “grabbed my head, and he took it all the way down onto his penis and pushed his penis into my mouth,” she said.
Golden-Gottlieb, a single mother of two, said she was afraid to report the attack for fear he would blacklist her.
She also said Moonves, who divorced Wiesenfeld in 2004, threw her against a wall for failing to send a memo to a colleague.
She said that when she rebuffed his further advances, he moved her to increasingly smaller offices and made her persona non grata at CBS.
“He absolutely ruined my reer,” she said.
Emboldened by the #MeToo movement, Golden-Gottlieb filed a report with Los Angeles police late last year. Authorities considered her claims credible but did not charge Moonves because the statute of limitations had lapsed, law-enforcement sources told The New Yorker.
Jessica Pallingston, a one-time assistant to Moonves, told The New Yorker that he pressured her into oral sex on her first day on the job with him in 1994.
Pallingston, then 34 and an as-
piring writer, said she showed up for work at 9 a.m. at the Regency Hotel suite where Moonves often worked as president of Warner Bros. Television.
He began plying her with wine and asking her questions about her sexuality before telling her, “I want you to suck my c--k,” she told the magazine.
Pallingston recalled saying, “OK,” despite misgivings.
“He pushed my head down, hard,” she recalled. “It was very violent, very aggressive. There was real hostility in it.”
When he tried to have sex with her, she suffered a panic attack and left, she recalled, but not before “he took my hand and shook it and said, ‘ You did a great job.’ ”
Pallingston said she was more steadfast in refusing his later advances. But Moonves began barking orders at her, engaging in lewd phone conversations in front of her and calling her a “c--t.”
A female doctor who Moonves once visited for an exam nearly 20 years ago recalled in a separate article how he “tried to force himself on me’’ — twice.
Dr. Anne Peters did not identify Moonves as her patient, but Vanity Fair did on Sunday, confirm- ing it with a source and an entry in the CBS exec’s datebook.
Peters said patient-confidentiality rules prevented her from revealing his identity.
“When I rebuffed him, he stood beside the examination table and satisfied himself,” Peters wrote in the Annals of Internal Medicine in May.
She said she reported the incident to administrators at UCLA Medical Center.
“I wanted a note placed in his chart warning other women never to be alone with him,” she recalled.
The doctor said he called her the next day to apologize.
“He said that he had a terrible problem and that he had done the same thing with many other women. That he basically couldn’t control himself when alone with a woman,’’ she wrote.
Makeup artist Deborah Green recounted to The New Yorker an incident in the early 2000s in which she was doing Moonves’ makeup for a promotional spot when he got up from his chair and “stuck his tongue down my throat.”
She didn’t report the incident for fear of reprisal, she said.
Deborah Morris said she was a junior executive at Lorimar in the late ’80s when Moonves tried to kiss her in his office and groped her while giving her a ride in his car, all despite her protestations.
When she tried to report him, she said, a woman in Lorimar’s legal department told her, “Who’s going to believe you? You’re no one.”
Morris said she felt “sick” when Moonves released a statement in July following the previous allegations. In the statement, Moonves claimed that he “never misused [his] position to harm or hinder anyone’s career” and that he stood by the principal “that ‘no’ means ‘no.’ ”
“He’s cunning. He’s calculating. And he’s a predator,” she told The New Yorker.
Writer Linda Silverthorn said that she had consensual sex with Moonves in the 1980s, while he was married to his first wife, but that she cut off their arrangement after learning about his kids.
He forced himself on her years later, she claimed.
They were in his office discussing work when he slammed his door closed, picked her up from her chair and kissed her, she said.
“Coffee was on his breath,” she recalled. “And then he just pulled his penis out.”
She said she “manually manipulated him and just got it over with.”
Afterward, Moonves told her that the studio couldn’t help her, and she never saw him again.
“It was unwelcome, it was unwanted,” she recalled.
Moonves also allegedly preyed on women outside the entertainment industry. Massage therapist Deborah Kitay said she rebuked him on a weekly basis for up to two years in the late ’90s, because he would instruct her to “work higher up his leg” or to “touch it.”
He also allegedly took off his towel and exposed himself to her.
“It was a weekly thing,” she said. “And I said ‘no’ every time.”
Moonves acknowledged some of the encounters to the magazine but said they were consensual.
He also told Vanity Fair that he “tried to kiss the doctor” but “nothing more happened.”
CBS did not respond to a request for comment.
With CBS boss Les Moonves suddenly forced to resign on Sunday under a cloud of sexual harassment allegations, talks to settle the company’s lawsuit against its controlling shareholder have been quickly completed, according to a report.
The settlement with the Redstone family’s National Amusements Inc. includes an agreement that NAI will not push a merger with Viacom for about two years, it was reported.
NAI, led by Shari Redstone, controls roughly 79 percent of the voting power of CBS and Viacom. She has been pressing to merge the companies for more than a year.
Moonves had fought Redstone’s plan — and even led a revolt in May to dilute NAI’s control in CBS to 17 percent. CBS sued NAI to secure the dilutive move.
Talks to settle the suit ahead of an Oct. 3 trial date have been ongoing since the Labor Day weekend, sources said. The CBS move was made more difficult when, in August, the New Yorker reported that several women accused Moonves of sexual harassment.
Moonves denied the allegation but CBS hired two law firms to investigate. With the probes under way, the New Yorker on Sunday reported sexual harassment allegations against Moonves from several more women.
That second round of accusations prompted Moonves’ imminent exit and the lawsuit settlement, Reuters reported. The lawsuit settlement could be announced as early as Monday. CBS declined to comment. Moonves’ lieutenant, Chief Operating Officer Joe Ianniello, is expected to take the reins as interim chief executive while the board searches for a permanent replacement.
A rep for the special investigation committee did not comment on the reported settlement.