The CBS Corporation, battered by scandal and facing a leadership vacuum, said its former chief executive, Leslie Moonves, misled the company about multiple allegations of sexual misconduct and tried to hide evidence as he made a frenzied attempt to save his legacy and reap a lucrative severance. As a result, the company said Mr. Moonves would not receive his $120 million exit payout.
“We have determined that there are grounds to terminate for cause, including his willful and material misfeasance, violation of company policies and breach of his employment contract, as well as his willful failure to cooperate fully with the company’s investigation,” the CBS board said in a statement on Monday.
The board, which met over several days last week, decided on Monday afternoon after reviewing information gathered by lawyers hired by the company to investigate claims against Mr. Moonves, who was forced out in September, as well as the broader workplace culture at the network.
Mr. Moonves “engaged in multiple acts of serious nonconsensual sexual misconduct in and outside of the workplace, both before and after he came to CBS in 1995,” according to a late November draft of the investigators’ report reviewed by The New York Times.
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The lawyers had gathered ample evidence showing Mr. Moonves had violated CBS policies, including lying to investigators and deleting texts that revealed his attempts to silence an accuser. Mr. Moonves has denied all the allegations and said any sexual acts he engaged in were consensual.
[Read more about how Les Moonves tried to silence an accuser.]
The investigators had spoken with Mr. Moonves four times and found him to be “evasive and untruthful at times and to have deliberately lied about and minimized the extent of his sexual misconduct,” according to the draft report.
Mr. Moonves could still contest the board’s ruling and fight for his severance through arbitration. He could argue the company violated the confidentiality terms of his exit agreement when the internal investigation became public.
“The conclusions of the CBS board were foreordained and are without merit,” Andrew Levander, a lawyer for Mr. Moonves, said in a statement. “Consistent with the pattern of leaks that have permeated this ‘process,’ the press was informed of these baseless conclusions before Mr. Moonves, further damaging his name, reputation, career and legacy.”
Mr. Moonves, 69, was a titan in Hollywood, a swaggering executive who led largely on instinct and managed talent through a combination of charisma and manipulation. He shaped the television landscape for more than 30 years with shows across several networks. As a producer, he developed hit after hit, including “Full House” in the 1980s and “ER” and “Friends” in the 1990s. At CBS, he turned a last-place network into the most-watched channel on television with mass-market fare like the police procedural “C.S.I.” and the ratings machine “Big Bang Theory.”
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