WaPo: Eight Women Accuse Charlie Rose Of Sexual Misconduct

Talk show host Charlie Rose poses with his award at the 73rd Annual George Foster Peabody Awards at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Monday, May 19, 2014, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
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Eight women have come forward to accuse television personality Charlie Rose of unwanted sexual advances over multiple decades in a Washington Post report published Monday.

CBS suspended Rose, who serves as an anchor on the network’s marquee morning news program. The production and distribution of his eponymous show were halted after the report, the Associated Press reported.

Three women went on the record with their stories to the Post, and five more described Rose’s behavior without being named. The Post said it corroborated the eight sources’ allegations, which spanned from the late 1990s to 2011, in interviews with “friends, colleagues or family members who said the women had confided in them about aspects of the incidents.”

Rose told the Post that “I deeply apologize for my inappropriate behavior” and “I am greatly embarrassed.” Still, he said he did not “believe that all of these allegations are accurate.”

“I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings, even though I now realize I was mistaken,” Rose said.

Reah Bravo, an intern who became an associate producer on Rose’s show, told the Post about Rose’s “unwanted sexual advances” after she began working for him in 2007.

In one instance, she said Rose come up behind her and put his arms around her at his Bellport, New York home, where she was working and living for a week. In another instance, Bravo said, Rose “grabbed me by my hair, holding a fist of it at the base of my scalp” while they shared a car. More than once, she told the Post, “he would grip my head tightly while talking to me,” forcing her to “look at him or to let him talk directly into my ear.”

Bravo also described instances of Rose’s appearing nude before her. Once, on a small plane, Bravo described Rose pressing his body into hers.

Kyle Godfrey-Ryan, a former assistant of Rose’s, recalled t0 the Post “at least a dozen” instances where Rose walked nude in front of her in one of his homes in New York City, in addition to calling her and describing fantasies of seeing her swimming naked.

The Post reported that, according to Godfrey-Ryan, she was fired when Rose learned she had told a mutual friend about his behavior.

Godfrey-Ryan said she’d also told Rose’s executive producer, Yvette Vega, about the calls. Two unnamed women separately told the Post that they “repeatedly” reported Rose’s behavior to Vega. Vega told the Post, referring to women working on Rose’s show: “I should have stood up for them … I failed. It is crushing. I deeply regret not helping them.”

Two unnamed former employees told the Post that the young women hired for Rose’s show were sometimes known as “Charlie’s Angels,” and that Rose gave “unsolicited shoulder rubs” to “several” of them, in what was known as “the crusty paw,” according to one unnamed former employee.

One unnamed job applicant described an overnight trip to the Bellport home that she agreed to take after Rose suggested, according to the Post, “they see how they traveled together.”

Eventually, Rose appeared before her nude but for an untied bathrobe at around 2 a.m. He attempted to put his hand down her pants, she told the Post. Her memories of what happened next were “hazy,” she said, but she ended up with Rose in his bedroom, where he tried reached down her pants. She resisted again, crying. Rose eventually appeared to fall asleep, and she left the room.

The unnamed woman said that the next morning, when she described the previous night as “a bit of a disaster,” he responded: “What do you mean?” She didn’t get the job, she told the Post.

Read the Post’s full report here.

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