Dear Gossips, 

For a couple of weeks now I’ve been calling it a Hollywood Predator Advent Calendar. Every day it opens a door and spits out another one. Yesterday it was Charlie Rose’s turn. The Washington Post spoke with 8 women who shared their experiences with Charlie, 3 of whom spoke on the record, including Reah Bravo who worked on Charlie’s show on PBS and Kyle Godfrey-Ryan, a former assistant. Kyle was fired by Charlie when he found out that she told a friend about what he did. Which was walk around naked in front of her and call her repeatedly to tell her that he was fantasising about her. Megan Creydt was a coordinator on his show and told the Post that he kept touching her thighs. 

Charlie Rose has been suspended from CBS, PBS, and Bloomberg and released this statement in response: 

“I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings”… 

 

That’s an important distinction he’s making. Because while he clarifies that he knows now that he read the situation the wrong way, the suggestion here is that he believed, at the time, that he was getting signals that his advances were welcome. That the behaviour of the women he harassed led him to action. Like it was a f-cking date, and he thought the date went great. Like there was actual romance involved. When in fact there was no date and no romance; these were colleagues, he was their boss, and this was workplace sexual harassment, not a case of missed mating signals, Jesus Christ. 

Duana’s first text to me this morning was to send me this – the Celebrity Perv Apology Generator. Charlie’s statement is basically a version of one of those. 

Yours in gossip,

Lainey

PS. Thank you for your emails asking whether or not we’d be posting about Lena Dunham. We are. We just needed some more time to figure out how to approach the situation and all the troubling questions and dilemmas that Lena’s mistakes have forced us to confront. Duana, Kathleen, and I will all be posting about Lena separately. We don’t have the answers. But our goal is to participate in a difficult conversation. We hope that you are willing to join us.