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CBS and its former Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves have been ordered to pay $30.5 million dollars — mostly to shareholders — for insider trading and covering up multiple sexual assault allegations against Moonves, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced on Wednesday.
CBS, now part of Paramount Global, is required to redistribute $22 million to its shareholders while Moonves, who resigned from CBS in 2018, must pay shareholders another $2.5 million. CBS is also required to spend $6 million to reform its Human Resources practices regarding sexual harassment and must provide biannual reports to the attorney general’s office.
“CBS and Leslie Moonves’ attempts to silence victims, lie to the public, and mislead investors can only be described as reprehensible,” James said in a statement.
“As a publicly traded company, CBS failed its most basic duty to be honest and transparent with the public and investors. After trying to bury the truth to protect their fortunes, today CBS and Leslie Moonves are paying millions of dollars for their wrongdoing.”
In 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Moonves was accused by more than a dozen women of sexual misconduct, including exposing himself and pressuring women for sex. Despite denying any wrongdoing and claiming the relationships were consensual, he was ousted from CBS in September 2018.
According to the AG’s office, a Los Angeles Police Department captain provided CBS executives with a confidential sexual assault complaint against Moonves in 2017 — months before the allegations became public.
The same day the sexual assault complaint was filed at a Hollywood LAPD station, the unnamed police captain shared an unredacted police report with a CBS executive, who later shared it with Moonves and other executives as they prepared for the fallout of the accusations going public.
