Leslie Moonves and Paramount Global will have to pay $9.75 million to CBS shareholders as a result of sexual misconduct claims in a deal made with the NY Attorney General. This is in addition to a $14.75 million settlement as the result of a class action suit that has been awaiting approval by a New York judge.
The paperwork about the case was disclosed in a Security and Exchange Commission filing related to the long-running class-action litigation filed around the controversy that ended Moonves’ 23-year tenure at CBS. The additional payments come as part of a settlement with the Investor Protection Bureau of New York State Attorney General office.
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Two federal lawsuits, filed in the Southern District of New York, were consolidated into one in late 2018. In 2019, a judge dismissed part of the suit against Moonves, former CBS executives and members of its board of directors.
Related video: CBS fired Moonves withouts $120 million severance in 2018
But Moonves’ comment on the need to address sexual harassment issues in the workplace at Variety‘s Entertainment and Technology conference in November 2017 became problematic for the company as the lawsuits claimed the then-CBS chief executive mislead shareholders by not disclosing his own vulnerablity to #MeToo-type allegations. Those allegations made international headlines in the late summer and fall of 2018 through several exposes in the New Yorker and by the New York Times.
The initial $14.75 million settlement was given preliminary approval by a judge last May.
More to come…
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