"An Anonymous Source Goes Public/Ali Diercks, who was crucial to a major #MeToo story involving the CBS executive Les Moonves, talks about why she started sharing information."

That's the headline for today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast.

We hear the Times reporter Rachel Abrams speaking with a lawyer, Ali Diercks, who chose to leak information about the document review she was doing for CBS after Les Moonves resigned from his position as the company's chairman and chief executive.

Here's the story Abrams co-authored back in 2018, based in part on the confidential information Diercks shared with her: "'If Bobbie Talks, I’m Finished’: How Les Moonves Tried to Silence an Accuser/A trove of text messages details a plan by Mr. Moonves and a faded Hollywood manager to bury a sexual assault allegation. Instead, the scheme helped sink the CBS chief, and may cost him $120 million."

Diercks's law firm, Covington & Burling, unsurprisingly, figured out that she was the source of the leak and she lost her job and her law license.

Diercks to Abrams: "Our career trajectories were thrown in diametrically opposed orbits by the same thing, the same catalyzing event. You know, a scoop like this is going to make your career and ruin mine at the same time."

Abrams, summing up: "She lost her career and struggled in isolation. I got a bigger profile and ended up with a book deal."

"The outside lawyers were told by multiple people that CBS had an employee 'who was "on call" to perform oral sex' on [CEO Les] Moonves."

"According to the draft report: 'A number of employees were aware of this and believed that the woman was protected from discipline or termination as a result of it.'... 'Moonves received oral sex from at least 4 CBS employees under circumstances that sound transactional and improper to the extent that there was no hint of any relationship, romance, or reciprocity.'"

From "‘Transactional’ Sex and a Secret Resignation Letter: Takeaways From a Report on Les Moonves/A 59-page draft report produced by lawyers for CBS’s board contains new details and allegations about Mr. Moonves, the company’s former chief executive" (NYT).

Is "transactional sex" a standard term? Here's a Wikipedia article, "Transactional sex":

Transactional sex refers to sexual relationships where the giving of gifts or services is an important factor. Transactional sex is a superset of prostitution, in that the exchange of gifts for sex includes a broader set of (usually non-marital) obligations that do not necessarily involve a predetermined payment or gift, but where there is a definite motivation to benefit materially from the sexual exchange. The participants do not necessarily frame themselves in terms of prostitutes/clients, but often as girlfriends/boyfriends, or sugar babies/sugar daddies. Those offering sex may or may not feel affection for their partners.

I've taken the moral position that one should only engage in sex where it is a sex-for-sex exchange. If the exchange must be sweetened on one side, with extras beyond the sex itself, then you shouldn't have sex at all. I'm not offering this as a legal standard, just my idea of what good people should do.

Anyway, "transactional sex" is an interesting term to me. I won't make a new tag, though. I'll just use the overarching term "prostitution." A lot of things are on what I would call the "prostitution continuum."

How can I trust a column with "'The personal is political,' Gloria Steinem famously said"?

That's not a Gloria Steinem quote! It's easy to look up. Wikipedia has an article, "The personal is political":

The phrase was popularized by the publication of a 1969 essay by feminist Carol Hanisch under the title "The Personal is Political" in 1970, but she disavows authorship of the phrase. According to Kerry Burch, Shulamith Firestone, Robin Morgan, and other feminists given credit for originating the phrase have also declined authorship. "Instead," Burch writes, "they cite millions of women in public and private conversations as the phrase's collective authors." Gloria Steinem has likened claiming authorship of the phrase to claiming authorship of "World War II."

That is, it looks as though Gloria Steinem is at most "famous" for saying that no one person can claim to have said it first.

The column with the bad fact-checking is by Margaret Sullivan in WaPo: "Abusive media moguls harmed more than just individual women. They shaped a misogynistic culture." Excerpt:

The powerful and now-departed men of CBS — Moonves, Fager and star interviewer Charlie Rose — helped shape how our society sees women. The network, after all, is the most-watched in the nation. “60 Minutes” for 50 years has been the very definition of quality broadcast journalism: the gold standard.

It’s impossible to know how different America would be if power-happy and misogynistic men hadn’t been running the show in so many influential media organizations — certainly not just CBS.

Yes, we can't know what might have been without these apparently awful people running CBS, but what's the evidence that the shows the shows pumped out on CBS were importantly misogynistic enough to have made our culture the "misogynistic culture" it is? I can't find anything in Sullivan's column.

"The departure of Mr. Moonves marks a stunning reversal for an executive who is credited with turning CBS into television’s most-watched network..."

"But he has been under intense pressure since July, when The New Yorker published an article by the investigative journalist Ronan Farrow in which six women accused Mr. Moonves of sexual harassment. On Sunday, the magazine published another article by Mr. Farrow in which six more women detailed claims against Mr. Moonves.... When the most recent television season ended in May, CBS was the nation’s most-watched network for the 10th consecutive year — an accomplishment that had made Mr. Moonves one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood... By the time Mr. Moonves left Warner Bros. to lead CBS Entertainment in 1995, he had a record-breaking 22 series on the air, including megahits like 'ER' and 'Friends.' At that time, CBS was last in the ratings and catered to an older audience that enjoyed series like 'Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman' and 'Touched by an Angel.' Mr. Moonves finally turned things around for good in 2000, when 'Survivor' and 'C.S.I.' debuted within a few months of each other.... Hit after hit started to appear on CBS, from 'NCIS' to 'The Big Bang Theory.'"

From "CBS Chief Executive Les Moonves Steps Down After Sexual Harassment Claims" (NYT). There have been 2 articles about him in The New Yorker, both by Ronan Farrow, one published just yesterday, the day his resignation was announced. There has been an investigation of him going on since the first article was published last March. Leading the investigation were Nancy Kestenbaum and Mary Jo White, both lawyers who are former federal prosecutors. White was head of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Obama administration.

Here's the new New Yorker article, which has an update stating the Moonves stepped down 3 hours after it was published. Excerpt:

One of the women with allegations against Moonves, a veteran television executive named Phyllis Golden-Gottlieb.... Moonves, she recalled, came into her office in the middle of a workday and suggested the two of them go out for lunch. Instead of taking her to a nearby restaurant, she said, Moonves drove her to a secluded area. When Golden-Gottlieb began to ask if he was having trouble finding a parking space, she said that Moonves “grabbed my head and he took it all the way down onto his penis, and pushed his penis into my mouth.” She said he held her head in place forcibly. “He came very quickly,” she recalled. “You sort of just go numb. You don’t know what to do.” Distraught, Golden-Gottlieb demanded that Moonves take her back to the office. When she got there, she said, she vomited. “It was just sick,” she told me. She didn’t report the incident at the time because she was a single mother supporting two children and feared for her career. “I realized he was the new golden boy,” she told me. “I just kept quiet.” But the incident, she said, “never left me.”

After she rebuffed Moonves, Golden-Gottlieb said that Moonves retaliated against her professionally, moving her into ever smaller offices. “Every two days, he’d find a darker space, or a place downstairs, or something,” she recalled. She told me that her career in the entertainment industry suffered, which she attributed to his influence at Lorimar and, later, CBS. “He absolutely ruined my career,” she said. “He was the head of CBS. No one was going to take me.”

"Yes, for the head of a network you’re some good kisser... Well, this has been great. Thanks... I’ve got to go now."

Said the writer-actress Illeana Douglas to Les Moonves, at the end of this incident (described by Ronan Farrow in "Les Moonves and CBS Face Allegations of Sexual Misconduct/Six women accuse the C.E.O. of harassment and intimidation, and dozens more describe abuse at his company" (The New Yorker)):

When Douglas met with Moonves at his office, she began to raise concerns about the “Queens” script, but Moonves, she recalled, cut her off. “He interrupts me to ask me am I single,” she said. Douglas, whose nearly decade-long relationship with Scorsese was coming to an end, was caught off guard. “I didn’t know what to say at that point,” she told me. “I was, like, ‘I’m single, yes, no, maybe.’ ” She began talking about the script, but Moonves interjected, asking to kiss her. According to Douglas, he said that they didn’t have to tell her manager: “It’ll just be between you and me. Come on, you’re not some nubile virgin.”

As Douglas attempted to turn the focus back to work, Moonves, she said, grabbed her. “In a millisecond, he’s got one arm over me, pinning me,” she said. Moonves was “violently kissing” her, holding her down on the couch with her arms above her head. “What it feels like to have someone hold you down—you can’t breathe, you can’t move,” she said. “The physicality of it was horrendous.” She recalled lying limp and unresponsive beneath him. “You sort of black out,” she told me. “You think, How long is this going to go on? I was just looking at this nice picture of his family and his kids. I couldn’t get him off me.” She said it was only when Moonves, aroused, pulled up her skirt and began to thrust against her that her fear overcame her paralysis. She told herself that she had to do something to stop him. “At that point, you’re a trapped animal,” she told me. “Your life is flashing before your eyes.” Moonves, in what Douglas assumed was an effort to be seductive, paused and asked, “So, what do you think?” Douglas told me, “My decision was to get out of it by joking my way out, so he feels flattered.”