A former intern for Charlie Rose – one of more than two dozen women to accuse the disgraced television journalist of sexual misconduct – says her old boss once had her unclog his toilet, which was “brimming with feces.”
“Of all my assignments for Charlie Rose, the one that came with the oddest sense of happiness was when he asked that I unclog the toilet in the master bedroom of his Bellport, [LI], home,” wrote Reah Bravo in a lengthy essay published on The New York Review of Books on Friday.
“It was brimming with feces and had left the upstairs smelling like a factory farm. My yellow dish gloves were flimsy and it was impossible to move the plunger without excrement slopping from the bowl. But I confidently reassured myself, ‘No man would ask this of a woman with whom he wanted to have sex,’” wrote Bravo, who later became an associate producer for PBS.
In the summer of 2007, Bravo was working as an unpaid intern for Rose’s long-running PBS “Charlie Rose” talk show when she “was learning about the man’s narcissism, temper, and licentiousness.”
That summer, Bravo said, she was at Rose’s Bellport estate because he had hired her to organize and alphabetize his library — “two floors of an entire guesthouse cluttered with books.”
Bravo wrote that she believes “Charlie Rose’s case falls toward the worse end of the spectrum [regarding sexual misconduct]. His misdeeds were systematic, and they were enabled at the highest levels.”
She went on to say she “would expect” executives as CBS — where Rose also worked — “to have known.”
“The man’s secret was as reliably open as a Waffle House,” Bravo wrote.
Rose was fired by CBS and had his PBS show canceled in the wake of the allegations.
“Not long after he told me to unclog his brimming toilet, he asked me to join him in looking at the moonlight, clutching me from behind as I did,” Bravo recalled. “He would call me late at night to berate me over the phone for my benighted background report on Bill Clinton or Sergei Lavrov or whichever upcoming interview was causing him anxiety, and he would call me at sunrise to tell me that he, breathing heavily, was thinking about me.
“The man who had enthusiastically interviewed Gloria Steinem some ten times would introduce me to his airport driver, not as someone who had helped prepare him for the lucrative speaking engagement from which he was returning, but as a table dancer he’d picked up the night before. He would get on top of me in an airplane, grope me in cars, and emerge naked in my presence,” Bravo wrote.
Bravo was one of the first several women to speak out on the record against Rose, and in the weeks after, she said, “I would return home cautiously from running errands, approaching slowly to make sure that he wasn’t wrathfully waiting for me outside my front door.
“This was a preposterous fear. I live in Brussels. But if there’s one thing I knew about Charlie Rose, it was that he did as he pleased, regardless of the irrationalities involved. Who was I to rule out the possibility that he might take a transatlantic flight as his career imploded, even if it was just to scream at an old employee whose name he probably still can’t pronounce?” she wrote.
Bravo’s essay comes as three women filed a lawsuit Friday in Manhattan Supreme Court against Rose and CBS News for Rose’s “blatant and repeated sexual harassment.”
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