Jeff Shell’s appointment this month to the presidency of Paramount Global once a merger with Skydance is finalized represents a significant comeback for the former CEO of NBCUniversal who was fired for sexual harassment only a year ago.
He’s the first major media figure to be welcomed back after a potentially career-ending scandal and his hire not only set off cultural alarm bells for women’s advocates, but they warned it creates legal risk for Paramount if Shell were to cross the line on the job again.
Nicole Regalado, vice president of Campaigns at the feminist nonprofit UltraViolet, says that hiring Shell after his high-profile firing “sends the wrong message to women.” UltraViolet has led media campaigns against famous men who were outed as sexual abusers in the early days of #MeToo, including former NBC anchor Matt Lauer.
Although Shell, unlike Lauer, has never been accused of any form of sexual abuse, Regalado said the group is considering launching a similar “high pressure” campaign over this.
Jessica Calarco, author of “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net,” told TheWrap that hiring someone with a history of harassment “creates a chilly climate for women, even women who aren’t the direct target of those attacks or actions, especially if they go unaddressed or unaddressed for long periods by leaders.”
Carol Miaskoff, associate legal counsel for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, also said that Shell’s hiring could prove a major headache. “If he were to repeat this, having him as president really exposes [Skydance-Paramount] to liability,” Miaskoff told TheWrap.
This isn’t the first high-risk decision that Skydance founder David Ellison made in the #MeToo category. Ellison previously faced criticism when he made a call in 2019 to hire John Lasseter, the co-founder and former chief creative officer at Pixar. He left the animation giant in 2018 after being accused of harassing female staffers with unwelcome hugs, kisses and groping.
Has Hollywood, and Skydance in particular, been too quick to forgive and forget?
Shell has worked to repair his reputation
Two insiders at the media company told TheWrap that no one on staff has objected to Shell’s hiring and that the media executive has “done the work” both publicly and privately to repair his reputation, as well as his relationship with his wife and daughter.
Skydance and Shell declined to comment for this article.
Shell was let go from NBCU without severance in 2023 after CNBC anchor Hadley Gamble accused him of a decade-long campaign of sexual harassment.
He apologized at the time, but characterized his relationship with Gamble as merely “inappropriate.”
His description was in stark contrast to how Gamble’s attorney Suann MacIsaac described it in 2023. The attorney told The New York Times that Shell had engaged in “a decade-long campaign of sexual harassment” against her client and dismissed his apology as “revisionist history.”
Gamble left CNBC shortly after Shell’s departure. She did not respond to TheWrap when asked to comment for this article. MacIsaac, who told the Times that Shell “targeted” Gamble before he even met her, also did not respond to TheWrap.
Shell remains married to his wife, Laura.
Many other Hollywood power players who were driven from their executive suites by the #MeToo purge remain out of work. Kevin Tsujihara, the former chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. Entertainment who exited in March 2019, can occasionally be seen around Hollywood but has not landed a new role. Les Moonves, who served as CEO of CBS for 15 years until his ouster in 2018, is largely persona non grata (though at 74, he is probably of retirement age). NBCUniversal vice chairman Ron Meyer had to exit in 2020 — at Shell’s insistence, at the time — over an alleged sexual affair with an actress.
Shell’s return might not be as alarming as, say, that of Louis C.K., who won a Grammy in 2022 and continues to do stand-up despite admitting in 2017 to multiple occasions of masturbating in front of women.
But women on all sides of the political spectrum are angry that seemingly “canceled” men are not staying canceled. When Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly was welcomed back to “The Daily Show” last week, Gretchen Carlson called Jon Stewart’s invite “unbelievably outrageous.”
O’Reilly was fired from Fox News in 2017 following multiple instances of sexual misconduct, but has bounced back with a podcast that is carried by Apple, Amazon and YouTube. And, despite Stewart saying in 2020 that having the conservative commentator on his show was “probably” the “worst legacy of ‘The Daily Show,’” he nevertheless had him back on July 16 to talk about the Republican National Convention.
Carlson was one of the women at Fox News whose accusations led to the 2016 ouster of CEO Roger Ailes. She tweeted that Stewart was “propping up” a “predator … like nothing ever happened @ Fox” and that having O’Reilly on his show “promulgates the idea that bad men get comebacks and courageous women continue to be penalized.”
The road to RedBird
Prior to joining Skydance, Shell served as an informal consultant to RedBird Capital; he has a 20-year relationship with the company’s founder and managing partner Gerry Cardinale. RedBird is partly backing the Skydance takeover of Paramount. The biggest chunk comes from Ellison’s billionaire father Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, who is footing $6 billion of the $8 billion deal to acquire National Amusements Inc., Paramount’s controlling shareholder.
Shell, who previously held senior roles at Comcast, Disney and Fox, worked at NBCU for more than 20 years. When he was named chairman of Universal’s entertainment group in 2013, the company’s then-CEO Steve Burke said in the 10 years he had known Shell, he was “consistently impressed by his strategic vision, operational focus and energy.”
During his tenure at Universal Filmed Entertainment Group (UFEG), the studio generated four years of record profit with the two most profitable years in the studio’s 107-year history, according to a Milken Institute speaker profile of Shell. UFEG also acquired DreamWorks Animation in 2016.
Shortly after he was appointed CEO of NBCU in January 2020, Shell oversaw the launch of the Peacock streamer and was an early proponent of releasing movies on the platform at the same time or soon after their theatrical release.
When the pandemic hit, Universal was well positioned to release films, including “Trolls World Tour,” directly to PVOD. The animated film brought in an estimated $100 million in on-demand rentals in its first three weeks in North America, just shy of the original movie’s domestic box office of $116 million in the same timeframe. The results “exceeded our expectations and demonstrated the viability of PVOD,” Shell sad at the time.
Shell is also known for his thriftiness. When director Quentin Tarantino suggested releasing his western “The Hateful Eight” on 70 mm theatrical prints that required retrofitting 100 theaters with special projectors, Shell told The Wall Street Journal he’d countered, “What if we released it on iPhones?”
At the time of Lasseter’s hiring by Skydance, both he and Ellison made carefully worded comments, an approach that apparently was not deemed necessary for Shell’s hire.
Ellison previously told The Washington Post that the company had “not entered into this decision lightly” and that they were not minimizing “anyone’s subjective views” on Lasseter’s past behavior, which he referred to as “mistakes.” Ellison also said that the animator had promised to “comport himself” professionally.
For his part, Lasseter issued a statement apologizing for his past behavior, saying he had spent the year since leaving Pixar in “deep reflection, learning how my actions unintentionally made colleagues uncomfortable, which I deeply regret and apologize for.” He added, “It has been humbling, but I believe it will make me a better leader.”
Times Up, which has since disbanded, said that Lasseter’s return to the industry “endorses and perpetuates a broken system that allows powerful men to act without consequence.”
Lasseter’s contract included “ironclad” provisions that made him personally responsible for any legal claims involving sexual harassment, including any past misconduct that might come to light from Pixar. Thus far, there have not been new public complaints about the executive.
More potential liability for Skydance
Still, Hollywood continues to attract more acute sexual harassment than many other industries.
In her book, Calarco cited a 2019 study from the University of California-San Diego Center on Gender Equity and Health, which found that 38% of American women have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace, while a disturbing 81% reported being sexually harassed on or off the job.
A different study from 2018 revealed even more shocking statistics in Hollywood. Of 843 women working in the industry, 94% — nearly all — said they had been sexually harassed or assaulted in some form while on the job, according to the study, which was conducted by USA Today, the Creative Coalition, Women in Film and the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.
However, only one in four of those women reported their experiences to anyone for fear of personal or professional retaliation. Of those who did report the misconduct, only 28% say their workplace situation improved afterward.
Miaskoff, who recently oversaw an extensive update in guidelines against different forms of workplace harassment, said that to have a “safe and respectful workplace, one of the first steps is to have leadership who buys into that and who demonstrates that.”
Referring to Shell, she added that it would not be appropriate to paint a previous offender as someone that would make the same mistakes. “On the other hand, if he does do it again, there are certain kinds of vulnerabilities and complexities,” Miaskoff noted.
It’s easier to defend an executive in an organization for actions they didn’t take — such as not refusing or promoting someone — than someone like Shell, who was fired after an investigation confirmed allegations of sexual harassment, she explained.
“What we’ve noticed here at UltraViolet is the entertainment industry is going through yet another reckoning when it comes to the workplace safety of women,” Regalado told TheWrap, referring to the numerous lawsuits filed in New York and Los Angeles in 2023 due to a temporary lifting of the statute of limitations.
“The #MeToo movement didn’t go away. The harassment in the industry still exists. Women are still unsafe in many of these entertainment companies,” she said. “Whether or not these companies are willing to do more about it is really up to us as consumers and as individuals.”
An earlier version of this story stated that Bill O’Reilly’s podcast is available on Newsmax. It is not. TheWrap regrets the error.
