Leslie Moonves accuser Illeana Douglas detailed her sexual misconduct accusations against the ousted CBS CEO during an appearance on “The View” on Wednesday.
The actress and comedian said the incident took place when Moonves invited her to his office after she had been cast on a CBS series called “Queens” in 1997.
“He started asking me a lot of personal questions and I was stumbling and fumbling and not really knowing what to say,” Douglas told the hosts of the daytime talk show. “And that, of course, led to him, you know, jumping on top of me and putting his tongue down my throat and pinning me down on the couch.”
Douglas said she had previously thought of the executive “as a father figure,” and had “no concern” at the time about being invited to his office to meet with him alone. “The purpose of the meeting was, ‘You and I should just get together and talk this out and make sure we don’t have any issues,’ and that was the frame of mind in which I entered the room,” she said.
As first detailed in a New Yorker report, Douglas said she was soon fired from the project due to “poor performance” and has struggled to get work at the network in the decades since.
“I think what [Moonves was] referring to is my poor performance when we were alone together in his office,” she said.
Moonves has admitted to trying to kiss Douglas but denied any of the accusations of assault, intimidation or retaliation. He is currently the subject of an external investigation examining both Moonves’s actions as CEO and the company’s corporate culture at large.
“I fully plan to cooperate with the investigation of CBS,” Douglas said. “In 1997, we reported this and if nothing was done about it in 1997, that’s on CBS.”