Arguably the worst moment of the Trump presidential campaign so far was the leaked audio of the candidate proclaiming his mistreatment of women to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush – a revelation that shocked voters on both sides of the political divide. But according to industry insiders, the bigger surprise is that we ever got to hear them at all.
Multiple TV producers across several kinds of unscripted and news programming say outtakes like Trump’s boast that his star status let him get away with grabbing women “by the pussy” are prevalent. But one of the reasons we rarely hear about them is that production companies go to great lengths to let their talent escape the consequences of harassment, producers say in interviews with the Guardian.
Networks maintain an arm’s-length distance from the productions themselves – leaving the executives who run production companies the only ones with the power to expose celebrities who mistreat their staff.
“It’s not an accident that we don’t know the specifics,” said one network executive at a reality network who asked not be identified. “Some of the talent is great, but a lot of the talent is really abusive and you just have to grow a thick skin. The behavior is often really lousy.”
One producer, “Ellen”, whose experiences were primarily in syndicated talkshows, said: “You sign your rights away when you’re under contract [on] these programs … This person [from human resources] would come in and say, ‘OK, you just have to be aware.’ And we’d go through this day-long talk and people would say, ‘There’s going to be certain language.’ You still had to sign something that said that you understood that.”
Production companies are careful with these waivers, making sure to keep them away from prying eyes. But everyone from participants in reality shows to backstage crew members on TV series must sign release forms, say the producers.
“It’s all so much about the wording of the releases that they signed,” said another producer, who had worked on Bravo’s Real Housewives series. “It’s only a thing if someone’s lawyer has looked over it and said, ‘They cannot depict you in this and this and this way.’ Morally it’s not my call – legally it’s all about that release.”
“If someone did want to harass you, you had signed your release,” said Ellen.
And it wasn’t always talk. Susan Levit, a longtime TV producer who worked primarily in TV news, said early in her career she felt she simply had to toughen up when it came to co-workers trying to touch her inappropriately or saying crude things to her. “I worked with an editor I liked very much. I respected him, I was friends with him. We knew that he was always making suggestive remarks, but we would just kind of brush him off. I remember a lot of nights just trying to push him away.”
The job, she said, was too important: “A lot was riding on it for me personally,” she recalled. “It was a lot of me kiddingly saying, ‘Get the hell away from me, you’re a pain in the ass.’ He was like an octopus.” Levit said the reasons for putting up with the abusive behavior was always the same: “The excuse was they were the best people to deal with, quality-wise.”
‘Really horrifying tapes are deleted or taped over immediately’
Levit’s stories predate The Apprentice, but one young producer, ‘Janet’, said the main thing that has changed in TV is the way people who mistreat women and people of color protect themselves.
Janet, who has worked across the industry over several years, described the process of destroying damning clips to the Guardian, on the condition that her name be changed and the name of the shows she worked on be redacted because those productions were often skeleton-crew operations.
On shows built around celebrities, she said, silence was not merely the culture but the explicit rule.
“The producers and APs [assistant producers], typically while shooting, will make notes either on the tape, cards, or in the daily logs about what is salvageable in a tape,” she said. “Really horrifying tapes or now files are deleted or taped over immediately. Others have the best clips pulled into the edit and then are erased, or destroyed.”
“It was nearly impossible to cut [another show] together between the grossness and abuse,” she recalled of a show involving a prominent conservative politician.
“That show was tape-destruction city, between [the two stars] and all of their other horrible, racist, homophobe, woman-abusing cronies,” Janet said. “It was nearly impossible to cut that show together between the grossness and abuse. But we were contracted to make this guy appear like a hero and maintain the brand not only of the show, but him and the network.”
The producer said that few people spoke out about the treatment because it was made clear that their jobs were on the line: “If any of the stuff gets exposed, a network or production company can hunt that person down and destroy their career, if not sue them.”
Janet said she felt complicit in the culture of misogyny but that she also felt trapped by her paycheck. “Ultimately networks, producers and APs are to blame for creating these people, and are complicit in presenting these people in the way that makes the most money but aren’t really their true character,” she said. “But then you have to remember that if some little AP calls out a star on a sexist comment, it’s not like the star of the show will be called out – the AP will just be fired and has no recourse. APs and producers just want to work and often witness this abuse and are subjected to this abuse on a daily basis with no protection. While being complicit, we also just needed jobs to pay our bills.”
‘It was such a personal thing’
Mike Fleiss, producer of The Bachelor, said the responsibility to provide the public with material like the tapes of Donald Trump reportedly hurling racial slurs and making fun of Marlee Matlin, who is deaf, on The Apprentice fell squarely on the shoulders of the person at the top of the corporate ladder.
In this case, that is Mark Burnett, the outspokenly Christian producer of The Apprentice. He should give the public the tapes, Fleiss told the Guardian. “If he wanted to, he could release this footage,” Fleiss said. “It’s incredibly damning stuff and he owes it to people because it’s the truth.”
“There’s so much footage,” Fleiss said of reality TV. “These shows are triumphs of editing, mostly. On these shows it’s a 50-to-one ratio, where you shoot 50 hours to make one hour.” The tapes all go to a transcription service; the footage itself goes into a vault until the 20th anniversary special. Given Trump’s behavior on Access Hollywood with Billy Bush, Fleiss told the Guardian, it was hard to imagine there was nothing else of deep public interest on the Apprentice tapes. “He was on the set of Access Hollywood for an hour,” Fleiss pointed out. “He was there for 10 hours a day on the set of The Apprentice.”
Fleiss scoffs at the $5m fine for leaking material, which the billionaire Mark Cuban has offered to pay anyone who is sued for releasing more footage of Trump. “It’s very standard practice. Even the $5m number, in terms of penalties for breach of nondisclosure agreement, that’s what’s in The Bachelor contracts. Shoot, we have leaks all the time. People release information and we’ve never sued anybody over it. If he wanted to, he could release this footage. It’s incredibly damning stuff and he owes it to people because it’s the truth.”
While ending the silence about harassment in TV is important to the general public in the case of the election, it’s also important to the people who have been harassed. While Levit spoke of brushing off harassment, there are other ways the TV-world boys club hurt her. “I hated LA,” she recalled of one incident many years ago. “This was between ’86 and ’89. I didn’t have a job, and I was looking for work. So I was networking as much as I could. Basically, I had gone to this guy’s office, I don’t even remember his name now, but he was a big muckety-muck at a television company or studio, and I guess he had called me saying, ‘I got a letter from so-and-so and I’d like you to come in and we can talk.’”
“I went in and he had the letter out on his desk, and he had to leave the office for a second. I mean – I can read upside down. And the letter said, ‘I think you should meet Susan Levit. She comes with a lot of credentials, but she is not attractive at all.’” Levit pauses. “I didn’t know what to do with that. I didn’t know if I should walk out or what. This was LA and this was the problem with LA, and if you weren’t drop-dead gorgeous, you wouldn’t exist.”
The nearly 30-year-old memory of the sudden intrusion of “locker-room talk” on the workplace still stings for Levit. “I never saw myself as a Donald Trump kind of statuesque model beauty but, you know, I was OK! I wasn’t fat! I was tall, I had a good sense of humor, I was cute,” she said. “It was the kind of thing that was very hurtful, because it was such a personal thing that had nothing to do with work.”
After speaking to the Guardian, Levit followed up with an email: “I don’t care what you look like – none of this behavior should ever happen,” she wrote, “and pretty or not, that shouldn’t be the deciding factor.”
