rfmcdonald | [LINK] "Jian Ghomeshi: How he got away with it" (Reply)

Anne Kingston's cover article in MacLean's is damning about everyone: Jian Ghomeshi, the CBC that enabled their star to be a monster unfettered, the people who knew something was up.

Now, the private Ghomeshi—the version given a free pass by his employer but well known within arts and media circles as “kind of dark with women,” as a friend of one of his accusers put it to her—was suddenly public. It was a case of everybody knew—except for the hundreds of thousands of listeners who started the day with his soothing voice, and who, understandably, trusted in the person presented to them by the CBC.

No one saw that disconnect more clearly than the dozen or so people who worked on Q. Although Ghomeshi was not the boss at the show, he was the “talent”—and the place operated as his fiefdom of sorts, a workplace with exacting standards and often cruel punishment for those who didn’t live up to them. “The culture was horrifying because of Jian,” says a former female producer. “He was a master of mind games,” says another former staffer. One day, Ghomeshi would be jovial and generous; the next, cold and dismissive. His chronic lateness kept staff on edge; he kept people waiting for hours. Everyone bridled—at least privately—at his mood swings and his penchant for playing staff against one another. The predominantly female staff found themselves reduced to tears by his tirades. The trauma and unhappiness within the unit was known within CBC, says a longtime CBC employee not associated with the show. And yet, CBC management never intervened. A producer who has alleged that Ghomeshi fondled her and told her he wanted to “hate-f–k” her reported she was told by the executive producer to try to work around it; Ghomeshi wasn’t going to change. This week, two more women—one a former Q staffer, another a current CBC employee—alleged Ghomeshi was abusive and sexually aggressive. One was afraid to speak out. The other says she told a supervisor but nothing happened. Even when Ghomeshi reportedly went to the CBC this spring about a story in the works about his interest in “rough sex,” management simply took his word for it that it was consensual.

But if Q staff saw a pattern of manipulation, it’s easy to see why they didn’t challenge it. “Nothing in Jian’s world happened by accident until recently,” says a former staffer. Anyone who disagreed with Ghomeshi could be cut off, says one producer: “If he perceived intellectual disagreement of any kind, he would freeze you out for days or weeks, which would make it impossible to do your job.” People who dared to confront him about his bad behaviour would be targeted. Ghomeshi could get angry and was often petulant, especially when he felt slighted. Story pitches would be subject to extra scrutiny, tiny faults would become a pretext for rewriting an entire script, and he would stop responding to emails and phone messages. Some staff came to believe that Ghomeshi was subtly telegraphing on air who was in his bad books by refusing to use their nicknames, as he usually did, when he read out the show credits at the end of the week.

Ghomeshi also had a reputation for being thin-skinned: “He could have an auditorium full of people applauding him, but if he goes out into the hall and somebody says, ‘You suck,’ it eats him alive,” says Roberto Veri, who worked as a Q producer in the show’s early days. “He’s a narcissist, very self-involved.” One former CBC employee who issued a critical tweet about an episode of Q, years after she’d left the corporation, reports that she received an angry phone call from the host.

There were occasional attempts to deal through official channels. And there was a widely shared view that management were unwilling to, or simply incapable of reining in the man who had become the face of CBC Radio. One former Q staffer saw the problem as systemic: “This whole economy at CBC is screwed up, and this guy took advantage of it. People are on contract; they don’t have secure jobs, and even those who do are led to feel lucky they do.”