Les Moonves' ouster from CBS took many by surprise because he seemed "too big to jail"

Slate

"The simple fact is that it is deeply ingrained in us to think some men get to mistreat women. Some men are too big to jail," says Lili Loofbourow, pointing out that Moonves didn't get the boot until after another set of accusers came forward Sunday with even more disturbing stories. "We should accept no calculus that says six accusations aren’t enough but 12 are," she says. "The pragmatic politics here are as straightforward as they are irrational and nasty: The P.R. mills that grind people into capital determined that Moonves could weather one scandal enough to eat dinner in public and fight for his standing, but not two." Loofbourow adds: "Men like Moonves do all they can to encourage this assessment of their value, of course. They present themselves as essential to the success of the enterprise, knit their fate to the company’s. Moonves is more than diplomatic in interviews, but he makes clear that Warner Bros. was No. 1 when he left it, that CBS is now the No. 1 network under him, and that his biggest question when he arrived at CBS was whether he would be able to fix its problems: 'Am I ever going to get this right? How am I going to be able to figure out how to rebuild this place?' Men like this characterize accusations as conspiracies to bring them down because of their prominence ...The boards they install and executives they hire only serve to bolster the illusion that without these big men, the system will not hold. Those in more junior ranks who know of or encounter allegations are faced with the entire scaffolding of the institution arrayed against them. (Here’s what’s weird, though: This particular strain of corporate self-centering actually reveals the men in question to be abysmal stewards of their companies. Anyone whose organization is solely reliant on him has failed; the very claim that they’re irreplaceable speaks to fragility, not robustness.)"

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