Entertainment

Producer Says E! Fired Her Over Red-Carpet Interview

With accusations of sexual harassment dogging its star host, Ryan Seacrest, and celebrities reportedly planning to steer clear of him on the Oscar red carpet Sunday, E! is under pressure heading into Hollywood’s biggest night of the year. Now a female producer is claiming employment discrimination after getting fired, she said, for letting a clip critical of the network air during the Golden Globes.

Posted Updated

By
CARA BUCKLEY
, New York Times

With accusations of sexual harassment dogging its star host, Ryan Seacrest, and celebrities reportedly planning to steer clear of him on the Oscar red carpet Sunday, E! is under pressure heading into Hollywood’s biggest night of the year. Now a female producer is claiming employment discrimination after getting fired, she said, for letting a clip critical of the network air during the Golden Globes.

The producer, Aileen Gram-Moreno, said she was let go after allowing a clip of Eva Longoria criticizing E! to air during the channel’s Golden Globes red-carpet show in January. On Thursday, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming she was unfairly terminated and replaced by a man.

Longoria was one of several actresses who used red-carpet interviews to voice their support of Catt Sadler, the former E! News co-host who quit after learning her male colleague was earning nearly double her salary. E! has said that the roles were not comparable, because Sadler was a correspondent, and that it pays its employees fairly “regardless of gender.”

The theme of women’s equality dominated the Golden Globes, and the ceremony served as a launching pad for Time’s Up, the Hollywood-led initiative to fight sexual harassment that emerged from the #MeToo movement. To show support for the movement at the January event, attendees, celebrities and journalists, including E! hosts Giuliana Rancic and Ryan Seacrest, wore black.

Since then, Seacrest has been accused of sexual harassment by his former personal stylist — claims he has denied. NBCUniversal, which owns E!, has said it conducted an independent investigation and found the claims to be unsubstantiated. E! has said Seacrest will appear as scheduled on its red-carpet show Sunday at the Oscars. But some celebrities are reportedly going to pass him by.

In her complaint, Gram-Moreno, who helped get E! off the ground in 1990 and who had worked as a part-time producer on the channel’s red-carpet shows for the past 12 years, said that at the Golden Globes show, she had been instructed to flag any mention of Sadler, Time’s Up or #MeToo before celebrity interviews went on the air. In the course of its red-carpet show, E! cannot broadcast all such interviews live because many take place simultaneously, so some interviews are recorded and then run a little later, with others not airing at all because of time constraints.

But after Debra Messing pointedly criticized E! during a live interview with Rancic, Gram-Moreno’s legal complaint said, executives seemed concerned that more celebrities would mention Sadler. As a result, the filing said, she was directed to review more interviews before airing, in an effort to weed out mentions of Sadler.

“They said, if there’s any mention of Catt in the preshow, make sure you flag it,” Gram-Moreno said in an interview Thursday. “You’re censoring celebrities; it’s just not a good idea in my humble opinion. But it wasn’t my decision.”

Gram-Moreno said in the filing that the number of recorded interviews made it all but impossible to fully vet every one. She said she had listened to most but not all of the clip with Longoria, who was interviewed alongside Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, but the decision was made to broadcast the clip before she heard Longoria say, at the end, “We stand with you, Catt.”

Gram-Moreno said she was devastated about the mistake, and texted an apology to her executive producer, who replied that it probably could not have been avoided. (The New York Times reviewed the texts.) Five days later, Gram-Moreno’s filing said, she received a call from an executive producer firing her from all upcoming shows she had been booked for, including the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the Grammys and the Oscars. “The executive producer said it was because you let the Catt mention get on air,” Gram-Moreno said in the interview.

But Adam Stotsky, president of E! Entertainment, said in an interview Thursday that while he and the network disputed Sadler’s claims of gender inequality and pay disparity, there was no effort to censor celebrities on the carpet.

If there had been, he said, the clips of Messing and Longoria criticizing the network, and another clip of Sarah Jessica Parker alluding to the controversy, would not have been broadcast; all three interviews are also on the channel’s website. And while an interview with Natalie Portman, who also voiced support for Sadler, did not make it on the air because of lack of time, he said, the network did publish the segment online too.

“If we were trying to censor, which is her primary thesis here, we certainly wouldn’t have done that,” Stotsky said.

He acknowledged that E! wanted to know ahead of time about any mentions of Sadler, and that the criticism from Messing put them on the lookout.

“We don’t agree with Debra Messing’s assertion,” he said. “We’re not in the business of being a megaphone for an inaccurate story.”

But Stotsky said there was no increase in the number of recorded interviews, and the production workload did not change at the Golden Globes. Gram-Moreno’s job, he said, was to “screen all of the assets completely and obviously she failed to do that.” He added that she was not asked to return to work in upcoming shows (and, since she was a freelance producer, he said, she was not technically “fired”) because of a “pattern of poor performance,” with the Golden Globes slip being the final straw.

An E! spokeswoman, Sarah Goldstein, said, “For the past decade Aileen Gram-Moreno was a freelancer who worked an average of 20 days per year solely for our red-carpet coverage.”

“After the Golden Globes,” Goldstein added, “she was asked not to return due to job performance issues. Gram-Moreno filed her legal claim after her request for a financial settlement was turned down.” Gram-Moreno’s lawyer, Katherine Atkinson, of Wilkenfeld, Herendeen & Atkinson, said E! never in 12 years complained about Gram-Moreno’s performance; in her filing with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Gram-Moreno said she had received a performance-based raise five years ago. She also said she had been replaced with a male producer who was given a higher title.

Atkinson said that after her dismissal, Gram-Moreno requested that E! pay her for the shows she had been booked for, and that when the channel declined, she had to resort to legal action.

Copyright 2024 New York Times News Service. All rights reserved.