50 years of NPR!!! Love it or hate it.... when did you start listening to their programs??

[betsuni]

36. Here's what he says about it:

"I got kicked out of public radio in November 2017, accused of an email flirtation with a freelance researcher, a friend who'd worked for the show for thirteen years, a woman of 55 who worked from home and who came to the office often to tell me about her troubles and who wrote me notes about my monologues, which she said were works of art, notes signed, 'I love you' and 'I miss you.' A man whose job had been 'eliminated' by MPR accused MPR of doing it because he knew some dirt about her and me and he demanded a larger severance payment. They declined to pay it, so the man got a lawyer and persuaded my researcher that he'd been eliminated on her account and she joined him in his demand, asking for an enormous sum of money with the implied threat that otherwise they would drag my name in the mud and put stones in my mailbox. They drew up a list of allegations against me and MPR, demanding cash and confidentiality. The flirtation was not the classic #MeToo story of a powerful bully trying to extort intimacy. She wanted to go on working for me past my retirement, and I had said no, but she persisted.

"MPR was named in the allegation, though she worked for me, and this may have made the CEO uneasy, knowing that, in December, 1989, he had been accused of sexual harassment in Ramsey County District Court by his development director at KSJR where he'd been station manger. The case never came to trial and I assume he was innocent, but in the atmosphere of 2017, an accusation was the same as conviction, and certainly he didn't want the story to be MPR SLAMMED AGAIN FOR SEX OFFENSES and it wasn't. He threw me under the bus, and so it was not his picture that appeared on the front page of the New York Times in a story about men brought down by the #MeToo movement, but mine: the writer of flirtatious emails thereby linked to rapists and brutes who exposed themselves and threw women against walls."

There were no other claims of harassment.