Another Ex-CBS Radio Employee Files Suit
• Another former CBS Radio employee has filed a lawsuit against the company — The New York Post reports that Jacquelyn Musiello, a former payroll specialist in CBS Radio’s HR department, is seeking $10 million in damages and class-action status. The Postreports that Musielloquit her job in early 2017 due to the “physical and emotional distress” of being sexually harassed by the talent, while also witnessing countless situations in which other employees were as well, according to the Bronx state court lawsuit.
During her five years at CBS Radio, Musiello says she fielded complaints from female co-workers who described “sexual comments,” “unwelcome touching” and “innuendoes” from supervisors and radio personalities on a “nearly daily basis.” In one 2016 instance, Musiello recounts walking in on a female and male employee having sex in a conference room after hours. When she confronted them, the employees questioned her authority. When Musiello told her boss, Margaret Marion — who is named in the complaint — of the incident, she “laughed it off.”
The suit also describes uncomfortable encounters Musiello had with former longtime WCBS-FM/New York midday personality Dan Taylor, who she alleges made unwanted advances toward her, including giving her chocolates and flowers and a handwritten card. She said Taylor also asked her out to lunch, and in order to entice her to say yes, reminded her that she was up for a promotion, saying it “would be in her best interest” to attend. Musiello says she also received complaints from other female staffers about Taylor, including solicitations to join him on his private plane. But when Musiello told her boss, Marion, of the complaints about Taylor, she was told to instruct the women to simply “stay away” from him. Taylor was fired in July 2019 after a misconduct investigation found that the company had ignored complaints of racism and sexism by three employees. “There was a deeply embedded sexist culture that extended from the top down,” said Musiello’s lawyer Donna Clancy.
The frat house-like culture at the company, particularly the radio division — which was sold in Nov. 2017 to Entercom — has been the subject of several lawsuits, as The Posthas previously reported. New York Attorney General Letitia Jameshas probed CBS Radio as part of an overall investigation into misconduct at the broadcasting company that had been led by Les Moonves until his 2018 resignation amid an avalanche of sexual harassment claims.
• You may recall that in July 2018 The Post first broke the story of former WFAN/New York account exec Laura Lockwood, who filed a $5 million sexual harassment suit agains tmidday co-host Joe Benigno, alleging that the station, which was owned by CBS Radio during her employment from 2006 to 2017, was run like a “frat house.”
The following month, the Post published another shocking series of allegations, this time leveled by Craig Lenti, the son of legendary former longtime WCBS-FM/New York PD Joe McCoy, who kept a daily diary to chronicle what he alleges was his rocky tenure as a producer for WCBS-FM midday talent Dan Taylor from 2006 until he was laid off shorty before Christmas in 2013.
As Lenti related to the Post in extensive detail, when he started working as a producer for Taylor, who he’d known since childhood, “the company turned from the ‘playground’ of his youth to an ‘Animal House‘-style nightmare.”
