NPR Executive Was Warned Repeatedly About Sexual Harassment, Report Finds
Oreskes committed to Mr. Hart that it would not happen again.”
But in the spring of 2016, Mr. Oreskes expensed several dinners with women, including one with a female NPR employee, the report found.
Shortly after, an NPR employee said Mr. Oreskes had made an inappropriate comment in 2016 during a conversation about her career,
and had invited her to his beach cottage to “continue the conversation over wine,” the report found.
“The past months have shown that sexual harassment is a serious, widespread problem,
pervasive in every industry and many organizations; NPR is no exception.”
The report said that some NPR employees had been warned about Mr. Oreskes’s behavior,
but the knowledge stayed within a “whisper network” that didn’t extend outside the newsroom.
In the summer of 2015, two female NPR employees said they had dinners with Mr. Oreskes that turned excessively personal, the report found.
The report by the law firm Morgan Lewis, which was hired by NPR, said
that Mr. Oreskes repeatedly expensed meals with young female employees, ostensibly to discuss their careers, but that the conversations often veered into sexual and other personal territory.
“While management made multiple attempts to counsel Mr. Oreskes about his conduct, he was not deterred from pursuing conversations and dinner meetings with women inside and outside of NPR
that were inappropriate and served a nonbusiness purpose,” the report said.
