After another high-profile media scandal, maybe the industry should revisit the ‘Pence Rule’
Timothy P. Carney
Most Americans — especially most women — don’t believe that married men ought to go out for one-on-one dinners or drinks with female colleagues and subordinates, polls indicate.
The big outlier from this consensus is the national news media, which reacted with near unanimous scorn in 2017 to news reports that Mike Pence had a rule against one-on-one dinners or drinks with other women.
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Here are some of the media freakouts from back then, as collected by conservative Mollie Hemingway:
How Mike Pence’s Dumb Dinner Rule Puts Women at a Disadvantage: “I thought I’d heard just about everything over the course of my 13-year career on Wall Street, but Vice President Mike Pence’s statement from 2002 about not dining with a woman unless his wife, Karen, was present, left me baffled.” Why It Matters That Pence Won’t Have Dinner With A Woman Who Isn’t His Wife: “In Pence’s worldview, men have no self-control, and women are either temptresses or guardians of virtue.” Mike Pence won’t dine alone with a woman who’s not his wife. Is that sexist? Mike Pence’s Dinner Rule Shows Donald Trump Team’s Fear of Powerful Women: “Women Are Binary in Trump World: Mike Pence and Donald Trump see women as sexual prey or altogether invisible.” How Pence’s Dudely Dinners Hurt Women: “The vice president — and other powerful men — regularly avoid one-on-one meetings with women in the name of protecting their families. In the end, what suffers is women’s progress.”
Vox.com alone had three articles attacking the “Pence Rule.” CNN ran an op-ed by sexual-misconduct lawyer Roberta Kaplan opposing guardrails against male colleagues having intimate get-togethers with female colleagues.
What has happened since then? We’ve had at least three media scandals resulting in resignations involving sexual affairs between prominent colleagues at major news outlets.
CNN honcho Jeff Zucker hired Allison Gollust, made her his mentee and eventually promoted her to executive vice president. Zucker called Gollust his “closest colleague,” and Katie Couric said the two had a “cozy arrangement” and were “joined at the hip.” As the Guardian reported, “Inside CNN, those familiar with Gollust described her as a stalwart member of Zucker’s inner circle, attending meetings with Zucker and traveling with him on work trips.”
Gollust got divorced in 2017, and Zucker got divorced the next year. There are disputes about when the sexual relationship between the two began, but in any event, the relationship was considered inappropriate enough that both Zucker and Gollust resigned for violating CNN standards.
It seems that if CNN thought secret relationships between bosses and subordinates were inappropriate, they could have erected more robust norms about how employees spend time together.
In late 2022, it was Good Morning America’s turn in the colleague-affair-dismissal spotlight. Co-anchors Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes, both married at the time, traveled together to England to cover Queen Elizabeth’s jubilee, and that reportedly is when their sexual affair began. Their relationship also included “flirty post-filming sessions at a New York City bar,” according to the Daily Mail article that exposed their cheating.
The New York Post reported that Holmes had serially cheated on his wife with Good Morning America colleagues. That is, this newsroom appears to have been a hotbed of sexual impropriety, and it could have benefited from more guardrails.
This year, NBC got its workplace-affair scandal. CEO Jeff Shell was ousted from the company, while his former mistress, who accused him of sexual harassment and discrimination, has left CNBC. Shell and Gamble reportedly had an off-and-on affair — under duress, Gamble says — beginning over a decade ago.
Check out how the relationship started, as described by Gamble’s complaint:
“The complaint alleged that Mr. Shell invited Ms. Gamble to dinner in London — the complaint does not say what year — when she was a relatively junior producer, and he was the head of NBC International. After the dinner, Mr. Shell accompanied Ms. Gamble back to her hotel, and he pressured her to start a sexual relationship but was rebuffed….
“Ms. Gamble and Mr. Shell eventually did begin a sexual relationship, according to the complaint, after it became clear to her that rebutting his advances would probably damage her career.”
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A vast majority of male and female colleagues who spend one-on-one time together, even at dinner or drinks, will not have an affair. A small minority will. That small minority can be very disruptive to a workplace, as these three stories show.
Seems that in the news industry, a little bit of prudence could go a long way.