Holy smokes.
That was pretty much the reaction from those familiar with Tavis Smiley going way back to his days as BET Tonight show host —– in the 80’s when he could do no wrong. The veteran media personality Tavis Smiley —– yup that Tavis Smiley —– had somehow managed to squeeze himself into the jam-packed gallery of bad dudes behaving badly, joining the burgeoning cabal of prominent men hit recently with accusation of sexual impropriety.
Who’s going to be next? Hell if I know.
After a group of aggrieved women trouped into PBS office last year to lodge complaint alleging they had sexual relationship with Smiley, their boss, it instantly spelled epic trouble for the 54-year old one-time media favorite in the African-American community. Following investigation, which seemingly authenticated the story narrated by these women, PBS wasted no time dropping the hammer, suspending the distribution deal for Smiley’s 30-minute radio show indefinitely, which stoked a nasty full-arm punch-up.
“Effective today, PBS has indefinitely suspended distribution of Tavis Smiley produced by TS Media, an independent production company,” said the media company. It continued: “PBS engaged an outside law firm to conduct an investigation immediately after learning of troubling allegations regarding Mr. Smiley. The investigation included interviews with witnesses as well as with Smiley. The inquiry uncovered multiple, credible allegations of conduct that is inconsistent with the values and standards of PBS, and the totality of this information led to today’s decision.”
National headlines across the country blared the stunning news. It was a choriamb accusation in which the women separately “expressed concern that their employment status with Smiley’s company, The Smiley Group, was linked” to their sexual dalliances with him, describing a cantankerous and hostile work environment that was “verbally abusive and threatening.”
Smiley, who, needless to say, went ballistic over the seemingly damoclean opprobrium that out of nowhere landed right on his doorstep. The Indiana University graduate came out swinging, firing off a combative video on his Facebook page defending himself against what he characterized as PBS ill-advised rush to judgment.
“I have the utmost respect for women and celebrate the courage of those who have come forth to tell their truth,” said Smiley. But “To be clear, I have never groped, coerced, or exposed myself inappropriately to any workplace colleague in my entire broadcast career, covering 6 networks over 30 years,” he said in the video.
The pushback was a good start. But not even Smiley thought for a second that his stone-face Facebook video blast, even as emphatic and bellicose as it appeared, was remotely enough to tamp down the vast media and public appetite for the unfolding and smoldering saga.
Sensing he was in a fight of his life, an intensely infuriated, Smiley made a b-line to Good Morning America (GMA) to continue pleading his case. But first, realistically, he had to come clean. And at GMA, he did just that, wisely jettisoning his earlier bold-faced lie to make room for the cathartic truth, acknowledging that he indeed had numerous sexual encounters with a retinue of his subordinates over several years, clearly contradicting the earlier claim on his Facebook that he only had sex with one coworker years ago.
That confession offered us the first palpable harbinger that the dude was in more hot water than a Chinese tea bag. But his confession came with a little nuance intended to soften the blow. Smiley, 53, told GMA that all of his sexual dalliances with his subordinates were “consensual,” an assertion he first made on his Facebook.
“If having consensual relationship with a colleague years ago is the stuff that leads to this kind of public humiliation and personal destruction, heaven help us,” said Smiley on his Facebook.
Taut and petered-out, a boulevardier Smiley hopped from one TV program to another, pleading his case and squirming desperately to downplay all of this as nothing but “consensual” decisions made by grown folks navigating the trails of love , and as he put it, to where their “heart’s going to lead” them or who they are going to “fall in love with.”
That was Smiley’s story and he, obviously, was going to stick to it, but Executives at PBS were having none of it, expressing rock solid confidence in their decision to give the dude the boot.
But a deeply unstrung Smiley dug in too. Unleashing a blast of defiant broadside and calling PBS investigation “sloppy,” hasty and peremptory, he vowed to fight for his reputation, declaring that “PBS made a huge mistake” that “led to a rush to judgment” that is now trampling “on a reputation that I spend an entire lifetime trying to establish.”
PBS, Smiley said, “need to fix it. They need to correct it. I’m going to do anything to protect my reputation.”
But that was a little too late for the Hoosier alumni, precisely because his seemingly apocryphal story appeared to be profoundly dogged by glaring Kafkaesques and earsplitting inconsistencies. On the face of it though, Smiley appeared to be putting up a gallant fight, but then it looked as though he was merely punching ghosts —- for a number of reasons.
For one thing, even if one were to align with Smiley’s side of the story agreeing that these were consensual sexual indulgencies, still, his conduct being a supervisor and company CEO in no way, shape or form cast him as a sanctimonious and hapless casualty of pointless kerfuffle festering unnecessarily over sex. Smiley, no matter how you look at it, irresponsibly engaged in monstrous breach of supervisory ethos and ethics. He alone sowed and watered the seed of his own burgeoning and tormenting mess by foolishly sleeping with his office factotums. It appeared the dude foolishly turned his media company into a sprawling beehive of minion sex jamboree that spiraled out of control.
As Smiley the media lammergeier, painfully toiled to disentangle himself from self-inflicted nadir, sabotaged by his own strikingly effete gambit, an apology might be the elusive therapy he needs to salvage his battered and besmirched reputation. But so far, he is stonewalling on the question of total humility and hasn’t expressed a modicum of rue. Instead, he remains committed to hanging his fate on the feeble “consensual sex” copout and crafty pitches to mask the nauseating stench of his office poop. By doing that, he pegged himself in an extraordinarily awkward posture, for on the one hand, he tactically agreed that he slept with subordinates, saying “we don’t forbid it,” but at the same time nervously tiptoed around the issue with absolute caution not to openly clash with those who loudly decried the epic stupidity of his behavior.
But perhaps, sensing he was getting nowhere with his tap-dancing, slick razzmatazz, his opaque tactics and acrobatic posturing, he wisely pivoted, and decided to sift through the ashes of his mess where he somehow scooped up the Pollyanna Syndrome buried deep in it, seeking to boost his case. It was a silver lining that for him mercifully opened up a glib favorable argument, allowing him to package his appalling conduct in a bouquet of roses to fit the contours of a broader, genteel pursuit of dignified workplace romance, and then from the confines of that tantalizingly relatable space, dangled the marvelous role it often plays in shepherding “millions” of office love birds to flourishing marriages.
“I certainly understand people who have the viewpoint that any consensual relationship in the workplace is wrong, but there are also other points of view on this…while we do not encourage office relationships, we do not forbid them, either,” said Smiley.
And here is really where he rested his case. “There may be millions of Americans watching right now who met their spouses at work.”
Millions?
Nice hyperbolic try, Tavis.
Let’s just say that Smiley, who pretty much lost his following in the African-American community for being former President Obama’s gadfly, screwed up big time ——- plain and simple.
All of this really offers a good textbook teaching that the gateway to maintaining a squeaky clean reputation when working alongside women of striking pulchritude is to resist the easy lure of fetching an office beau or launching workplace romance. Such tantalizing swoon, which is typically sparked by the slippery-slope of one-time dalliance, often escalates to a labyrinth of office and out of office cocktail of indulgencies, salacious lechery that in turn becomes a ticking tinderbox, which then, as in Smiley’s case, explodes into catastrophic and humiliating career ruin.
Yeah —- some might scold these women for being fiendishly as cold as arctic snow; for treacherously and maliciously wrecking careers. And some of them are probably guilty of those, but Smiley, if truth be told, could have avoided the morass altogether by avoiding office romance in the first place. Instead, he is now an inaugural part of a mushrooming pantheon of bad men behaving so badly that it gave rise to the burgeoning ‘Me Too Movement’.
Hey — I hope the sex was all worth it.
