E! Allegedly Terminates Veteran Female Producer Over Golden Globes Censorship
A female E! producer was reportedly laid off for her failure to censor actress Eva Longoria’s pre-recorded critique of the organization’s management of former E! host Catt Sadler from its January 7th Golden Globes Awards telecast.
Aileen Gram-Moreno filed a suit against her former employers at E! Entertainment with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for discriminatory termination on Thursday, March 1. The proceeding contends that the grounds for Gram-Moreno dismissal was imbued with gender-bias as she was subsequently replaced by a male counterpart with a more established title.
Over the last decade, Gram-Moreno had been employed by the network as a part-time programming producer to supervise broadcasts of both live and pretaped red carpet interviews. In light of Sadler’s departure from E! as a result of a significant gender-wage disparity last December, prominent female celebrities utilized this year’s Golden Globes red carpet interviews with E! to express a solidarity stance with Sadler and the TIMES UP movement.
Gram-Moreno claimed that producers were instructed by network executives to immediately review and withhold pre-taped interviews that mentioned Sadler after Debra Messing’s scathing review of E! in a live interview with Giuliana Rancic. Gram-Moreno acknowledged, in the proceeding, that she had prematurely approved of Eva Longoria’s interview before she detected Longoria’s declaration of “we stand with you, Catt.”
In an interview with The New York Times on Thursday, Gram-Moreno stated that she had texted an apology to her superior, whose reply admitted that the error would have been unavoidable. The New York Times has examined and verified the content of the texts.
Nevertheless, Gram-Moreno received a call from another executive several days later, informing her that her scheduled services were no longer required at upcoming awards ceremonies as she allowed “the Catt mention get on air.” In addition, the network declined to grant her remuneration requests for the canceled engagements.
E! sustains its stance that the organization appropriately compensated its employees in sole accordance with their work attitudes, not gender. A representative for E! has refuted Gram-Moreno’s allegations of biases and censorship efforts, citing to The Hollywood Reporter that it had been Gram-Moreno’s lackluster work ethic that eventually convinced the network to cease its working relationship with her.
Gram-Monroe’s lawyer Katherine Atkinson has, in turn, countered those claims, proclaiming that the network’s management had never once voiced concerns regarding Gram-Moreno’s supposed unsatisfactory performance over the past 12 years. “That is a convenient excuse for covering up attempts to silence women speaking out,” Atkinson told Variety.
