One of Charlie Rose's accusers explains why she decided to be named when so many other women are afraid to come forward
- Kyle Godfrey-Ryan, one of several women who have accused prominent journalist Charlie Rose of unwanted sexual advances, explained in a Facebook post why she made her story public.
- Godfrey-Ryan said she felt she would be "de-legitimatizing the experiences" of Rose's other alleged victims if she did not attach her name to her story.
One of the eight women who accused prominent journalist and CBS News host Charlie Rose of unwanted sexual advances in a Monday Washington Post report said that she made her allegations public because she felt remaining anonymous would have made her "complicit" in the abuse that other women experienced.
Kyle Godfrey-Ryan wrote in a Monday Facebook post that when she was first approached by a Post reporter a few weeks ago, she discussed her allegations off the record.
As Rose's assistant at the "Charlie Rose" show in the mid-2000s, Godfrey-Ryan said that he walked nude in front her at least a dozen times while she worked in his New York home. Rose would allegedly call Godfrey-Ryan, then 21, late at night and early in the morning to tell her his fantasies of watching her swim naked in his pool or ask her about her sex life.
Godfrey-Ryan said that even though she recognized that her former workplace "supported a spectrum of misconduct from unhealthy boundaries to outright physical abuse," she was initially unwilling to attach her name to an explosive story of sexual misconduct.
"I had no desire to allow my identity to be public in this story," she wrote. "I do not revisit this time in my life often and I felt no need to take anyone down."
But after reading excerpts of interviews with other women allegedly victimized by Rose, she had a change of heart.
"These stories helped me reframe my perspective. I felt that by withholding my identity, I was de-legitimatizing the experiences of these other women," she wrote. "I couldn't be complicit in what silence meant for them, so I allowed my name to run with the story."
Godfrey-Ryan was one of two women who were named in the Post story.
Godfrey-Ryan, now the founder of a meditation studio, said she recognized, upon revisiting her experiences working for Rose, how damaged her self-esteem had been when she was younger and how society supports "layers of abuse."
"When I was in my early 20s my self-worth was decimated, even before working at the show," she wrote, "and that is a major contributing factor to why I stayed in an abusive situation as long as I did."
Godfrey-Ryan reported the unwanted touching and sexual advances to Yvette Vega, Rose's executive producer. But Vega dismissed her concerns, brushing them off as "just Charlie being Charlie."
"She just made me feel like I was being a dramatic little girl," Godfrey-Ryan said.
She eventually confided her story to a friend, who also knew Rose. After the friend told Rose about her complaint, Rose fired Godfrey-Ryan, telling her he was embarrassed by the accusations, which he said were unfair.
The former assistant went back to finish college at Columbia University and abandoned her nascent career in journalism.