WASHINGTON (WASHINGTON POST) - Veteran television host has been suspended by CBS, PBS and Bloomberg following a report by the Washington Post in which eight women said he sexually harassed them.

CBS News issued a brief statement on Monday (Nov 20) saying Rose, 75, has been suspended "immediately while we look into this matter", Los Angeles Times reported. Rose, whose show airs on PBS, also co-hosts CBS This Morning and is a contributing correspondent for 60 Minutes.

PBS and Bloomberg said in statements that they were suspending Rose's signature interview show, distributed on both outlets, citing the allegations in the newspaper story.

Eight women have told The Washington Post that the longtime television host made unwanted sexual advances towards them, including lewd phone calls, walking around naked in their presence, or groping their breasts, buttocks or genital areas.

The women were employees or aspired to work for Rose at the Charlie Rose show from the late 1990s to as recently as 2011. They ranged in age from 21 to 37 at the time of the alleged encounters.

There are striking commonalities in the accounts of the women, each of whom described their interactions with Rose in multiple interviews with The Post.

For all of the women, reporters interviewed friends, colleagues or family members who said the women had confided in them about aspects of the incidents. Three of the eight spoke on the record.

Five of the women spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of Rose's stature in the industry, his power over their careers or what they described as his volatile temper.

"In my 45 years in journalism, I have prided myself on being an advocate for the careers of the women with whom I have worked," Rose said in a statement provided to The Post.

"Nevertheless, in the past few days, claims have been made about my behaviour toward some former female colleagues."

"It is essential that these women know I hear them and that I deeply apologise for my inappropriate behaviour. I am greatly embarrassed. I have behaved insensitively at times, and I accept responsibility for that, though I do not believe that all of these allegations are accurate. I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings, even though I now realise I was mistaken."

"I have learned a great deal as a result of these events, and I hope others will too. All of us, including me, are coming to a newer and deeper recognition of the pain caused by conduct in the past, and have come to a profound new respect for women and their lives."

Most of the women said Rose alternated between fury and flattery in his interactions with them. Five described Rose putting his hand on their legs, sometimes their upper thigh, in what they perceived as a test to gauge their reactions.

Two said that while they were working for Rose at his residences or were traveling with him on business, he emerged from the shower and walked naked in front of them. One said he groped her buttocks at a staff party.

Reah Bravo was an intern and then associate producer for Rose's PBS show beginning in 2007. In interviews, she described unwanted sexual advances while working for Rose at his private waterfront estate in Bellport, New York, and while traveling with him in cars, in a hotel suite and on a private plane.

"It has taken 10 years and a fierce moment of cultural reckoning for me to understand these moments for what they were," she told The Post.

"He was a sexual predator, and I was his victim."

Kyle Godfrey-Ryan, one of Rose's assistants in the mid-2000s, recalled at least a dozen instances where Rose walked nude in front of her while she worked in one of his New York City homes. He also repeatedly called the then-21-year-old late at night or early in the morning to describe his fantasies of her swimming naked in the Bellport pool as he watched from his bedroom, she said.

"It feels branded into me, the details of it," Godfrey-Ryan said.

She said she told Yvette Vega, Rose's longtime executive producer, about the calls.

"I explained how he inappropriately spoke to me during those times," Godfrey-Ryan said. "She would just shrug and just say, 'That's just Charlie being Charlie.'"

In a statement to The Post, Vega said she should have done more to protect the young women on the show. "I should have stood up for them," said Vega, 52, who has worked with Rose since the show was created in 1991.

"I failed. It is crushing. I deeply regret not helping them."

Godfrey-Ryan said that when Rose learned she had confided to a mutual friend about his conduct, he fired her.

Megan Creydt worked as a coordinator on the show from 2005 to 2006, overlapping with Godfrey-Ryan.

"It was quite early in working there that he put his hand on my mid-thigh," said Creydt, who agreed to be interviewed on the record to support other women who were coming forward with what she deemed to be more serious claims concerning Rose.

She said that during the incident, Rose was driving his Mini Cooper in Manhattan while she was sitting in the passenger seat.

"I don't think I said anything," she said. "I tensed up. I didn't move his hand off, but I pulled my legs to the other side of the car. I tried not to get in a car with him ever again. I think he was testing me out."

Her then-boyfriend confirmed to The Post that she told him the story at the time.

In addition to the eight women who say they were harassed, The Post spoke to about two dozen former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Six said they saw what they considered to be harassment, eight said they were uncomfortable with Rose's treatment of female employees, and 10 said they did not see or hear anything concerning.

"He was always professional with me," said Eleonore Marchand Mueller, a former assistant of Rose's who worked for him from 2003 to 2005.

"I never witnessed any unprofessional incidents."

The show's small, informal structure, with roughly 15 employees, and the centrality of Rose's authority on a programme he owns led to uncertainty over how to respond, said the women who felt victimised.

"There wasn't anybody to report this to if you felt uncomfortable," one of them said.

The employees worked for Charlie Rose Inc., and not Bloomberg LP or PBS, which said they did not provide human resources support for the show.

The environment brimmed with the young and potentially vulnerable, hungry for scarce television jobs. "There are so few jobs," said one of the women who said Rose groped her.

"You know if you don't behave a certain way, there's someone else behind you."

Rose travelled frequently, jetting off to interview world leaders across the globe and splitting time between two New York City residences and homes in Bellport - on Long Island - and North Carolina. Often at his side was a rotating cast of young assistants and producers.

The young women who were hired by the show were sometimes known as "Charlie's Angels", two former employees said. Rose frequently gave unsolicited shoulder rubs to several of them, behavior referred to among employees as "the crusty paw", a former employee said.

Rumours about Rose's behaviour have circulated for years. One of the authors of this report, Outlook contributing writer Irin Carmon, first heard and attempted to report on the allegations involving two of the women while she was a journalist at Jezebel in 2010 but was unable to confirm them.

In the past several weeks in the wake of accusations against Harvey Weinstein, Carmon and Post investigative reporter Amy Brittain jointly began contacting dozens of men and women who had worked on the Charlie Rose show or interviewed for jobs there.

A woman then in her 30s who was at the Bellport home in 2010 to discuss a job opportunity said Rose appeared before her in an untethered bathrobe, naked underneath. She said he subsequently attempted to put his hands down her pants. She said she pushed his hands away and wept throughout the encounter.

A woman who began as an intern in the late 1990s and was later hired full time described a "ritual" of young women at the show being summoned by Rose to his Manhattan apartment to work at a desk there. The woman described a day when Rose went into the bathroom, left the door open and turned on the shower.

She said he began to call her name, insistently. She ignored him, she said, and continued working. Suddenly, he came out of the bathroom and stood over her. She turned her head, briefly saw skin and Rose with a towel and jerked back around to avoid the sight.

She said he said, "Didn't you hear me calling you?"

She said she told someone in the office, and word got around. A few days later, she said, a male colleague approached her, laughing, "Oh, you got the shower trick."

The woman's sister confirmed that her sibling had told her about the shower incident soon after it occurred.

Another woman said that during her internship in the early 2000s, Rose groped her breasts and stomach as she drove him from Bellport back to Manhattan. Her then-boyfriend, now husband, confirmed that she described the incident to him immediately after it occurred. When Rose invited her to work regularly and stay overnight at Bellport, her boyfriend told her to refuse the offer, and she did, both told The Post.

Rose's eponymous show, with its trademark black background and round oak table, has been in production since 1991. What it lacks in mass viewership, the Charlie Rose show makes up for in prestige and high-profile bookings of the likes of former president Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Warren Buffett. Rose's show is produced by Charlie Rose Inc., an independent television production company, and distributed by PBS. It is filmed at Bloomberg headquarters in Manhattan.

Rose's stature has only grown in recent years.

CBS tapped him in 2011 to help revamp its ailing morning show, now called CBS This Morning, expanding his audience. He has also been a contributing correspondent for 60 Minutes for nearly a decade. His 2013 interview of Syria's president won Emmy and Peabody awards. (None of the women who made accusations against Rose to The Post worked for PBS or CBS.) Representatives from PBS, CBS and Bloomberg said they have no records of sexual harassment complaints about Charlie Rose.