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Affair of Channel Seven's CEO exposes mixed societal mores

By Brendan O'Reilly - posted Friday, 13 January 2017


The public always loves a salacious scandal, in part because such titillation provides a bit of comic relief from our own more mundane lives.  Scandals always require some element of moral outrage.  To the religious it might be the affront caused by the sin of adultery and indulgence in illicit pleasures.  To the more secular, any outrage concerning extra-marital affairs more commonly is about broken commitments to spouse and family, abuse of position by powerful men, or hypocrisy by perpetrators (especially those who publicly trumpet their "family values").

The other side of the coin, however, is that those whose private lives are placed in the public spotlight against their wishes, can suffer great embarrassment.  Such has been the fate of  Tim Worner, Channel Seven CEO, whose private life has been sprayed all over the media. 

The affair became public when Mr Worner's former lover, Amber Harrison, detailed claims that she and Mr Worner had engaged in cocaine-fuelled sexual encounters, some of which allegedly took place following work events.  When the affair began, Ms Harrison, then 35, was the "highly-ranked executive assistant"to the CEO of Seven West's magazines.  The affair reportedly ran from the end of 2012 until June 2014, and the media have sought to rationalise it using almost every possible stereotype. 

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The scandal became an absolute doozy, largely because Ms Harrison on 18 December 2016 issued a press release (currently posted in full on the Web) publicising extensive details of the affair.  According to the press release: “We started flirting, and soon after Tim began texting and emailing me for sex,”Ms Harrison said, revealing the pair would meet for sex at her Sydney apartment.  “I knew he was married.  It was never about love.  It was about sex and power.  He likes having a bit on the side.  I found our relationship, if you’d call it that, thrilling to begin with.”

The blog publicising Ms Harrison's statement goes on to describe it as "a powerful read on how some people abuse their positions of authority to satisfy their sexual needs".  The blog quotes a number of (R-rated) texts from Mr Worner containing "some crude content, which he has not denied".   Ms Harrison also alleged that Mr Worner (then in his early 50s) had four other affairs with Channel Seven staff members. The claims have been denied by Mr Worner and the women.  The blog also claims that Ms Harrison only went public "after becoming frustrated by three failed attempts over two years at negotiating a settlement".

According to a report in Fairfax, Channel Seven subsequently took "an Australian blogger" to Court in a bid to protect two of its high profile network stars.  Seven also launched defamation proceedings against the blogger in the NSW Supreme Court because his website published the names of two of the women ( a well-known actress and an on-air presenter). 

It is also reported that in August 2014 Ms Harrison was paid $100,000 hush-money and agreed to "blowtorch"the iPhone she used to exchange texts, later delivering damaged pieces to Seven West representatives.  She also claims the company in November 2014 agreed to pay her $350,000 after she was made redundant but Seven never paid.  “All they had to do was stick to the deal,” she told journalists. “This is not about me trying to be famous and it’s not about me trying to sell my story".  Seven, however, says it is entitled to withhold payment for "noncompliance with the settlement deed" (code for not keeping quiet, as required?). 

Ms Harrison had earlier complained to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) alleging bullying, victimisation and harassment at Seven but failed to progress her case.  Channel 9 reported that Ms Harrison was allegedly warned she would become "Australia’s Monica Lewinsky" and lose her job, if she refused hush money.

Essentially, the Worner affair is a repeat of the age old story of powerful men attracting women, and subsequently (often along with their lover) being damaged, if not brought down, by their sexual antics being made public.  It raises questions about the mores that apply or ought to apply to the sexual indiscretions of individuals. 

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Let's start with the response of the media and the issue of the public's right to know.

Former PM, Paul Keating, (while enraged at media intrusion following his divorce) stated that ''Matters for which there is no public right to know ought to be the preserve of the citizenry in its privacy,''....''That includes details of their personal lives, altercations in marriages, love affairs, compromising photographs taken of them privately without their consent. These are all matters that should be off limits for newspapers and other media.''

News Limited's then CEO, John Hartigan expressed a contrary view, noting that ''What we have now is a man calling for a new law so that people like him can use their wealth, power and privileged positions to avoid scrutiny when it suits them, while remaining happy to exploit the media for their own gain at other times.''

The matter of the mores applying to media coverage of the private lives of high profile individuals in any case seems to be settled in the world of the Australian media.  The reality is that, in the absence of over-riding legislation, our media, given a choice between protecting privacy or running a good salacious story, will almost always (defamation laws permitting) opt for the latter.

In the case of the Worner affair, it is hard to avoid the impression that sections of the media (Fairfax being the most obvious) relished being able to expose the embarrassing secrets of a competitor news organisation, publicising the juicy details and printing copious photographs of key players.  Fairfax’s Private Sydney column went as far as labelling the affair as "shameful".

According to the SMH, "inexplicably the News Corp press had been sitting on the Worner story, and only published the details when the Herald began making enquiries... the same day it is understood Katrina Worner also learned of the affair".  The story (in keeping with the media tradition of portraying betrayed spouses as veritable saints) also quoted an attestation that "Worner's wife, the mother of their school-age children", was"the sweetest, loveliest, kindest woman you could ever hope to meet".  The Australian added that "Katrina Worner nursed her husband through non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma when the then up-and-coming programmer was in his mid-30s". 

The Murdoch media were generally more sympathetic to Tim Worner's plight and to the action's of Seven in trying to minimise the scandal.  The Australian noted Seven's hope that "scorned-mistress Harrison will be discredited after emerging as a corporate felon guilty of cheating on her company credit card".  (There was controversy about Ms Harrison's credit card expenditure of about $400,000 over three years.  Seven rejected suggestions that its investigation was a “vindictive reaction” to the relationship.)

The Murdoch press also felt compelled to mention that Worner was "a father of four and a regular churchgoer", while the Daily Mail (not to be outdone) made a point of publishing many of the lewd text messages said to have been sent by Worner to Harrison during their affair.

Apart from the issue of privacy, there is the more complicated issue of sexual morality in the modern age. 

At one level, society generally accepts that what consenting adults do in private is largely their own business.  Issues arise only when one or both of those involved are married to another party, or where harassment or abuse of power are involved.  In affairs involving a married man, the "other woman" (in addition to the husband) is considered "at fault" because married men are supposed to be "off limits".  

There are a number of stereotypes that the public and the media commonly apply to illicit affairs. 

It is not uncommon for the man to be blamed for "not keeping it in his pants", and powerful men seem to be more frequently linked to marital infidelity.  Biologically, human males are more strongly programmed to seek out sexual opportunities than is the case for females, and powerful men seem to be much more prone to having extra-marital affairs than powerful women.  Equally, women seem to be unduly attracted to powerful men but men do not seem to be unduly attracted to powerful women.

Ms Harrison herself raised the issues of abuse of power and sexual harassment.  She said in her media statement that "I never felt this was a sexual harassment case. It was about abuse of power and also workplace safety.  At the time of negotiating the first deed, ...(a senior female executive at Seven)had me in a hotel room....while I was on medical leave for acute depression and extremely distressed, trying to force me to sign a contract".  On the face of these and other statements (including Harrison's admission that at the outset both were flirting), one can only conclude that the affair was consensual, and that any alleged harassment was not sexual in nature, and seemingly involved persons other than Worner.

On the matter of harassment, this affair was quite different to the  David Jones sexual harassment case.   That case involved the then CEO of David Jones, Mark McInnes, and claims by a 25-year-old junior publicist of persistent unwelcome advances.  While both cases led to claims for money, the alleged victim in the David Jones case was much younger and the difference in status was much greater, so that the question of abuse of power was more of an issue.

In the Worner case, other matters, that come into play are the stereotypical issues of a "woman scorned", "kiss and tell", and the career implications of "screwing the boss".

Ms Harrison indirectly denied playing the role of a "woman scorned", when she claimed that her affair was "never about love".  She also said that she "found our relationship, if you’d call it that, thrilling to begin with”, implying that it was less than a fulsome relationship and that the thrill had diminished over time.  She also claims that going public over the affair was not an act of vindictiveness but merely a tactic to "receive fair treatment from Seven and see them honour their contracts with me.”

It seems likely that Ms Harrison was more disappointed about the ending of the affair than she admits.  It is reported that Ms Harrison "was becoming increasingly angry and resentful that she was “invisible” to her lover in the workplace" and that she "sent several heated texts to Mr Worner about allegedly multiple affairs with other women...employed at Seven".  Such actions seem inconsistent with passions about the affair having totally subsided.

One claim by Ms Harrison, namely that an "entrenched sexist culture prevails and provides that a male executive behaving badly is rewarded and protected while the company will destroy the woman who stands up to it" is not entirely off the mark, though  I would put the situation somewhat differently. 

In my observation, when an Australian employer is facing a scandal involving illicit sexual encounters between a senior executive and another employee, the employer makes a judgement concerning their relative importance to the organisation.  Almost always it is the senior executive (usually male) that is the more highly valued and protected, while the other party (usually female) is bought off.   Affairs at work (especially involving the boss) are high risk both for female employees and the boss.  Experience seems to show that the utmost discretion is required to avoid a public scandal that may end in tears for both parties. 

In the US, research shows that "15 per cent  of women have slept with their bosses - and (interestingly) 37 per cent got promoted for it".  61 per cent of men and 70 per cent of women, however, lose respect for a leader involved in an affair.

Overall, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Ms Harrison over-played her hand, and that it was also in Channel 7's interests to have been be more conciliatory.  The main outcome sought by Seven appears to have been confidentiality (in particular keeping details of the affair out of the media) so that by going public Harrison seems to have thrown away her trump card and had little remaining to bargain with.  Harrison reportedly has been unemployed since losing her job in 2014, while Seven failed utterly in keeping the scandal under wraps. 

While aspects of the scandal are subject to innuendo and rumour, some reports have suggested Ms Harrison had originally sought as much as $2 million.  It is also suggested that Harrison spent over $300,000 in legal fees, and that Seven’s legal costs were over $1 million. A timely commercial settlement offering confidentiality to Seven and an agreed substantial six figure sum to Ms Harrison would have been a far better outcome for all concerned, except maybe for the lawyers.

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About the Author

Brendan O’Reilly is a retired commonwealth public servant with a background in economics and accounting. He is currently pursuing private business interests.

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