Just months after being fired by CBS, Leslie Moonves is running a new company, while his wife Julie wraps up Celebrity Big Brother.
And though Moonves and his former employer are locked in a dispute over $120 million in severance, CBS is paying for the office space that Moonves now occupies.
The company, Moon Rise Unlimited, operates out of a 10th-floor suite at 9000 Sunset Boulevard, among the tallest buildings in West Hollywood.
9000 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood
A glass-sheathed office tower with expansive views of Los Angeles, it can be seen from miles away and is near entertainment industry beehives like Soho House and Chateau Marmont.
Moonves was forced out of CBS in September after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct.
In December, the company officially said he was fired, citing “willful and material misfeasance, violation of company policies and breach of his employment contract.”
His exit agreement, however, states that CBS must pay for Moonves’s “office services” for no less than a year, even if the company fired him for cause.
On Oct. 30, according to a filing with the California secretary of state, Moonves registered Moon Rise Unlimited, a limited liability company that will focus on “entertainment services.”
He is listed as the company’s manager in a separate filing.
Moonves also appears to have formed two related companies around the same time: Moon Rise Technologies, which it said in a filing planned to provide “streaming services and distribution,” and Moon Rise Productions, which it said planned to provide “film and television production” services.
Moonves’s specific ambitions are not clear.
Moon Rise Unlimited has no website, has no track record in Hollywood and has made no efforts to promote itself when it was incorporated.
It is also not known if his wife Julie Chen will work with him in the new company.
Moonves started dating Chen when he the president and chief officer of CBS Television and she was a newsreader on The Early Show.
She became the host of Big Brother in 2000, and four years later, following his divorce, they were married.
The couple, who for years enjoyed the attention and privileges befitting one of the most powerful couples in media, have maintained a public profile since his ouster.
They were spotted lounging on David Geffen’s yacht in St. Bart’s, seen dining at Hollywood restaurants like Craig’s and Sunset Tower and he had a run-in with the comedian Kathy Griffin at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge.
At the same time, Moonves and his legal team are gearing up to fight CBS for his severance.
The network said it would refuse to pay him after determining that he failed to comply with an internal company investigation into his behavior, and even misled investigators.
Under the terms of his exit agreement, CBS has been paying Moonves’s legal fees.
For more than three decades, Moonves had an outsize role in shaping the network television landscape.
Then last year, a dozen women told The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow that Moonves had sexually harassed or assaulted them.
As CBS looked into those claims, it also learned that Moonves was trying to buy the silence of another accuser by getting her work on a CBS show.
During it all there has been growing speculation that Chen will leave CBS immediately following the season finale of Celebrity Big Brother.
She resigned as co-host of The Talk last fall.
Julie Chen remains one of the best broadcasters of modern times.
Before she took the advice of Moonves and headed to the entertainment division, she was the highly qualified and credible anchor of the CBS Morning News.
She is one of the best interviewers on television.
But her time at CBS, so tightly linked to her husband the past two decades, is probably coming to an end.