In 2017, Reah Bravo was one of eight women who accused her former boss, the US journalist and talkshow host Charlie Rose, of sexual misconduct. After initial reports in the Washington Post, a further 27 women came forward with similar allegations. Complicit is not a straight memoir about working for Rose. In fact, Bravo, now a speechwriter living in Brussels, opens with a bold and distancing statement: “Enough time has passed that I can say I regret calling Charlie Rose a sexual predator,” she writes. Like the title of the book, this is a provocative and arresting place to begin.
In a 2018 article for the New York Review of Books, Bravo, who was a producer on Rose’s PBS show, detailed unblocking her ex-boss’s clogged toilet. When people responded with outrage, “I knew I had failed to accurately convey my message,” she writes here. She had not been “forced”, as readers assumed, but saw her acquiescence to Rose’s demeaning requests as evidence of her “unflappable” nature in the workplace. She argues now that this was a form of complicity, and a “brutal recognition that the soft power of the patriarchy had its way with me”.
