Yesterday, CBS picked up the Michael Weatherly–starring series Bull for a fourth season despite detailed allegations of sexual harassment that Eliza Dushku made against Weatherly last December. Steven Spielberg and his production company Amblin Television, however, will not be producing the series going forward. “Steven Spielberg, Amblin Television, Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey are no longer attached to Bull,†an Amblin rep told Deadline. (Frank and Falvey were also executive producers on Bull.) In December, the New York Times first published a story revealing that CBS made a $9.5 million settlement with Dushku over her allegations of sexual harassment.
Unlike Weatherly and writer-producer Glenn Gordon Caron, Dushku did not comment in the initial report, but later she went into further detail in a story for the Boston Globe describing the “cruel†and “aggressive†misogynistic humiliations Weatherly allegedly perpetuated against her on set, including making jokes about a “rape van†while pushing for her to be fired. In that piece, Dushku said she was promised a meeting with Spielberg — who had been a supporter of the Time’s Up movement alongside his wife, Kate Capshaw — as part of her settlement with the show, but that it hadn’t yet happened. In a March interview with Deadline, Dushku said she had since met with Spielberg and heads of Time’s Up and “we sat and brainstormed and discussed possible solutions for this systemic imbalance of power, the abuse and harassment that we’ve been seeing and hearing and experiencing both in our industry and beyond.†Weatherly has denied pushing for Dushku’s firing, but apologized for behavior he said was “both not funny and not appropriate,†while Caron, per Deadline, is still in talks to return as Bull’s showrunner.