E!’s coverage of the red carpet festivities leading up to tonight’s Academy Awards has just kicked off, but Deadline says that the network has a system in place in case a celebrity brings up the sexual misconduct allegations that have been raised against Ryan Seacrest while they’re being interviewed. The allegations go back to November, when a former stylist who used to work with Seacrest at E! News accused him of sexually harassing her, but the network and Seacrest have continued to deny that anything happened.
Deadline reports that an “insider” says E! might be running Seacrest’s red carpet interviews with a 30-second delay so that it can cut to Giuliana Rancic or “pull the plug altogether” if anything with Seacrest “goes into tricky territory.” E! has sort of denied that it has any such plan in place, but it has acknowledged that it always has multiple “sources of content” running at the same time so it can “deliver the best possible show.” Of course, if this plan really is in place, the people watching at home might not even know.
Variety adds that this supposed plan is also in place to avoid something like what happened at the Golden Globes, when Debra Messing called out E! News on the air for not paying Catt Sadler as much money as her male co-host. A longtime E! producer, Aileen Gram-Moreno, claims she was fired for allowing interviews like the one with Messing to make it to air. Considering the Oscars are more of a big deal than the Golden Globes—no offense, HFPA—it makes sense that E! would be even more wary of something happening.