Law & Order: SVU showrunner David Graziano accused of bullying and sexism in new report
The L.A. Times interviewed more than a dozen people accusing Graziano of unprofessional, "abusive" behavior on the sets of multiple shows
David Graziano took control over one of the longest-running and most successful franchises in TV history earlier this year, when Graziano—whose previous credits include the short-lived CBS All Access border drama Coyote, Amazon’s Jack Ryan, and Tim Roth-starring series Lie To Me—became showrunner of Law & Order: SVU. (Now in its 24th season, and, at 524 episodes, now the fourth-longest-running primetime scripted show of all time.)
The L.A. Times has a long report on Graziano today, containing allegations of abusive, bullying behavior and sexism from people who have worked with him across his career. The statements against Graziano appear to have been inspired in part by a recent post from a former script coordinator for SVU, who warned others off of working on the show, writing, “I urge you — especially women — to think twice before putting yourself in a position that could end as badly as mine did.” The L.A. Times report collects allegations from more than a dozen people, mostly speaking on conditions of anonymity, that accuse of Graziano of bullying subordinates, commenting inappropriately on women’s bodies, and otherwise creating hostile working environments on a number of shows where he was one of the most powerful people on the set.
The longest account comes from Graziano’s former assistant, who recounts working for him from 2009 and 2012, a period where she sometimes wrote down unpleasant incidents with Graziano in a journal. These included hearing him talk “about women’s bodies and the things he’d want to do with them,” expressing inappropriate sexual desires toward her, and a specific instance in which she was groped by another producer, and, when she brought the incident to Graziano, he told her the man in question was “an important showrunner” and that she was a “nobody.”
Several of the allegations in the report focus on Graziano’s time running Coyote, which starred Michael Chiklis, and which was planned for a 10-episode run on the Paramount Network before getting cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. Graziano says he was in intense pain from a neck injury during the filming of the series; others involved described a long series of tantrums from him, many of them involving, somehow, lunch. (With at least one member of the show’s staff allegedly fired due to not meeting Graziano’s particular demands for food.) Here’s a bit from the part of the report centered on Coyote writers’ production assistant Paloma Lamb, who called Graziano’s behavior on the show’s set “emotionally and verbally abusive”: