What to Know
In a new E! docuseries called Dirty Rotten Scandals, several women who worked on The Price is Right open up about the sexual harassment they experienced while on the game show. Models (also called “Bob’s Beauties”) Kathleen Bradley and Holly Hallstrom and former producer Barbara Hunter tell their stories in a way that suggests the harassment was rampant—and they were expected to put up with it.
While Bob Barker hosted the game show from 1972 to 2007, the women dealt with a lot of men gawking at them or touching them without consent. Per Entertainment Weekly, Kathleen initially thought everyone on set was “pretty cool” until she noticed that sexual harassment was “commonplace.”
Barbara told a horrifying story about a man grabbing her.
She said, “One time, I was in the elevator and one of the men just stuck their hands right on my boobs. I had to push him away.” And while this incident might stand out as particularly disturbing and unacceptable, it sounds like avoiding certain men on set was kind of the norm, and the women had to work around that.
“It became common knowledge to stay away from this person or stay away from that person,” she said. “There was stuff going on where you had to say, ‘Hey, stop that.'”
But the network’s response was actually “a joke.”
When the women tried to speak up about how these things were affecting them, no one seemed to really listen or care. Barbara said that even though what was happening on set was clearly sexual harassment, “no action was taken” when she reported the issue to producers. “I was really taken aback,” she said.
Eventually, CBS got involved, but the “solution” the network allegedly put in place does not sound like a solution at all. Apparently, after receiving multiple complaints about sexual harassment the network decided to implement a “10-Second-Rule.” Which basically means that sexual harassment is still allowed, but only for 10 seconds at a time?
The rule did not ban men from gawking at models. It merely banned men from staring at models for more than 10 seconds. Yikes. Of course, how do you even implement a rule like this and hold people to it anyway?
Holly said, “There was no one monitoring how long the guys were staring at the models. It was a joke. It was an appeasement. They did things that made it look like they were taking action, so you will stop complaining and go away.”
She also claimed that Bob did nothing about it.
Holly asserted, “If anyone had gone to Bob because Bob was in charge of the show and said, ‘I have a problem. I have a complaint.’ He would have told her to get over it or look for a new job,” per USA Today.
When speaking to People, Holly explained how freeing it is to speak out about these issues now. “To be able to say, ‘This is what is happening in our industry and it’s been this way since the beginning,’ and to speak out and have an audience to hear it, it was so liberating,” she told the publication. “It was like the weight of the world was off my shoulders that I didn’t even realize I’d been carrying for 30 years.”
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