The career arc of Les Moonves, the accomplished and visionary chief executive of CBS, shifted abruptly last month, after The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow published a damaging report alleging that he had sexually harassed six women from the 80s to the 2000s. Four women described forcible attempts at intimacy in the context of business meetings. Two women told Farrow that Moonves, once rebuffed, had subsequently threatened to impede their professional advancement. “I recognize that there were times decades ago when I may have made some women uncomfortable by making advances,” he admitted. “Those were mistakes, and I regret them immensely. But I always understood and respected—and abided by the principle—that ‘no’ means ‘no,’ and I have never misused my position to harm or hinder anyone’s career.”

On Sunday morning, Farrow published a second damning account, which included six more allegations of sexual misconduct, including self-exposure and forced oral sex. “The appalling accusations in this article are untrue. What is true is that I had consensual relations with three of the women some 25 years ago before I came to CBS. And I have never used my position to hinder the advancement or careers of women,” Moonves responded. “In my 40 years of work, I have never before heard of such disturbing accusations. I can only surmise they are surfacing now for the first time, decades later, as part of a concerted effort by others to destroy my name, my reputation, and my career.” By the afternoon, The L.A. Times reported that Moonves was preparing to resign without a severance package.

Farrow’s initial piece on Moonves presumably helped him surface other women who claimed similar stories. Shortly after his first New Yorker story was published, a source familiar with the situation told me that Moonves was the anonymous subject of a recent article published this past May by Dr. Anne Peters in the Annals of Internal Medicine, under the headline “A Physician’s Place in the #MeToo Movement.” In her article, Peters recounted an incident with a patient from the past. “It happened many years ago in an examination room where I’d been asked to see a V.I.P. patient early in the morning before regular business hours,” she wrote. “I remember the early-morning light filtering through the blinds.” She and her patient sat at a small table as she conducted her initial interview. After that, when she and the patient moved to her examination table, “he grabbed me as I stepped forward,” Peters wrote. “He pulled himself against me and tried to force himself on me. He did this twice; when I rebuffed him, he stood beside the examination table and satisfied himself. After he finished, he reassembled himself and left.”

Peters, who states in her piece that her responsibility as a physician makes her “legally unable” to name the patient “who harassed me,” wrote that she was stunned and did not know what to do as her colleagues trickled in. “I felt ashamed,” she wrote. “I hadn’t screamed—I was supposed to be offering ‘extra-special’ service to this man because he was rich and powerful and good for my institution.” Although disoriented, she managed to figure out whom to call in the administration at the UCLA medical center. According to Peters’ account, she reported the incident. “I wanted a note placed in his chart warning other women never to be alone with him,” she continued. “What if the patient did the same thing to another woman? I needed to protect people more vulnerable than I was as an attending.” She recalled that “the person” who answered her call in the UCLA administration “explained my rights” but also said that the patient had “more money for lawyers” than did UCLA and cautioned her “to refrain” from reporting the incident to the police “because I would lose in court.” (In a statement, a spokesperson for UCLA Health noted only: “Sexual harassment and misconduct are not tolerated at UCLA Health. Members of our community are encouraged to come forward with concerns about the workplace environment, and allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct are promptly reviewed and addressed consistent with UCLA policies and procedures.”)

According to Peters’s article, the patient called Peters the next day to apologize. “He said that he had a terrible problem and that he had done the same thing with many other women,” she wrote. “That he basically couldn’t control himself when alone with a woman.” Peters wrote that she told the patient to get counseling immediately and to never allow himself to be alone with a woman in a room. She never heard from him again. “However, he has become ever more powerful and venerated in his professional world,” she concluded.

Peters’s article didn’t seem designed to bring anyone down. The journal’s readership of medical professionals may have wondered about the identity of the V.I.P.—but it hadn’t crossed over to a wider audience that often discusses #MeToo issues. Last month, however, I learned from a source familiar with the situation that Dr. Peters was referring to Moonves. (Through a spokeswoman at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, her current employers, Peters declined repeated requests to comment or to cooperate with the reporting of this story.)

According to an entry in Moonves’s datebook calendar, he went to see Dr. Peters at 7 a.m. on September 17, 1999 , when he was the president and C.E.O. of CBS Television. It was his first meeting with Peters, and also his last. But he recalls the visit differently. In response to a series of questions about the incident, Moonves stated via a representative: “The appalling allegations about my conduct toward a female physician some 20 years ago are untrue. What is true, and what I deeply regret, is that I tried to kiss the doctor. Nothing more happened.” A representative from CBS responded: “CBS takes these allegations very seriously. Our Board of Directors is conducting a thorough investigation of these matters, which is ongoing.”

Initially, unlike so many other powerful men implicated in the #MeToo movement, it seemed like the Moonves imbroglio would likely open a new chapter in our society’s long-overdue reckoning with sexual misconduct. Moonves didn’t simply offer his resignation and disappear. Shortly after the first The New Yorker article was published, he was front and center on a CBS earnings call in his role as chief executive. In short, his situation was quite complicated. Moonves, after all, was one of the greatest media executives of his generation, and certainly the most well-known C.E.O. to be enmeshed in a #MeToo crisis. His unique value appeared inextricable linked with CBS’ stock price, which had more than doubled during his tenure. And his alleged transgressions appeared to have taken place in the past, making them subject to the toll of memory.

Moonves had also recently signed an intricate new contract, a document of more than 75 pages that meticulously outlined the conditions under which CBS could fire him “for Cause” and thereby prevent him from receiving a severance package, or whether he could resign “for ‘Good Reason’” and walk away with a payoff estimated to be as much as $200 million. Furthermore, Moonves appeared to be the last line of defense as Shari Redstone, whose family owns nearly 80 percent of CBS’s voting shares, has repeatedly plotted how she would, or could, re-combine the company with her family’s other significant media asset, Viacom. Twice in the the past two years, Shari has tried to re-merge CBS and Viacom, despite the fact that her father, Sumner Redstone, famously split them apart in 2006. Whereas the fates of many previous men had been determined by popular sentiment or by managerial protocol, Moonves’s destiny appeared to be in the hands of lawyers and executives. The CBS board hired two prestigious law firms, Debevoise & Plimpton and Covington & Burling, to conduct a detailed investigation into the allegations.

Now Moonves is finished. It’s a once-unfathomable outcome that will cap off a series of unprecedented events giving Shari Redstone her long sought triumph. His settlement could very well terminate ongoing litigation in a Delaware court over CBS’s efforts to dilute Redstone’s holdings; remove the long-serving CBS board members who have been a thorn in Redstone’s side and replace them with those of her choosing; and, commence a search for a new C.E.O. of CBS, with Moonves’ number two executive, Joe Ianiello serving in an interim capacity until a new boss is found.

Peters, meanwhile, did not set out to be a face of the #MeToo movement. She was head of the clinical diabetes program at Cedars-Sinai, in Los Angeles, before moving to UCLA. She did her residency at Stanford. (She is now a Professor of Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and Director of the USC Clinical Diabetes Programs.) On several occasions, she has been named as one of the Best Doctors in the United States. But the wave of #MeToo reporting surrounding Harvey Weinstein catalyzed her decision to dredge up the nearly 19-year-old incident, which caused her, as she wrote, to “remember these events almost obsessively” and to have “many sleepless nights fretting about what to do.” She consulted with legal counsel and considered her role as a physician and as a public health advocate. “My purpose, as I see it,” she wrote, “is not to be the focus of a media storm by reporting my incident but rather to help find a way forward.”

Indeed, one unexpected byproduct of #MeToo is the ongoing evolution of medical statutes to handle the contours of our evolving times, including the possibility of revealing patient names in the event of a crime. Peters concluded her piece with the thought that men and women need to help each other in such situations and that women doctors and nurses need to take certain precautions, such as not being alone with a male patient and having staff check in on a frequent basis. “Asking for someone else to be present during a visit if it doesn’t seem comfortable otherwise is acceptable,” she wrote. “And institutions have much better reporting policies about sexual harassment now than what I encountered long ago, although reporting is never easy.”