Admit it, you're a sex pest! Powerful men need to stop deluding themselves

If the men of the world - men who proclaim their own greatness - shape their own legacy by crafting their own narrative of glory, they also set themselves up for their own fall into ignominy.

Case in point: Charlie Rose, the famous but now disgraced CBS broadcaster who was recently denounced as a serial sexual predator. A man who believed his own hype, but will now be remembered for walking around with an open bathrobe, exposing himself to aspiring young female journalists, convinced that he was so powerful, so attractive, so famous, so great that any woman would be so honoured to have a glimpse - or far more - of him.

This is the same man, celebrated for his interviews with the likes of Vladimir Putin, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Bashar al-Assad, who said to Georgetown University's 2015 graduating class: ''Think ahead to the end of your life. And think about what you would like to be remembered for at the end of your life. It's not honour. It's not prestige. It is character. It is integrity. It is truth. It is doing the right thing. It's hard to imagine or think about that when you're 22. It's easy when you're 73."

Turns out that Charlie Rose's true character, at 75, is that of a desperate, arrogant flasher, he with the crusty paws who thought the young women at work he would lay his hands on were into him, too.

"I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings, even though now I realise I was mistaken," he said.

Shared feelings? This was a man who could tell when a dictator was fudging the facts, who could cajole and charm a reluctant subject into candid revelations, but he couldn't even read a woman properly! He clearly couldn't tell that she didn't want to feel his wrinkly hands on her, or see his saggy bits flapping against his shriveled other bits. And he clearly underestimated all the women he pounced on, thinking his fame and stature insulated him from the consequences of his predatory behaviour.

The world is filled with Charlie Roses. And Woody Allens. And Bill Cosbys. Harvey Weinsteins and Tariq Ramadans. Men who revelled in their power, who thought they controlled their own narratives because that's what men have always done, tailoring history to burnish their own myths. But, what they often fail to realise is that they're brought down by their own imagined credentials.

Even Jacob Zuma's were immortalised many times in paint.

• This article was originally published in The Times.