Roger Ailes’s (Other) Legacy
Remembering the founder of Fox News also demands remembering the many women in his orbit—women who refused to be silent.
Ailes took her to the day after she accepted her job with the network. During it, she claims, Ailes asked her, “When did you first discover you were sexy?” When she replied that “I am finding this conversation very embarrassing,” her new boss persisted. “He continued to explain,” she recalls, “how much he believed in loyalty and how much he believed the best expression of that loyalty comes in the form of a ‘sexual alliance.’”
.. Other women at Fox remembered Ailes asking them a litany of personal questions, ostensibly to expose vulnerabilities that he might exploit later on. “He asked, ‘Am I in a relationship?’” one woman recalled. “‘What are my familial ties?’ It was all to see how stable or unstable I was.”
“Roger had made sure I knew the stakes, telling me: ‘I don’t like to fight, but when I do, I fight to kill.’ The message could not have been clearer: ‘If you tell anyone, I will destroy you.’”
.. But Ailes, in the end, had aged into a new context—one in which women have access to recording devices, and in which, through the internet, women have access to each others’ stories, and in which, in general, women have had enough. Secrets, now, have a way of getting out. The sins of the past have a way of becoming the scandals of the present. Women today have more ways than ever of fighting back.