The attitudes about women that doomed O’Reilly hid in plain sight for years
When I went on his show, he chastised me for being a victim of sexual assault.
.. And the dismissive way O’Reilly dealt with my own history as a victim of assault made the allegations that finally pushed Fox News to fire him this week feel all too familiar.
.. O’Reilly challenged me about the fact that I decided to go meet this person I didn’t know. He then insisted that at 13, I should have known better than go meet someone
.. he told me I made a huge mistake and appeared to suggest that I deserved to become a victim of sexual assault because I knew I was doing something I shouldn’t have done.
.. in O’Reilly’s mind, meeting a stranger off the Internet who you think is your friend at 13 is a mistake. But sexually harassing your staff as an adult is just fine.
.. how many people watched the night I was on, who saw that in the “no-spin zone,” it was acceptable to blame the victim. I can only wonder how many other victims he blamed when they appeared on his show. (He did it often enough that it became a frequent trope for his critics.)
.. I never said anything to him, because I believed that his hubris and karma would settle the score.
.. at its peak, was earning $178 million.
.. O’Reilly’s bosses only cared when his behavior cost their bottom line