Mr. Metaxas wrote a biography of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, so he is surely familiar with his teaching on cheap grace — “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance.” Cheap grace wrongly separates absolution of sin from acknowledgment of that sin. In Christian teaching, God forgives people before they confess wrongdoing. But among individuals, groups and nations, there can be no forgiveness when wrongdoing isn’t named.
.. In churches, a quick forgiveness for perpetrators often dovetails with strict standards of purity for women. From a young age, many Christian women are taught to dress modestly so as not to cause men to “stumble.” John Piper, a prominent pastor and theologian, has said that “a lot of Christian women are oblivious to the fact that they have some measure of responsibility” in managing men’s lust. The moralizing about dress and behavior can be a setup for victim-blaming wrapped in a spiritual veneer.
Perhaps churches have been slow to address sex crimes out of a belief that such offenses couldn’t happen among their own. It’s assumed that the culture of harassment at a place like Fox News would never come to infect a community serving God. This thinking is both naïve and theologically irresponsible: Christians, of all people, acknowledge the depths of human depravity
Court Transcripts: Bill O’Reilly’s Daughter Saw Him “Choking Her Mom”
the ex-couple’s teenage daughter told a court-appointed forensic examiner that she witnessed O’Reilly “choking her mom” as he “dragged her down some stairs” by the neck. The same transcripts also reveal that O’Reilly—who famously settled a lurid sexual harassment claim from one of his young female producers—told his daughter that her mother is an “adulterer”; that he struggles to control his rage around his family; and that his daughter regards him as an absentee father.
.. In response, O’Reilly provided a vague statement to Politico: “All allegations against me in these circumstances are 100% false. I am going to respect the court-mandated confidentiality put in place to protect my children and will not comment any further.” The transcripts we’ve acquired will help O’Reilly’s fans and critics alike judge that statement for themselves.
.. Q: In the course of your meetings with the children, did either of them describe any incidents of domestic violence between their parents?
A: Yes.
Q: And who was that?
A: M. reported—having seeing an incident where I believe she said her dad was choking her mom or had his hands around her neck and dragged her down some stairs.
Q: And?
MR. CLAIR: Your Honor, to the extent that that incident as alleged may have predated the signing of the agreement.
.. the daughter regarded O’Reilly—who has sanctimoniously and repeatedly criticized the “black community” for failing to parent children appropriately—as an absentee father.
Q [O’Reilly attorney]: And M. reported to you that her father was never around to have a relationship with her for 11 years, correct?
A [Cohen]: That’s what she said.
Q: And the word, when I emphasize the word “never,” that was her word, was it not?
A: Yes, it was.
.. these revelations indicate that O’Reilly has brought nearly every feature of his tremendously profitable public persona—his absurd moralizing, his obscene religiosity, his habitual cruelty toward women—to bear on his own family, with predictable consequences.
Reading Bill O’Reilly’s Old Novel About a TV Newsman Who Murders Several People After Losing His Job
The main character is a violently bitter journalist named Shannon Michaels, who, after being pushed out of two high-profile positions, takes revenge on four of his former colleagues by murdering them one by one.
.. rants about ex-wives, newsroom politics, and the Long Island Expressway
.. a veteran newsman preys upon a younger female co-worker in the very first scene.
.. struggling with a “basic human need, the need for some kind of physical release.” Costello spots a pretty camerawoman at a party, happily notes that she’s had too much vodka, and approaches her with “intense sexual hunger.”
.. Then the vengeful Michaels kills Costello by shoving a silver spoon through the roof of his mouth and into his brain.
.. the feud between Michaels and Costello in “Those Who Trespass” is based on O’Reilly’s experience at CBS, in the eighties, during the Falkland Islands War. O’Reilly and his crew had captured exclusive footage of a riot in Buenos Aires, which CBS spliced into a report delivered by the veteran network correspondent Bob Schieffer, who never mentioned O’Reilly by name.
.. spends the next decade plotting his revenge.
.. O’Reilly’s first avatar within the novel: a horny, aggressive, ambitious Irish-American who delivers monologue after monologue about the “self-obsessed business” of television news. (“People who are greedy for power realize that television is the most influential tool ever created,” he says.
.. Tommy O’Malley, who is also horny, aggressive, ambitious, and Irish. O’Malley is an “intense man, sometimes quick to anger.” He arrests a drug dealer and breaks his thumb out of spite: “That must really hurt, he thought, giving in to a feel of sadistic pleasure.” He really hates inner-city teen-agers. (“These thugs killed with a casualness that O’Malley could not comprehend.”) For the duration of the story, as Michaels goes about murdering colleagues who have slighted him, O’Malley, the good guy, is hot on his trail.
.. Like both Michaels and O’Malley, Van Buren is horny, aggressive, and ambitious. Unlike them, she’s not an avatar for O’Reilly but an object onto which he projects a whole host of suspect qualities. “Ashley Van Buren knew her good looks were partially responsible for her rapid rise,” O’Reilly writes
.. In her first conversation with O’Malley, trying to get information about the murder on Martha’s Vineyard, the blond Van Buren deploys both a “deep, sexy tone” and a “teasing voice.”
.. Van Buren is the only major female character in the novel. (An “unattractive woman” named Hillary appears briefly, before Michaels knocks her out and throws her body out the window into an alley.) It’s almost funny how utterly the character of Van Buren unmasks her author: she is conveniently and perpetually sexually frustrated, and she is happy to be seen as an object of desire while she’s at work. She’s dying for a real man to make real advances upon her. In one entirely unnecessary flashback, she invites a date to her apartment, takes off her bra, licks her lips at the sight of her reflection—“her unrestrained breasts were full and firm . . . and her nipples were clearly outlined”—and then pouts when her date won’t take the hint. Over the course of the investigation, she becomes attracted to both O’Malley and Michaels; when she sleeps with Michaels, she silently marvels at “Shannon’s stamina.”
.. it’s full of recognizable pet ideas. Housing projects are “moral sinkholes”; inner-city children are “unfeeling predators.” A Latino detective succeeds in his department because “his strategy included overlooking petty crap like prejudice.”
.. It’s impossible to take in the steady stream of coldly rendered violence in O’Reilly’s novel without remembering his daughter’s court testimony that he choked his ex-wife and dragged her down the stairs by the neck.
.. Being on TV was like a drug to him and when it was taken away from him, he had to find a substitute drug
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