the portrait that has emerged of Fox News as a geriatric frat party where the rewards for being a top dog included ogling, propositioning, and groping the women who worked there, from clerical temps to news producers to star anchors like Megyn Kelly.
.. five women who had accused O’Reilly, now sixty-seven years old, of harassment that included “verbal abuse, lewd comments, unwanted advances and phone calls in which it sounded as if Mr. O’Reilly was masturbating.”
.. More than one said that O’Reilly had threatened to wreck their careers
.. Fox producer Andrea Mackris told the Times that O’Reilly vowed that if she complained about his behavior, he’d make her “pay so dearly” that she’d “wish she’d never been born.”
An internal Fox investigation turned up still more accusations
.. O’Reilly’s self-aggrandizing temper, his fondness for the phrase “shut up” when he’s speaking to or about people he deems insufficiently patriotic or submissive.
.. someone with a personality not unlike our President’s—thin-skinned and pugnacious, with a tendency to treat women as chattel.
.. The book, which my colleague Jia Tolentino recently wrote about, recounts, in gory detail, the murderous rampage unleashed by a pugnacious Irish-American news anchor after he is fired.
.. You’re either Old School or you’re a Snowflake—no in-betweens
.. “Instead Mr. O’Reilly blamed others, embracing the victimization he so ridiculed of the American left.”
.. Bosses who treat their workplaces as their harems are, among other things, lazy. They can’t be bothered with taking the time and effort to get to know someone well enough to, for example, tell whether that person might at all be interested in having sex with them. They crudely leverage their power over people’s livelihoods rather than courting them
.. his new mode regarding the sexual-harassment allegations against him—to drop cryptic little references that create a sense of persecution and of the supposed silencing of conservative voices.
Bill O’Reilly and the Revenge of Chick Lit
But equating the narrator with the author is only one of many risks of writing while female, and I hope that as Mr. O’Reilly continues to remain in the public eye and promote his other titles, he’ll get to experience more of them.
.. I hope some reporter asks Mr. O’Reilly how his ex-wife, or his former boss, felt about those pornographic descriptions of violence. I hope an interviewer will point out — as if he’d never thought about it himself — that someday, his kids might read the book, and ask what he’s going to tell them when they do.
.. I hope he’s forced to talk about how he managed his marriage and family while he was working full-time and writing on the side. I hope he has to explain who did the housework when he did his book tour and who watched the kids while he wrote.
I hope that someone tells him, before he gets his next author photo taken, that he’d sell more books if he smiled.
.. Real unfairness, of course, is when a man can be accused of victimizing and harassing female colleagues for decades and face absolutely no consequences until his bad behavior affects his company’s bottom line. I hope that every reporter and critic who covers Mr. O’Reilly the author will ask Mr. O’Reilly the newsman about these misdeeds.
.. I hope that a man who got away with mistreating female colleagues spends the rest of his writing life being treated like a girl.
Trump, Asked About Accusations Against Bill O’Reilly, Calls Him a ‘Good Person’
“Personally, I think he shouldn’t have settled,” Mr. Trump told Times reporters in a wide-ranging interview. “Because you should have taken it all the way; I don’t think Bill did anything wrong.”
“I think he’s a person I know well,” Mr. Trump said. “He is a good person.”
.. But the president has a particular rapport with Mr. O’Reilly, whose hectoring braggadocio and no-apologies nostalgia for a bygone American era mirror Mr. Trump’s own.
.. Mr. Trump called it “locker room talk” and apologized for the remarks. Mr. O’Reilly, on air that evening, allowed that the tape was “an embarrassment” for the Republican nominee. But he also criticized The Washington Post, the newspaper that published the footage.
.. But Mr. Trump’s advice to his friend on Wednesday — that Mr. O’Reilly “shouldn’t have settled” — was consistent with the never-back-down ethos of a president, and former real estate magnate, who relishes the counterattack.
.. Fox News’s prime time and morning hosts are blatant champions of the administration — to the extent that NBC News’s chairman, Andrew Lack, recently compared the network to “state broadcasting.”
.. Mr. Murdoch’s former wife, Wendi Deng, is so close with Ivanka Trump that the president’s daughter became a trustee of the Murdoch children’s fortune.
.. Mr. Murdoch, meanwhile, had mentored Ms. Trump’s future husband, Jared Kushner, in the art of media moguldom after his purchase of The New York Observer in 2006.
.. Mr. Trump’s kind words for Mr. O’Reilly on Wednesday seemed a reciprocal gesture of sorts, from a leader who values loyalty.
Bill O’Reilly Payout Could Be as High as $25 Million
the total amount of payouts related to sexual harassment allegations at Fox News to more than $85 million — paid by the network’s parent company, 21st Century Fox. The vast majority of that — as much as $65 million in exit packages — is being paid to the men who were ousted because of the allegations.
.. Mr. Ailes received a $40 million package when he left.
.. As examples of how the network had yet to change, the employees pointed to the fact that Bill Shine and Jack Abernethy, the network’s co-presidents and former lieutenants to Mr. Ailes, remained in their positions.
.. But the new contract provided the company with some protections. Those included a provision that Mr. O’Reilly could be dismissed if the company was made aware of other allegations against him or if new ones arose, according to one person briefed on the matter. The contract also included provisions meant to get Mr. O’Reilly to address his behavior, the person said.
.. Last November, 21st Century Fox disclosed that for the three months that ended Sept. 30, the company had about $35 million in costs related to settlements of pending and potential litigation after Mr. Ailes was ousted.