at least five women have received payments from either him or Fox that together total about $13 million, most of which were never previously made public. Many of the payments have come with agreements that the women won’t speak about what happened to them.
.. She fought hard against being forced into private arbitration. Buried in Fox’s contracts with its employees is fine print saying that they can’t bring lawsuits against the company in court. Instead, those disputes have to be settled by a private entity with the details kept private, too.
.. Because she isn’t an employee, but a contributor, she is unbound by arbitration restrictions
O’Reilly-Ailes-Trump: The dirty-old-man triumvirate
Yet this isn’t a two-way back-scratching exercise. It goes three ways.
Roger Ailes was the chief of Fox News, until he was ousted last summer for what appears to be a bottomless sexual-harassment scandal. Ailes denies the claims against him. The list of women who have accused Ailes of sexual harassment exceeds two dozen, and another suit was filedthis week by current Fox News contributor Julie Roginsky. As it turns out, Ailes was accumulating sexual-harassment complainants at the very same time as O’Reilly was accumulating sexual-harassment complainants.
.. And as we’ve written before, they had forged a mutual protection racket. When O’Reilly sustained a scandal in 2015 for either embellishing or lying about his reportorial exploits in various hot spots around the world, Ailes backed him with no qualifications. There was no network investigation of O’Reilly’s ethics and integrity. He squeaked through the criticism and improved his ratings.
One year later, it was O’Reilly’s turn to back Ailes. After former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson filed her world-changing suit against Ailes, O’Reilly turned up on Seth Myers’s “Late Night” show with some helpful words. “I stand behind Roger 100 percent,” said O’Reilly
.. Starting in spring 2011, Trump began weekly chats with the folks on the unimaginably idiotic “Fox & Friends” morning show. Those sessions persisted all the way up to the moment that Trump, in June 2015, launched his presidential campaign. Trump helped Ailes by giving him a ratings-assisting weekly interview; Ailes helped Trump by giving him a platform to test poorly thought-through stances on politics.
.. These dirty old men stick together.
Megan Kelly Accuses Roger Ailes of Sexual Harassment in New Book
“There was a pattern to his behavior. I would be called into Roger’s office, he would shut the door, and over the next hour or two, he would engage in a kind of cat-and-mouse game with me—veering between obviously inappropriate sexually charged comments (e.g. about the ‘very sexy bras’ I must have and how he’d like to see me in them) and legitimate professional advice,” Kelly alleges, according to Radar.
Kelly says she rejected every advance, but her former boss “crossed a new line” in 2006, when he allegedly grabbed her and tried to kiss her on the lips. “He asked me an ominous question, ‘When is your contract up?’ And then, for the third time, he tried to kiss me.”
She writes that she reported him to a supervisor, and the harassment stopped after six months.
.. Kelly called Lachlan Murdoch, co-chairman of 21st Century Fox, directly, and told him and the firm’s general counsel about Ailes’s behavior.
Megyn Kelly’s Pivotal Moment in a Post-Ailes Era at Fox News
Early last year, in an article in The New York Times Magazine, I defined what I called a “Megyn moment,” in a profile of the Fox News host Megyn Kelly:
“When you, a Fox guest — maybe a regular guest or even an official contributor — are pursuing a line of argument that seems perfectly congruent with the Fox worldview, only to have Kelly seize on some part of it and call it out as nonsense, maybe even turn it back on you.”
.. Ms. Kelly, clearly mindful of four years ago, when so many Fox News hosts doubted polls showing an Obama re-election, challenged him. “He’s been behind in virtually every one of the last 40 polls that we’ve seen over the past month, that’s the reality,” she said of Mr. Trump.
But what really set Mr. Gingrich off was when Ms. Kelly said the sexual assault accusations against Mr. Trump were clearly taking a toll, raising questions about whether the candidate was “a sexual predator.” Mr. Gingrich asked why Bill Clinton’s accusers weren’t getting covered, and Ms. Kelly replied by saying that on her show they were.
.. By all accounts, in the absence of Mr. Ailes, Ms. Kelly has been freer to pursue her show on her own terms, which are certainly not in line with those of either Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump and therefore not in line with many in the Fox News core audience (let alone those of her old boss Mr. Ailes, who informally advised Mr. Trump before the debates).
.. The same has held true for the Fox contributors who have not embraced Mr. Trump’s candidacy — like Dana Perino, the Republican co-host of “The Five,” and the Weekly Standard writer Stephen F. Hayes. They have been given ample time and freedom to call it as they see it in ways that were not as obviously apparent earlier this year.
.. But there’s a flip side. In this “Free(er) to Be You and Me” environment at Fox, pro-Trump network personalities have become even pro-Trumpier, none more than Sean Hannity, the host whose show follows Ms. Kelly’s. An informal adviser to Mr. Trump, his rhetoric has grown as incendiary as that of his candidate.
.. Mr. Hannity announced on his radio show that if Trump won, he would personally pay to fly President Obama to Canada or, for that matter, Kenya or Indonesia. It was a nod to the fake, old “birther” conspiracy that even Mr. Trump has eschewed after promoting it for years.
.. But if the Murdochs persuade Ms. Kelly to stay, will there be room for her, Mr. Hannity and Mr. O’Reilly?
.. if Mr. Trump will pursue some sort of television news-style venture (he says he has no interest). But if he does, he could conceivably hire Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Hannity