He is, for lack of a better comparison, the Donald Trump of lawyering.
.. A walk through Mr. Kasowitz’s office at Kasowitz Benson Torres in Midtown shows magazine covers and framed pictures of him. He’s quick to tell you about his latest accomplishment and never shies from publicity. The first paragraph of the online biography on his firm’s website, before mentioning any of his work, cites the dozens of media outlets that have written about him, and how they have described him as the “toughest lawyer on Wall Street,” an “uberlitigator” and “the toughest of the tough guys.”
.. In case you didn’t get the message, he likes a good fight, the nastier the better.
.. Mr. Kasowitz was largely responsible for helping Liggett settle the huge class action suits it faced over the health impact of tobacco
.. Mr. Kasowitz’s firm was on the other side of Mr. Icahn in a dispute over casinos. The client? Mr. Trump, along with his daughter Ivanka.
.. Mr. Kasowitz recently added Sberbank, a Russian state-controlled bank, as a client in a case that accused it of conspiring to take over a Russian granite company — and asserting that the conspiracy involved lieutenants of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The complaint called it a “textbook case of Russian corporate raiding.”
The big question in Washington is whether Mr. Kasowitz, who is not a criminal lawyer or a political hand, is the right person to be at Mr. Trump’s side. Some of Mr. Trump’s friends and advisers have privately raised questions about his hiring.
.. he does know about Mr. Trump — and he does know about the news media and the 24-hour news cycle.
.. He’s currently representing Bill O’Reilly
.. Mr. Kasowitz sent a letter to the paper threatening to sue over the publication of accusations from two women that Mr. Trump sexually harassed them.
.. Mr. Kasowitz’s law partner, David M. Friedman, was Mr. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel.
.. And another of Mr. Kasowitz’s partners — one of his newest — is Joseph I. Lieberman
.. “I don’t read much. Mostly I read contracts, but usually my lawyers do most of the work.”
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.
Roger Ailes, Former Fox News Chief, Dies at 77
Ailes left network last year amid sexual-harassment controversy
Roger Ailes, who combined political savvy with television showmanship to build the Fox News Channel into a conservative media juggernaut, becoming one of American media’s most controversial figures along the way, died Thursday. He was 77 years old.The cause of death wasn’t immediately known. Mr. Ailes had been in failing health, and had recently been hospitalized after a fall... Mr. Ailes pioneered a style of cable news with opinionated, right-leaning prime-time programming delivered by pugnacious hosts.
.. Through a career in politics dating back to the 1960s and his leadership of Fox News, Mr. Ailes helped shape the modern conservative movement.
.. Known for his bluntness and disdain for the so-called liberal media elites
.. Rupert Murdoch: .. “He will be remembered by the many people on both sides of the camera that he discovered, nurtured and promoted.”
.. Mr. Ailes also demanded loyalty, and he usually got it. When Mr. Ailes was building Fox News, almost 100 people from NBC went with him, causing executives there to complain that he was stealing staff. “You don’t know the difference between recruitment and a jailbreak,” he fired back.
.. In his letter of resignation, Mr. Ailes didn’t address the sexual-harassment claims but told Mr. Murdoch, “I am proud that we have built Fox News and Fox Business channels into powerful and lucrative news organizations that inform our audience and reward our shareholders.”
.. I met him once, and he was more than anything unashamed of his role in creating value by increasing an audience by the means he correctly saw as most potent — conflict. Whether you like the message or not, you cannot ignore screaming, and Ailes proved screaming pays very well regardless of whether there is anything remotely worth screaming about.
Sexual Harassment Is Invisible to Half the Population
So men need to gather some data and empathize rather than just extrapolating from personal experience... No, when I say “harassment,” I’m talking about … well, this is a family column, so actually, I can’t repeat most of what I’m talking about. But let’s just say that when you are on your knees under someone’s desk in order to check the network connection, and the owner of that desk starts a sentence with “while you’re down there,” he has not inadvertently stumbled over some near-invisible social line he wasn’t aware of. The sort of men who make these remarks don’t do this kind of thing because they think it is all right; they do it because they can get away with it. That is the kind of abuse that Carlson and others are alleging... But I was surprised to find that Rivera actually thought “I’ve never seen any sign of it myself” was relevant to the question of Ailes’s guilt or innocence. Does Rivera consider himself so irresistible that anyone with the potential to sexually harass would be sure to sexually harass him? Like he’s some kind of canary in the sexual harassment mine? “Oh, don’t worry about Roger; if he were a lech, I’d be the first to know.”.. I was shocked when a black friend told me that clerks followed her around stores. What she said was completely alien to my own experience. But after she told me, I did observe it happening occasionally. Previously, presumably, I had not noticed, because it wasn’t happening to me... We don’t need to believe that all cops, or even most cops, abuse their power, to understand that as soon as power is created, it will be abused by at least some of the people who wield it. And if those people perceive that it is wiser to target black men than middle-aged white women, the middle-aged white women will have no idea that this is going on, while the black men will grow to see every cop as a potential threat... “Most sexual harassers are men” is not the same statement as “most men are sexual harassers.” And the righteous majority of men, or police officers, probably has more in common with victims of sexual harassment, or victims of police brutality, than with the perpetrators.