Federal investigators have interviewed network executives and on-air talent, asking about sexual-harassment settlements
.. In an interview with the Journal, Ms. Luhn said Mr. Ailes harassed her and subjected her to “psychological torture” for years. She said Mr. Shine took steps to keep her from talking to the press, moving her between hotel rooms and at one point calling her father to arrange her placement in a psychiatric-care facility in Texas against her wishes. Eventually her lawyer negotiated a settlement with Fox. Ms. Brandi signed it while Messrs. Ailes and Shine signed a general release of known and unknown claims that was part of the separation agreement... Mr. Kranz was given immunity by prosecutors for speaking to them, people familiar with the matter said. He left the network last year after an internal inquiry found that he was involved in making settlement payments to Mr. Ailes’s alleged victims without the parent company’s knowledge, the people said.
The Mistake Christians Made in Defending Bill O’Reilly
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
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
Bill O’Reilly’s Self-Aggrandizing Sense of Persecution
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.