O'Reilly scandal: Intersection of court, TV
Fox news anchor files own suit, alleging extortion
BY VERNE GAY
STAFF WRITER - NEWSDAY
October 15, 2004
The battle between Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and the woman who has accused him of sexual harassment escalated Thursday on several fronts, from courthouses to the network morning shows.
A series of fast-paced legal maneuvers indicate the legal fight between the Fox News star and associate producer Andrea Mackris will be lengthy and bruising. O'Reilly's lawyer sought to have his accuser's attorney, Benedict Morelli, removed from her case because Morelli is named in O'Reilly's suit claiming extortion.
In addition, O'Reilly's lawyer, Ronald Green, said he has asked a judge in State Supreme Court in Nassau County "to declare that terminating her employment would not be considered an unlawful act of retaliation."
Mackris, 33, of Manhattan, remains employed by Fox News Channel, but Green said she told friends in an e-mail that she had left the network.
In a phone interview, O'Reilly would not say whether he had sexually explicit phone conversations with Mackris, as she charged in her lawsuit.
"My lawyers have said to me I can't talk about anything remotely associated with their case because of the severity of our lawsuit," he said. "There are a whole bunch of legal things that are in play here, and they don't want to have any kind of interference, and I understand it."
O'Reilly appeared on "Live with Regis and Kelly" Thursday, saying "If I have to go down, I'm willing to do it," then added: "I'm going to take a stand. I'm a big mouth on the air, and I'm a big mouth off the air."
Mackris, meanwhile, appeared on "Good Morning America" and "The Today Show," where she said: "The last time this inappropriate conversation had happened, he said it was going to be in person. And I was -- felt extremely threatened, for many reasons."
A call to Mackris' home was not returned, and her lawyer did not return calls.
While Mackris and Fox traded accusations, observers also noted that O'Reilly and Fox never specifically denied that he had held the conversations with his producer.
"Bill believes in retrospect that the conversations may have been recorded, and he's confident that if they exist in an unadulterated state, it will be exculpatory," Green said.
Without confirming or denying that sexually explicit conversations took place, Green said tapes might indicate whether they were "initiated for the purpose of entrapment."
Green also filed a motion with the court to have any tapes turned over by Oct. 22, but has received no response from Morelli, he said. The move to remove Morelli as Mackris' attorney, Green said, comes because he is "a litigant. And he can't be both a litigant and an advocate."
The TV news business is still absorbing the impact of the controversy involving Dan Rather's use of a fraudulent memo on President George W. Bush's National Guard service, and O'Reilly's sudden legal battle stunned the industry. It left many, including O'Reilly, guessing about its outcome.
"If I thought about what that would be, I wouldn't be able to do my job," he said.
Lisa Bloom, a Court TV anchor and veteran sexual harassment attorney, said Morelli's and Mackris' demand for $60 million, which led Fox to sue for extortion, "is an extraordinarily high number. And in my experience, in a lot of these cases against celebrities, $4 million to $6 million would be high."
But, she added, "It looks like she has a viable claim ... If she's got tapes [with him] making these extremely explicit comments to her, she's got a strong case, and it would be clearly sexual harassment under New York law. The only defense is that she welcomed, encouraged and participated in it, and I haven't heard Fox say that so far."
Fox News declined to comment on the suits Thursday. However, some former colleagues said there was no evidence of inappropriate behavior by O'Reilly in the past.
"He's a workaholic kind of guy totally fixated on the medium more than anything else," said Mike Schneider, an anchor with Bloomberg Television and one of the founding anchors on FNC before leaving in 1997. "He always struck me as the kind of guy -- like most of us on camera -- fixated on achieving his goals."
Said O'Reilly: "I have 30 years of a squeaky clean record ... This is like being struck by lightning."
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc. |
