More horrifying details of Roger Ailes’ harassment of Fox News employees emerge
We already know ousted Fox News top dog Roger Ailes is a pudding-faced grope monster who used his position of power to sexually harass female employees and spy on journalists who reported on him in ways he didn’t like. Now a new report from New York Magazine has revealed even more horrifying details from his 20-year reign of terror.
Following a physically and emotionally abusive childhood, Ailes found work in television. He began harassing women in the early 1960s, as soon as he’d obtained a modicum of power as executive producer of “The Mike Douglas Show,” a daytime variety show that was shot in Cleveland.
Via New York Magazine:
Though Ailes had married his college girlfriend, he used his growing power to take advantage of the parade of beautiful women coming through his office hoping to be cast on the show. Over the past two months, I interviewed 18 women who shared accounts of Ailes’s offering them job opportunities if they would agree to perform sexual favors for him and for his friends. In some cases, he threatened to release tapes of the encounters to prevent the women from reporting him. “The feeling I got in the interview was repulsion, power-hungriness, contempt, violence, and the need to subjugate and humiliate,” says a woman who auditioned for Ailes in 1968 when she was a college student.
Even then, his abuse, assault, and harassment of women was accompanied by a slick ability to evade consequences for his behavior:
A former model told me that her parents called the police on Ailes after she told them he assaulted her in a Cincinnati hotel room in 1969. “I remember Ailes sweet-talking my parents out of pressing charges,” she says.
Ailes’ treatment of women was such a liability that he could not even get a job in the Nixon White House. The Nixon White House, people.
After Ailes moved to New York he kept up the good work, offering to trade jobs for sex and generally behaving like the textbook sexual harassers you read about in your new hire seminar:
A former television producer described an interview with Ailes in 1975, in which he said: “If you want to make it in New York City in the TV business, you’re going to have to fuck me, and you’re going to do that with anyone I tell you to.”
Hey, a guy’s gotta look out for his friends.
While running media strategy on Rudy Giuliani’s 1989 mayoral campaign, Ailes propositioned an employee of his political-consulting firm: He name-dropped his friend Barry Diller and said that if she’d have sex with him he’d ask Diller to get her a part on Beverly Hills 90210. (Diller said he never received such a request.)
Ailes would often ask women questions about themselves in an effort to find out who was vulnerable to his predatory behavior:
According to interviews with Fox News women, Ailes would often begin by offering to mentor a young employee. He then asked a series of personal questions to expose potential vulnerabilities. “He asked, ‘Am I in a relationship? What are my familial ties?’ It was all to see how stable or unstable I was,” said a former employee. Megyn Kelly told lawyers at Paul, Weiss that Ailes made an unwanted sexual advance toward her in 2006 when she was going through a divorce. A lawyer for former anchor Laurie Dhue told me that Ailes harassed her around 2006; at the time, she was struggling with alcoholism.
Despite the eager way Ailes’ bosses the Murdochs threw him under the bus when Carlson sued him personally instead of the network (a way to get around a clause in her contract that mandated arbitration for any such claims), it’s clear Ailes got away with it because sexism was deeply embeddedwithin the culture of the network:
The fact that these incidents of harassment were so common may have contributed to why no one at Fox came forward or filed a lawsuit until now. Ailes’s attitudes about women permeated the very air of the network, from the exclusive hiring of attractive women to the strictly enforced skirts-and-heels dress code to the “leg cam” that lingers on female panelists’ crossed legs on air. It was hard to complain about something that was so normalized.
A particularly harrowing passage tells the story of Laurie Luhn, who was essentially a high-priced hooker (and madam) Ailes paid with the network’s money. Part of her job was to set up one-on-one meetings at which he could harass attractive women and find him (barf) “Roger’s Angels.” She later attempted suicide.
One especially horrific details comes courtesy of a Fox News makeup artist, who says women would often come out of meetings with Ailes with their makeup smudged:
Karem Alsina, a former Fox makeup artist, told me she grew suspicious when Fox anchors came to see her before private meetings with Ailes to have their makeup done. “They would say, ‘I’m going to see Roger, gotta look beautiful!’?” she recalled. “One of them came back down after a meeting, and the makeup on her nose and chin was gone.”
In addition to hating women, Ailes has a reputation for being a scary asshole to Jews:
In October of [1995], NBC hired the law firm Proskauer Rose to conduct an internal investigation after then-NBC executive David Zaslav told human resources that Ailes had called him a “little fucking Jew prick” in front of a witness. Zaslav told Proskauer investigators he feared for his safety. “I view Ailes as a very, very dangerous man. I take his threats to do physical harm to me very, very seriously … I feel endangered both at work and at home,” he said.
It’s also well-documented that he ran his business like the Church of Scientology, using network resources to spy on his own employees as well as any journalists he didn’t like:
But most striking is the extent to which Ailes ruled Fox News like a surveillance state. According to executives, he instructed Fox’s head of engineering, Warren Vandeveer, to install a CCTV system that allowed Ailes to monitor Fox offices, studios, greenrooms, the back entrance, and his homes. When Ailes spotted James Murdoch on the monitor smoking a cigarette outside the office, he remarked to his deputy Bill Shine, “Tell me that mouth hasn’t sucked a cock,” according to an executive who was in the room; Shine laughed. (A Fox spokesperson said Shine did not recall this.) Fox’s IT department also monitored employee email, according to sources. When I asked Fox’s director of IT, Deborah Sadusingh, about email searches, she said, “I can’t remember all the searches I’ve done.”
…
Fox News also obtained the phone records of journalists, by legally questionable means. According to two sources with direct knowledge of the incident, Brandi, Fox’s general counsel, hired a private investigator in late 2010 to obtain the personal home- and cell-phone records of Joe Strupp, a reporter for the liberal watchdog group Media Matters. (Through a spokesperson, Brandi denied this.) In the fall of that year, Strupp had written several articles quoting anonymous Fox sources, and the network wanted to determine who was talking to him. “This was the culture. Getting phone records doesn’t make anybody blink,” one Fox executive told me.”
It’s a shame he didn’t get that job in the Nixon administration. He would have fit right in.
There is also an insane (but believable) tidbit about how Donald Trump might have paid someone to poison Megyn Kelly during their little spat over whether or not women are people:
Problematically for Ailes, Fox’s audience took Trump’s side in the fight; Kelly received death threats from viewers, according to a person close to her. Kelly had even begun to speculate, according to one Fox source, that Trump might have been responsible for her getting violently ill before the debate last summer. Could he have paid someone to slip something into her coffee that morning in Cleveland? she wondered to colleagues.
Protect ya neck, Kelly.
It’s a shame Fox News and Rupert Murdoch came out relatively unscathed from this and Ailes walked away with millions, but at least he will probably never be anyone’s boss again. |
