Gabriel Sherman, who wrote an unauthorized biography of Fox News head Roger Ailes and has sources within the organization, continues to get information about more women coming forward with lurid stories about Ailes’s atrocious behavior. The stories keep getting worse and worse.
Another former model, now 74 and speaking anonymously because she never told her husband about her experience, said Ailes propositioned her during her interview for The Mike Douglas Show in 1967, promising, “If you sleep with me, all these things will happen.” She says they did have sex several weeks later at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia. “Then I started getting calls from an agency — I think they got my number from him. I got asked to go on interviews in New York City, but they weren’t jobs at all. I was sent to different places where you’d go into a room and some guy would be there thinking you have to give him a blow job. It was horrifying. I wasn’t a prostitute.” Later, she said, she tried to kill herself with pills.
The parent company 21st Century Fox has hired an outside legal firm to do an internal investigation. Sherman says that there are more people still working at Fox News who have experienced harassment. They do not want to talk to the media but feel safer talking to the outside lawyers doing the internal investigation.
But Sherman also says that the firm is the same as the one that was brought in to investigate the so-called Deflategate issue and was criticized by a federal judge for being an advocate for the NFL rather than being independent. So the aim of 21st Century Fox may be to see how best to contain the damage rather than expose the truth.
One internal investigation a la Bridgegate, coming up.
For the first time, there’s reason to admire Gretchen Carlson for opening the floodgates. Now I just hope she speaks up and changes her tune.
The difference being prostitutes demand payment upfront?
#3: take the quotes out of context, reverse the order, hmmm.
Reverse the order? Why?
Roger Ailes is being judged by today’s standards. There were no penalties for sexual harrassment back in the ’60’s and ’70’s. Sexual harrassment was pretty routine from what I experienced and saw. Ministers had sex with congregants. Professors had sex with co-eds. Bosses demanded sex from job-seekers and underlings. Construction workers cat-called and whistled at women passers-by. Drunks propositioned at bus stops and on buses. A stranger sidled up to me at an airport viewing deck, stood close behind me and repeatedly thrust his pelvic area at me (when I was 13.) Today such behavior is considered illegal. In those days, it was simply “Boys will be boys”. And to prosecute a rape, the woman had to prove all sorts of things (like she didn’t pull down her underwear and her clothing was not provocative). Those girls/women I knew who had been raped never prosecuted successfully.
By today’s enlightened standards, Roger Ailes is truly horrifying.