Fox boss becomes the hunted in media meltdown
In a week where Donald Trump rose to the top of the Republican Party, a man who for decades had been an all-powerful voice in the GOP suffered a spectacular fall from grace.
One day in early June, an embattled but determined news anchor met her lawyers on the 35th floor of a Manhattan law office.
Gretchen Carlson’s job as a Fox News host was in danger, and she knew it. For the previous nine months she’d been quietly preparing a sexual-harassment lawsuit against her boss, the allpowerful Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes. Now she was almost ready to go public with her allegation that Ailes had sabotaged her career because she wouldn’t have sex with him.
Within weeks, Carlson would be out of a job, and a cascading series of events, unfolding with dizzying speed, would culminate in the public shaming and resignation this week of Ailes, one of the most influential executives in American television history. News of Carlson’s firing and her lawsuit have now prompted 25 women to come forward with what they describe as similar harassment claims against Ailes, 76, that stretch back to his days in the 1960s, according to Carlson’s lawyer, Nancy Erika Smith.
Ailes has vigorously denied the claims and called Carlson’s lawsuit defamatory.
Ailes, the son of an Ohio factory foreman, learned the television business in the 1960s during stints at stations in Cleveland and Philadelphia. But he soon exhibited the behaviour that would come back to haunt him. A teenage model auditioning for a part recalls going into shock when he suddenly grabbed her and kissed her.
‘‘‘I got out of there as fast as I could,’’ said the woman, 18 at the time. ‘‘I said to myself, ‘I’m going to remember that man’s name’.’’
Ailes, who worked his way up to executive producer of the nationally syndicated Mike Douglas Show, met Richard Nixon while the presidential candidate was waiting to appear on the programme. Soon, he was working for him, going on to start .his own political consulting firm. In the late 1980s, a receptionist in Ailes’s consultancy says, he called her into his office and locked the door. He told her he could introduce her to power players in the industry who would cast her on television shows, but she had no doubt that he was suggesting that she would have to sleep with him. Ailes’s bravado and insouciance seemed like a perfect match for the Fox network that billionaire Rupert Murdoch was launching in the mid-1990s. Ailes created an unabashedly right-leaning network, heavy on opinion, and succeeded in obliterating his main rival, CNN, in the ratings. He also pushed for a very specific look: blonde and leggy. ‘‘It became common knowledge that women did not want to be alone with him,’’ a former staffer said. ‘‘They would bring other men with them when they had to meet him.’’
Gretchen Carlson, a CBS reporter and 1989 Miss America pageant winner, joined Fox in 2005. At first she was happy, and she thought Ailes was ‘‘brilliant’’.
But by 2009, Carlson alleges, she was being harassed by one of her co-hosts, Steve Doocy. When Ailes heard about her concerns, she says, he called her a ‘‘man hater’’ and demoted her.
After the switch, Carlson alleges, Ailes, who has been married since 1998, continued to harass her. Carlson says she confronted Ailes in his office last September.
‘‘I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago, and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better,’’ she alleges he told her.
On June 23 – two days after her 50th birthday – Fox fired Carlson. But what the network didn’t know was that she had been quietly preparing a lawsuit.
Fox responded aggressively, but then other accusers began coming forward.
Fox News’ star anchor, Megyn Kelly, has told the network’s investigators of her own experience of Ailes’ behaviour, claiming inappropriate hugging, alleged to have taken place about a decade ago when she was a relative newcomer to the network.
Even on Friday, as the media world was rocked by news of his resignation, Smith said she was hearing from more women.
‘‘They keep coming,’’ she said. ‘‘I got three today."