Sexual Harassment in the Media
After a scandal at Fox, sexual harassment in the news business is making news
CLARA WAS AN 18-year-old high school student and photography intern at a newspaper in the southeastern United States when a section editor asked if she’d ever had sex. He also sent Clara (not her real name) several flirtatious texts during her two years at the paper, asking if she would come to his house and whether she “would do anything for him.” A teacher at her high school sensed something bad was happening and told her to be careful, a warning Clara didn’t heed.
The editor implied that “I wouldn’t get a recommendation from him for any other internships, or further work, if I didn’t,” says Clara, now a 23-year-old general assignment reporter at a different news outlet. “I didn’t know what else to do. I was afraid saying no would mean I wouldn’t collect any more clips.”
After declining his invitation several times, she
eventually went to his house. “I told him I didn’t really want to fool around, that I had changed my mind,” and asked him to watch a movie, she says. Instead, he told Clara that watching a movie wasn’t why she was there. He forcibly performed oral sex on her before she grabbed her clothes and ran out. She was able to avoid seeing him again at the paper, but he continued to contact her for two months, until she went to college. She never reported the incident.
Clara is one of the 53 women and two men who contacted Newsweek about sexual harassment related to their jobs in journalism. In mid-July, I emailed friends and colleagues seeking stories and was soon inundated with recollections of inappropriate jokes, comments on race and appearance, and unwanted touching and worse by sources, colleagues, bosses and the public. Newsweek has granted anonymity to those who requested it; many women still work at the companies where they say they were harassed. While this is not a scientific survey, it’s an opportunity to hear the stories of women who have faced irritating, intimidating and, at times, life-threatening behavior.
I’ve also decided to include a few of my experiences with sexual harassment. I was a 22-yearold intern at an international news organization in Washington, D.C., when an older, married male journalist invited me to go stargazing with him in rural Virginia. When I declined, he sent me an email: “I hope I can count on you as a very mature person and not hear some crazy rumors in the office.” That same year, an older male sports photographer detailed the injury of a wellknown football player by reaching under the table and tracing lines on my knee and thigh.
Like many of the women who spoke with Newsweek, Clara blames herself for what happened. “It wasn’t until I went to counseling and told my therapist what happened did I realize it was rape. The question of consent never crossed my mind at 18,” she says. Five years after the attack, she says, she is unable to cover stories that involve sexual violence due to her post-traumatic stress disorder.
At her new job, she says, “it was humiliating, not because my boss wasn’t accepting—just because I had to admit I couldn’t [cover stories about sexual trauma] and why,” she says. “No one wants to tell that story to their boss.”
DO THE TWIRL
Sexual harassment in the media industry made headlines this summer after allegations against former Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes by numerous female staff members, including anchors Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson. Ailes was ousted in July over the claims, and in late August Laurie Luhn, a former director of booking at Fox News, told New York magazine she had been harassed by Ailes for more than two decades.
Sexual harassment is defined by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as “unwelcome sexual advances, request for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature.” Sexual assault is defined as nonconsensual physical contact and can include rape, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. But sexual comments, jokes and insinuations are also not acceptable and can make a workplace unbearable.
A 2013 study from the International Women’s Media Foundation found that nearly two-thirds of women journalists polled have experienced some form of harassment or abuse in relation to their work. The ever-changing nature of the media industry, including lack of job security, “absolutely” leads to fewer women telling their managers or other authorities about sexual harassment due to the fear of retaliation, says Elisa Lees Muñoz, executive director of the IWMF.
A recent British study found that more than half of the women in a variety of careers had experienced sexual harassment at work, rising to 63 percent of girls and women between the ages of 16 and 24. In the U.S., a survey of 2,235 women by Cosmopolitan last year found that one in three women ages 18 to 34 has been sexually harassed at work, and that the food service, hospitality and retail industries had the highest reported levels of harassment. The prevalence of sexual
“IT FEELS SO DANGEROUS TO BURN BRIDGES IN JOURNALISM.”
harassment in journalism is particularly disturbing when you consider that a reporter’s most important job is to expose wrongdoing. And yet so many women journalists are afraid to speak up when they are the victims. “[Women] are afraid to say something,” says Muñoz, “afraid of being the squeaky wheel, afraid they wouldn’t get assignments.”
Thinking back to her time working in a Washington, D.C., news bureau nine years ago, Elizabeth (not her real name) remembers that she didn’t want to get her male colleague fired, even though he was harassing her. She was a 23-yearold reporter; he was an assistant. They became friends, but she was in a long-term relationship and said no when he asked her out.
He began texting her all the time and shifting his schedule to match hers, showing up when she did in the morning. He tried to talk to her about his anxiety problems and told her how unfair it was that he didn’t get to write. Returning to the office one day after covering a meeting, Elizabeth found herself alone with him, a situation she had managed to avoid for five months. “He immediately came to my part of the office. My desk was sort of in a corner, and he walked all the way up to me. He was getting angry: ‘Why are you such a bitch to me?’ ‘You really strung me along.’ ‘You know I have anxiety issues, and you decided to fuck with me anyway,’” she recalls.
“At this point, he’s literally backed me into a corner. I said a couple of times, ‘You need to step back from me.’ He was yelling at me but [also saying], ‘We would be perfect together. We should really be a couple.’ It got really creepy.”
Despite this harrowing scene, Elizabeth did not report him. “It feels so dangerous to burn bridges in journalism, specifically because everyone ends up working together again and because jobs are so tenuous,” she says.
The majority of women who spoke with Newsweek said their sexual harassment happened early in their careers. Janille Miller was in her mid-20s when she interviewed for a broadcast journalism job. After an interview with the news director, Miller went with him to meet the head of news, who asked her to stand up and turn around. “There I was, standing up in front of the news director and head of news, both men. I felt humiliated and disgusted as the head of news looked me up and down as though he was inspecting a piece of meat,” she says.
“I knew what had just occurred was wrong,” says Miller, who was offered a job and a contract after that demeaning audition. “I hated myself for allowing it to occur,” she adds.
Andrea Tantaros, another former Fox News employee who has made sexual harassment claims against Ailes, recently told New York magazine that in 2014 he asked her to do “the twirl” so he could look at her figure. In her lawsuit against Ailes, Tantaros says, “Fox News masquerades as a defender of traditional family values, but behind the scenes it operates like a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency and misogyny.” In her complaint, Carlson says Ailes ogled her, asked “her to turn around so he could view her posterior” and said Carlson was “sexy” but “too much hard work.”
DANGERS ABROAD
While there are laws against harassment in U.S. workplaces, women journalists abroad often have little protection. Moreover, reporting from countries regularly accused of human rights abuses can be particularly dangerous—especially when sexual harassment is deliberately used as a means of intimidation, as was the case in Egypt during the Arab Spring.
In 2011, CBS journalist Lara Logan was sexually assaulted while covering protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, in one of the most well-known incidents of a woman journalist being violently attacked while doing her job. She spoke about the incident on 60 Minutes three months later, and Jeff Fager, then-chairman of CBS News, said he hoped that would break the “code of silence” surrounding the risk of sexual assault
“I FELT HUMILIATED AND DISGUSTED AS THE HEAD OF NEWS LOOKED ME UP AND DOWN AS THOUGH HE WAS INSPECTING A PIECE OF MEAT.”
faced by women journalists reporting overseas.
Amanda Mustard is a photojournalist who lived and worked in Egypt for three years. In Egypt, she says, reporting as a woman meant the constant threat of rape. On multiple occasions, she was followed home and assaulted. “I would regularly walk around with a can of Coke in my hand in case I had to throw it at somebody,” she says. She wore a stab vest to prevent unwanted touching and wore her belt inside out because that made it harder to remove.
Mustard developed a “serious physiological response to leaving the house,” and the stress became so bad she had a small stroke known as a transient ischemic attack. Even when she was in the hospital, a doctor flirted with her and told her she was just “being silly,” despite the right side of her body going numb and her sudden inability to speak.
‘YOU DON’T KNOW HOW BAD IT HAS BEEN’
Mustard says there’s “a real need for older female champions” to speak out about their experiences of sexual harassment. “The two generations need to work together more.”
Leslie Bennetts was a journalist for 45 years. On the third day of her first job at a newspaper in Philadelphia, she says, she was in the elevator when a man grabbed her breasts and “jammed me up against the wall.” That man was the book editor, and her boss’s response when she told her was “Oh, that dirty old man.” Harassment from sources was constant, she says.
Bennetts says young women journalists need to understand “how bad a lot of this has been. If they haven’t experienced this personally, they don’t know it exists.”
Despite the sordid stories and what she endured as a woman in journalism, Bennetts feels optimistic and has “a sense that the world is changing.” She points to how quickly the Murdoch family acted in removing Ailes, the man who had made their company billions.
“It’s time for women to say we are absolutely not going to participate in these systems anymore. We are absolutely going to fight back, make it public, do whatever you have to do,” she says. “For my generation, we owe it to our daughters.”