Gretchen Carlson’s tenure as an on-air host at Fox News was imperiled, and she knew it. For the previous nine months she’d been quietly meeting with attorneys to craft a sexual-harassment lawsuit against her boss, the all-powerful 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. But questions ricocheted around the room.
What would be the fallout? How would this be perceived? How would it play?
“We knew Fox was a high-powered, very potent machine that would go into full attack mode,” recalled Carlson’s public relations agent, Allan Ripp, who was meeting his client for the first time that day. “But she was resolved.”
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, as well as a primary architect of the modern-day Republican Party and conservative movement. News of Carlson’s firing, and the lawsuit she filed shortly thereafter, have now prompted 25 women to come forward with what they describe as similar harassment claims against Ailes that stretch across five decades back to his days in the 1960s as a young television producer, according to Carlson’s attorney, Nancy Erika Smith.
Interviews with four of those women portray the 76-year-old television powerhouse as a man who could be routinely crude and inappropriate, ogling young women, commenting about their breasts and legs, and fostering a macho, insensitive culture. Three of the women were speaking about their allegations for the first time, including a 2002 Fox News intern who says Ailes grabbed her buttocks, and a Fox News employee who says Ailes touched her and tried to kiss her against her will at his office in 2004.
Many of the allegations that have become public — first in New York magazine and then elsewhere — are clustered in the decades long before Ailes became the founding chief executive officer and guiding light of media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s new Fox News Channel in 1996. Some involve instances of Ailes kissing or touching women against their will; others fall into the realm of boorish behavior, off-color quips and assertions that women needed to provide sexual favors to advance their careers.
(Continued)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...ff9024-5014-11e6-aa14-e0c1087f7583_story.html
What would be the fallout? How would this be perceived? How would it play?
“We knew Fox was a high-powered, very potent machine that would go into full attack mode,” recalled Carlson’s public relations agent, Allan Ripp, who was meeting his client for the first time that day. “But she was resolved.”
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, as well as a primary architect of the modern-day Republican Party and conservative movement. News of Carlson’s firing, and the lawsuit she filed shortly thereafter, have now prompted 25 women to come forward with what they describe as similar harassment claims against Ailes that stretch across five decades back to his days in the 1960s as a young television producer, according to Carlson’s attorney, Nancy Erika Smith.
Interviews with four of those women portray the 76-year-old television powerhouse as a man who could be routinely crude and inappropriate, ogling young women, commenting about their breasts and legs, and fostering a macho, insensitive culture. Three of the women were speaking about their allegations for the first time, including a 2002 Fox News intern who says Ailes grabbed her buttocks, and a Fox News employee who says Ailes touched her and tried to kiss her against her will at his office in 2004.
Many of the allegations that have become public — first in New York magazine and then elsewhere — are clustered in the decades long before Ailes became the founding chief executive officer and guiding light of media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s new Fox News Channel in 1996. Some involve instances of Ailes kissing or touching women against their will; others fall into the realm of boorish behavior, off-color quips and assertions that women needed to provide sexual favors to advance their careers.
(Continued)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...ff9024-5014-11e6-aa14-e0c1087f7583_story.html
But...clearly there is more than one way to deploy a 'Golden Parachute'.
