On
a list of days that will live in infamy, October 13, 2004, is, for most
people in the outside world, probably pretty close to the bottom. If we
consider dates like December 7, 1941, November 22, 1963, and September
11, 2001, to be at the top of the Infamy List, then 10/13/04 would have
to fall somewhere between March 6, 1969 (Major League Baseball
introduces the Designated Hitter rule), and May 19, 1999 (George Lucas
releases the first Star Wars prequel).
In
the insular, gossipy microcosm that was Fox News, the day that saw the
release of a salacious sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill
O’Reilly—our biggest star and most fearsome newsroom presence— had the
same effect as Lee Harvey Oswald flying a Japanese Zero into the World
Trade Center.
I was still in my early green days then, doing
videotape for the afternoon and evening cut-ins. I showed up to work
like normal at three p.m. and grabbed a desk next to the rest of the
team. As I was logging in, I noticed that something was amiss in the
newsroom. It was quieter than usual. Instead of the sound of workers
talking on phones or shouting questions to colleagues seated across the
room, people were huddled in small groups around desks, talking in muted
tones, occasionally stifling giggles or gasping, and periodically
looking around nervously. It reminded me of a bunch of schoolkids
furtively attempting to share a hilarious passed note but not wanting to
get caught by the teacher. All the small groups appeared to be looking
at the same website, because the same bright orange background appeared
on all the monitors.
“What’s going on?” I asked Barry, a cut-in
writer I was friendly with who was occupying the desk next to mine. He
was, I noticed, also reading the orange website as intently as the rest
of the newsroom. “What’s everybody looking at?”
“Oh, my God. You
haven’t heard?” Barry said, minimizing his browser window and turning to
me with a gleeful look. “Go to The Smoking Gun. Right now.
Immediately.”
The Smoking Gun is a website that posts government
documents, lawsuits, mug shots—anything in the public record that might
be entertaining. I’d actually looked at the site a few weeks prior,
laughing at the section featuring leaked concert “riders”—backstage
demands that musicians inserted into contracts with promoters. (My
favorite: macho conserva-rocker Ted Nugent’s 2002 request for
tropical-fruit-flavored Slim-Fast in his dressing room.)
But a secretly effete rock star’s beverage preference was not the topic du jour at TSG that day.
O’Reilly Hit With Sex Harass Suit, the site’s headline screamed.
The
story went like this: An associate producer named Andrea Mackris had
accused O’Reilly of sexual harassment and asked for sixty million
dollars from him and Fox to keep quiet about it. (The
sixty-million-dollar figure was the amount of revenue Mackris and her
lawyers estimated “The Factor” brought in for Fox each year.) O’Reilly
and the network reportedly negotiated quietly at first but then balked,
and sued Mackris for extortion. She countersued for harassment, and
filed a salacious twenty-two-page lawsuit that The Smoking Gun posted,
and that two-thirds of the employees in the newsroom currently had their
noses buried in.
“This is some pretty racy shit,” Barry said.
And
so it was. I’ll spare you most of the horrific details since I’m not a
sadist (and since this is 2013 and you all have access to Google if you
want to see the damn thing for yourselves), but the gist of it is:
Mackris claimed that, over the course of several dinners and phone
calls, Bill repeatedly made suggestive remarks, tried to convince her to
buy herself sex toys, and on at least three occasions called her while
he was pleasuring himself. The lawsuit never says so explicitly, but
Mackris apparently had audio recordings of some of the phone calls,
because at some points, it quotes O’Reilly verbatim and at length.
One
of these word-for-word passages features Bill monologuing a fantasy of
showering in a hotel on a tropical island with the producer. He
repeatedly mentions his desire to scrub her down with “one of those
mitts, one of those loofah mitts.”
Let me interject at this point and defend my former boss on one point.
I’m not sure if his scenario qualifies as
erotic,
per se—though if getting a soapy caress from a volatile middle-aged
millionaire floats your boat, this is pretty much the pinnacle. What it
is, however, is extremely
hygienic, and also
practical
in its use of specific props likely to be on hand. This was clearly a
well-thought-out fantasy, showing a lot of planning and dedication. (As I
would later learn working for him, Bill’s a detail-oriented guy. The
lawsuit doesn’t say so, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a specific
make and model of loofah in mind.)
Unfortunately for Bill—and
fortuitously for late-night comedians and Keith Olbermann—soon enough,
the thread of his tropical fantasy gets away from him, and he
temporarily forgets the name of his ersatz sex toy, confusing it with a
word for a delicious Middle Eastern food made from fried chickpeas.
And
that’s how the entire Fox News organization and the world at large
discovered that the number one host in cable news had allegedly told one
of his producers that he wanted to massage her lady parts with a
“falafel.”
I had just finished the falafel section of the lawsuit,
and my jaw must have been hanging open, because Barry sounded panicked
when he quietly hissed at me: “Dude!”
I turned to him and saw that
his monitor was no longer displaying The Smoking Gun. No one’s was. A
hush had fallen over the newsroom, the chat groups had evaporated, and
everyone was back at their own seat with their heads buried in their
screens, suddenly very interested in whatever duty they had been
shirking in favor of gossip. I looked around, puzzled. Barry caught my
eye and gestured with his head toward the newsroom entrance.
It was O’Reilly.
He
stood framed in the doorway, tall and stone-faced, surveying the room
like some sort of cable news golem, seemingly daring anyone to make a
peep.
No one did.
He pushed into the room, walking briskly
down the main aisle toward the “Factor” pod, as producers unlucky enough
to have a desk in his direct path ducked their heads even farther,
trying to make themselves invisible.
He came within twenty feet of
my desk. I risked a peek out of the corner of my eye as he blew past. I
had misjudged his countenance from a distance. It wasn’t the impassive
stone face that I had originally thought. It was a clenched jaw and a
mask of pure, unadulterated fury.
Just fucking try me, his face said.
Make my fucking day.
* * *
The
fallout was swift and severe. Bill usually started every show with a
segment called the Talking Points Memo, an editorial monologue about
five minutes long. Normally he’d spend it commenting on some political
issue, giving his opinion while his words appeared, bullet-pointed and
paraphrased, in a graphics box floating next to his head.
The
Talking Points segment that night, a few hours after the charges broke,
was anything but business as usual. Bill vaguely referred to the
allegations, saying, “This is the single most evil thing I have ever
experienced, and I’ve seen a lot.” But where Bill was vague, the
late-night comedians were happy to be much, much more specific, as I
discovered that weekend going through the shows for my “Fox &
Friends” duty.
Conan O’Brien may have been the most merciless,
doing a recurring bit where a Bill sound-alike called into the show to
chat and ended up soliciting Conan for sex. Tina Fey, who was still
behind the Weekend Update desk on “Saturday Night Live” at the time, was
also brutal, uncorking a fast and furious monologue that mixed
righteous feminist anger with penis size speculation, entitled “Don’t
Forget Bill O’Reilly Is Disgusting.” Even the normally bland Jay Leno
got in on the action, cracking a joke about a “fair and balanced” set of
breasts.
Reaction among the newsroom staffers was surprisingly
gleeful. Schadenfreude reigned, as most people agreed that Bill had it
coming. I hadn’t been around long enough at that point to have had any
significant run-ins with him, but there was no shortage of producers,
video editors, makeup ladies, and security guards he had rubbed the
wrong way over the years; some of these folks were now positively
crowing, filling the air with speculation about O’Reilly’s future.
Interestingly, not one person I spoke to thought Fox would go so far as
to pull him off the air. He was just too valuable. If one lowly producer
had to endure his masturbatory phone calls on a regular basis, that was
the price the suits on the second floor were willing to pay for the
five million viewers and countless ad dollars he brought in every night.
And
as if to underscore this, O’Reilly’s ratings spiked by 30 percent
during the crisis, even though—aside from the initial Talking Points
Memo—he wasn’t saying a single word about the lawsuit. (“His ratings are
going up faster than his dick,” Barry cracked after we saw the first
round of post-lawsuit numbers.)
In the midst of all this, Bill
disappeared entirely from the newsroom. He had habitually made one or
two appearances per day in the subterranean space. But following his
day-of, glare-filled excursion when we almost made eye contact, he
hadn’t returned even once, reportedly sequestering himself all day in
his seventeenth-floor office with the door closed, emerging only to tape
the show in his ground-floor studio.
Rumors flew. Everyone had a
theory, none of them fueled by anything other than wild speculation and
hearsay. Even the O’Reilly staffers, when buttonholed by
information-starved staffers on other shows, protested that they were as
much in the dark as everyone else. The tabloids had a field day, with
the News Corp.–owned New York Post floating innuendo about the accuser,
and the liberal-leaning Daily News breathlessly reporting the more
salacious O’Reilly-damaging details.
Then, just as suddenly as it began, it was over.
A
little more than two weeks after Mackris filed the lawsuit, she settled
with O’Reilly and Fox out of court. He announced it on the show that
night, again during his Talking Points segment. The statement was a
carefully worded masterpiece of blame diversion, complete with
complaints of being the target of “media scorn from coast to coast,” and
claims that the reason for all the scrutiny was dislike of him and Fox
News. He recited the meticulously lawyered phrase “There was no
wrongdoing in the case whatsoever by anyone.” He cast doubt on the most
salacious tidbits without directly addressing them: “All I can say to
you is please do not believe everything you hear and read.” And finally,
he attempted to close the books on the topic: “This brutal ordeal is
now officially over, and I will never speak of it again.”
No one
in the newsroom had any such inclination toward dropping the subject,
however; it was all we could talk about for the next week.
“The
Washington Post is saying that Mackris got at least two million dollars
in the deal,” I announced to my cut-ins team the day after the news of
the settlement broke, reading off the paper’s website.
“I heard
she got four million dollars,” my producer, Angie, said. “One of the
tech guys swears he bumped into her at a bar downtown last night, and
she was wasted. She was apparently celebrating because she’s rich now
and doesn’t have to work here anymore.”
Lenny, the former National
Enquirer writer, shook his head. “I heard it was even more. My buddy at
the Post said he’s hearing it was six or even eight mil. And that
O’Reilly refused to pay it out of his own pocket. Ailes agreed to pick
up the tab to keep him happy.”
Angie grimaced. “I’ll remember that
at my next review when they tell me money is too tight for a raise.”
She deepened her voice, launching into a surprisingly accurate
impression of Nelson Howe, our fastidious news director: “ ‘Well, Angie,
we’d love to give you that whopping three percent raise this year, but
we had to pay for O’Reilly to get his rocks off over the phone with one
of his employees. I’m sure you understand.’”
The speculated money
shortage never materialized. But the company-wide consequences were
still annoying enough to garner a round of
I-told-you-sos from
the peanut gallery that had blasted O’Reilly from the beginning of the
scandal. A few weeks after everything had settled down, we got a mass
e-mail from human resources about mandatory sexual-harassment and
diversity-sensitivity classes.
Lenny, who by that point had been
switched from the evening shift into full-time on the overnights, did
not take the news well. “What is this horseshit?” he griped after
reading the e-mail. “I start work at goddamn eleven at night, and they
want me to come in at two in the fucking afternoon for a
sensitivity class? I’m still asleep then, for chrissakes!”
“Maybe they’ll let you have an exemption because of your schedule,” I said. “I don’t think you really need the classes anyway.”
“Nah,
I know this place. They’ll make me come in, and they probably won’t
even pay me for the hours, the cheap bastards.” He gestured in
frustration in the direction of the executive offices, two floors over
our heads. “And all this because fucking O’Reilly can’t stop polishing
his knob over the hired help. Pathetic.”
Personally, I was
delighted to attend the harassment class. The company did, in fact, pay
for the time, so that was three hours of overtime I wouldn’t have gotten
otherwise. I chose one of the available slots that allowed me to take
the three-hour class, then hang around—still on the clock—for an extra
hour and a half before my actual shift started.
I showed up for
the session on a Tuesday afternoon in a nondescript conference room on
the third floor only to find a feeding frenzy under way. There was a
snack table at one end of the room set up with sodas, cookies, chips,
and candy. The twenty or so attendees who had arrived before me,
unaccustomed to such displays of culinary generosity from our stingy
employer, were in the process of mobbing it, piling food onto flimsy
paper plates with abandon. Never one to pass up a free meal myself, I
elbowed my way up to the table, grabbing a lukewarm Diet Coke and a
handful of pretzels.
Snack in hand, I turned to the large table,
looking for a friendly face to sit with, figuring that the three hours
would go faster if I had someone next to me to whom I could safely make
snide remarks.
(Normally, I’d have no reservation making sarcastic
asides to a stranger, but I figured that a sexual harassment seminar was
no place to try my luck with a potentially unreceptive audience.) I
recognized a few people from the newsroom, but, disappointingly, I
didn’t see any friends. Cutting my losses, I picked a seat next to a
long-haired, Ramones T-shirt–wearing tech guy, assuming he’d be the best
partner in crime.
He grinned at me as I lowered myself into the
seat next to him. “Not too bad so far, is it?” he asked, with a mouthful
of Pringles. “Free food, right?”
Before I could answer him, one
of our second-tier anchorwomen sat in the vacant chair on my other side.
She smiled and nodded at us. “Hey, guys.”
I decided it was best to keep my mouth shut for the duration of the class.
Without
my ability to be a wiseass during the session, the three hours dragged
on. To their credit, the man and woman leading it— lawyers who
apparently specialized in schooling office drones on workplace
conduct—were affable, and copped an apologetic, we’re on your side
attitude about the whole thing:
We know this is all nonsense, but please bear with us and we’ll all get out of here eventually.
They
explained the criteria of what does and does not constitute harassment,
criteria that I discovered are surprisingly vague. Obviously, if your
boss says, “Sleep with me or you won’t get that promotion,” that’s a
textbook case. Open and shut. But anything shy of that depends a lot on
interpretation, intent, and circumstance. The lawyers introduced us to
the concept of “hostile workplace,” meaning that an employer could be
held responsible if an employee felt the office atmosphere was
pervasively offensive but the managers refused to do anything about it.
(By that standard, I probably could have scraped together a case after
my first two weeks of listening to the banter in the control room.)
After
about an hour of lecturing from the lawyer duo, we broke off into small
groups, and were given worksheets to read and discuss among ourselves.
The sheets had several poorly written and far-fetched playing scenarios
for us to evaluate:
Susan is a production assistant.
Her supervisor, Derek, a senior producer, approaches her one day and
tells her that the rest of the staff is going to a strip club after work
to unwind. Susan feels uncomfortable, but she decides to go anyway,
because she worries she won’t get a promotion if she refuses.
My
small group agreed that the scenario was unrealistic, not because there
were no senior producers pervy enough to bring their team to a titty
bar—there certainly were plenty of those—but because any news staff
worth its salt would balk at after-work drinks that were as pricey as a
strip club’s yet didn’t include a selection of free hot appetizers.
My
group was heatedly debating the relative merits of chicken wings versus
pigs-in-blankets on bar happy-hour steam table buffets, when the
lawyers signaled that the group discussion time was over and that we’d
be doing a Q&A to end the session.
“We just want to see if
anyone else has any situations, hypothetical or otherwise, that they
need clarification on,” the female lawyer said.
To my left, the
anchorwoman’s hand shot up. “Yeah, I’m wondering … uhhh, hypothetically …
if your boss tells you that you have to wear short skirts instead of
pants on the air because they want viewers to see your legs more, does
that count as harassment?”
When the class’s round of nervous
laughter died down, the anchor persisted: “No, seriously, though. I’m
not saying anyone said that to me, but if they had … ?” She trailed off.
“As
a matter of fact,” the male lawyer said, “they can ask you to wear
whatever they want. The law says that since your on-air appearance is
basically their ‘product,’ they can control how you dress.” He cleared
his throat. “There’s a lot of legalese that I won’t get into, but long
story short, they can pretty much ask you to wear anything.”
“So if they want me to do the news wearing a bikini … ?”
“Yup.” He nodded. “Theoretically, they could ask you to do it naked.”
The anchor sighed, then broke into a smile of resignation. “Couldn’t hurt the ratings, I guess.”
* * *
I
went to the sensitivity class three more times during my career at Fox.
If the program ever differed from that first session, I wasn’t able to
tell. It seemed like the same lessons, the same information, the same
outlandish hypothetical scenarios each time. It was as if someone in the
Fox legal department decided that, to inoculate the company from
lawsuits, we all needed to renew our training every two years or so,
like some bizarre sexual harassment DMV. And just like getting a
driver’s license, the class was interesting the first time—due to the
novelty more than anything else—and a huge pain in the ass on every
subsequent occasion.
Making matters worse, by my third go-round
through the training in 2007, I was working for “The O’Reilly Factor.”
At the beginning of the class, the lawyers had us go around the room,
giving our names and our positions. When I announced who I worked for, I
could hear some grumbling coming from the back of the room.
It’s your boss’s fault we’re stuck in here again.
The
taint of Bill’s alleged transgressions clung to his staff, sticky and
thick like hummus spread on a pita. The lawsuit was still fresh enough
in everybody’s mind in 2007 that it was the first thing I was asked
about by multiple people when I told them I was taking the “Factor” job.
“What are you going to do,” Camie asked me about two weeks before I started, “if he calls you late at night?”
I laughed. “Do you know how much money Mackris got? For that kind of cash, he can talk dirty to me all he wants.”
She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Ewww.”
“Hell,” I continued. “For that kind of money I might take a cab to his hotel room and finish him off myself.”
Camie punched my arm with surprising strength. “You’re disgusting!”
The
“Factor” old-timers, those who had been working on the show when it all
went down, were a lot less willing to joke about it than I was; most of
them were reluctant to even talk about it. I got the impression that it
had been a very unpleasant couple of weeks for everyone involved.
“There
were closed-door meetings every day,” one of them told me. “And Bill
was in a horrible mood the entire time. We were all walking on
eggshells.”
And there was at least one long-term effect on the
staff that I personally found debilitating—we were severely hindered
from eating the Middle Eastern entrée
that shall not be named.
The
radio “Factor” crew would sometimes order lunch from a great little
Israeli place near the office. The owner was incredibly surly (and,
according to some online reviews, mentally insane) and some days when he
answered the phone, he’d just flat-out refuse to make a delivery for no
apparent reason. But the matzoh ball soup was so good that we gladly
took his abuse.
One time during a commercial break, we were
calling out our meal choices to Eric, who was writing them down in
preparation to phone in our order. (We figured that Eric, who was fluent
in Hebrew, had the best chance of coaxing the reticent restaurateur
into cooperating on days when he was being difficult.) I was studying
the menu, not paying attention to the goings-on in the studio, when I
found the dish I wanted.
“Eric, put me down for the combination plate with hummus, Israeli salad, and falaf—”
“MUTO!” Sam said, sharply cutting me off. “Let me see that menu real quick!”
I
looked up to see panic written on Sam’s face. I followed his gaze and
saw the door between the control room and the studio swinging shut.
Bill, normally safe behind soundproof glass, had been hanging out in our
half of the studio, chatting with Stan.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
Sam shook his head. “Dude, you don’t even know. You almost said the F-word in front of Bill.”
“The F-word?” I asked, incredulous. “You mean
falafel?”
“Jesus!” Sam yelled, throwing up his hands in despair. “Quit it! Stan, tell him to quit it.”
Stan looked up from the e-mail he was writing. “Muto, you should probably listen to Martinez.”
“How the hell am I supposed to order lunch, Stan?”
Stan smiled. “Order something else. Or find something else to call it.”
“Like what?”
“Eric,
put Muto down for some fried chickpea patties,” Stan called out. He
paused for a second. “Me, too, actually. Fried chickpea patties on a
pita. Extra hot sauce.”
Reprinted by arrangement with Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from “An Atheist in the FOXhole” by Joe Muto. Copyright © 2013 by Joseph Muto. last week Salon published another excerpt, about how Roger Ailes controls the coverage,
here.“>here.
Bill O'Reilly (Credit: Reuters/Lisa Miller)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered