Authors: Joe Muto
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Politics
I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that my best bet was to cut my losses while I was still anonymous, wait a week or two for the heat to die down, then give my notice.
I’d just about made up my mind when the green room door opened. I looked up. It was Stan, who should have been in the control room supervising the end of the show. He had a grim look on his face.
He didn’t need to say anything. I knew I was fucked.
CHAPTER 12
Loofah, Falafel, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
O
n 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).
But that was just for the outside world.
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 companywide consequences were still annoying enough to garner a round of
I-told-you-so
s 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.