Authors: Joe Muto
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Politics
“So how long have you two been together?” one of the women asked eventually.
“Excuse me?” I said.
They thought Jesse and I were a couple. Fair enough, I guess. On a list of signifiers of homosexuality, “attending a Rosie O’Donnell book signing with another man” is probably pretty close to the top, right behind “voluntarily watching any show from the Real Housewives franchise.” I wasn’t about to lapse into a gay panic, though. I was plenty secure in my own sexuality. Honestly, for a twentysomething man living in New York City, getting mistaken for gay was more a compliment than anything else, implying that the casual observer recognized a certain stylishness about you. Normally, I was way too schlubby to get pegged for anything other than what I was: a boring straight guy.
“Oh, we’re not together,” I said. “He’s married and I have a girlfriend.”
“Oh,” the woman said. “Uh-huh.”
She didn’t believe me, clearly, but I happened to be telling the truth. A few months after Jillian and I broke up, I’d met Krista. She was tall, and wore a stylish pair of glasses. She had long, straight, light-brown hair and an endearingly girlish affinity for the color pink. We’d met at a party, where we’d struck up a conversation about movies, agreeing that the Kirsten Dunst cheerleading opus
Bring It On
was criminally underrated. She’d impressed me with her ability to finish the
Sunday Times
crossword puzzle without cheating, and we’d bonded over our mutual love of Led Zeppelin, Italian cured meats, and all things New York City. While Jillian and I had been a case of opposites attracting, Krista and I had almost everything in common. She was essentially me in female form, a fact that in retrospect probably should have been a red flag, but one that I narcissistically embraced at the time.
I didn’t tell any of this to the skeptical lady in the book-signing line, because our conversation was interrupted by cheering coming from the front of the store. Rosie had arrived. I felt a surge of adrenaline, and maybe a tinge of fear. Aside from some youthful shenanigans, mostly involving alcohol, this was probably the most socially disobedient thing I’d ever attempted.
Jesse and I waited patiently, barely speaking, as the line slowly progressed and we got ever closer to Rosie. She was very chatty, making small talk with everyone who approached her to get a book signed, so it was about another half hour before we neared the front of the queue.
As we inched closer, I surveyed the setup. Rosie had a bigger entourage than I thought she would (though, to her credit, it was probably a lot smaller group than most other celebrities of her stature would have). She had her own camera crew taping the proceedings for some reason, and at least two bodyguards that I could see, and maybe three or four hangers-on.
I noticed that some of the people ahead of us were videotaping and photographing Rosie as they approached her, which worked out perfectly for my purposes. My camera would seem unremarkable, at least until Jesse started firing questions at her. I slipped it out of the bag, flipped open the viewfinder, and started recording.
The bookstore flunky who was controlling the traffic flow gave us the go-ahead, and Jesse and I approached the table together.
Rosie wasn’t even paying attention to us at first. She was yelling to someone across the room. Jesse sidled right up next to her, and I made sure to frame up a shot that showed both of them.
Jesse started speaking: “Rosie, I’m Jesse from Bill O’Reilly’s show.”
“No, you’re not!” she laughed.
“He wants to know why you won’t come on the show,” Jesse continued. “You had such a good time last time you were on. You’re always invited.”
I should pause here and explain that the “we just want you to come on the show” ruse is essential for a successful ambush. Ambush interviews are generally considered journalistically suspect, except in one very specific set of circumstances: The person refuses to talk to you otherwise. This was the standard established by Mike Wallace years ago, and it’s the banner that O’Reilly wrapped himself in more often than not.
You see, we were forced to send a camera crew after this guy because he ignored our phone calls.
But the truth is that, in most ambush situations, Bill actually
didn’t
want the person to come on the show—because the interview would have been a disaster. If O’Reilly set his sights on you for an ambush, chances are that you’d actually make a terrible guest. You’d either be too hostile or too crazy, and the interview would dissolve into chaos, or, conversely you’d be too persuasive and reasonable, getting the better of the host.
The “we just want you on the show” gambit was the easy way out of these situations, giving journalistic cover to the dubious practice of ambushing. The only requirement was that a day or two before the ambush, someone on the staff would place a call or drop an e-mail requesting an interview. This request was almost always wisely ignored by the target (or more often, I suspect, their representatives). Jesse was then free to ambush the subject with the paper-thin excuse that the whole thing was just an attempt to get them to come on
The Factor
.
Bill never said so, but everyone knew that the real purpose of the ambush was to make the subject look stupid. This wasn’t particularly hard to do, as almost anyone looks stupid when confronted unexpectedly with a camera crew and a microphone-wielding reporter. Even if the ambush victim answers the questions, they usually come off badly, or at least end up looking as if they have something to hide. And if they’re uncooperative, all the better. Running away provides a great visual, guaranteed to make the show’s preproduced “cold open” introduction video and be teased before commercial breaks throughout the show. If Jesse got
really
lucky, the victim would try to slam a house or car door on him. That was TV gold.
But there was no door for Rosie O’Donnell to slam that day. She was sitting at a table as Jesse peppered her with questions and I taped the whole thing.
“Oh, my God. Is that what you do?” she asked, incredulous. “You go around to book signings?”
Jesse grinned. “No, we want to meet you. We want you to come on the show.”
“He knows how to find me, the guy,” Rosie said.
“We’ve called you a hundred times,” Jesse said, possibly not even exaggerating that much—unlike in the case of some of our other ambushees, O’Reilly actually had made a determined effort to get Rosie on the show, with Eugene leaving her a couple messages a month.
“I do not want
you
to call me,” Rosie said calmly. “If Bill wants me, he should tell me himself. He is a big boy. He is a grown-up.”
At this point, Rosie’s bodyguards still hadn’t noticed what was going on, probably because the noise from the fans waiting in line made it hard for them to hear Jesse grilling their boss. She signaled to them.
“Hey, this is Bill O’Reilly’s camera crew,” she said. “But don’t throw them out, because that makes it all worse when he puts it on the Bill O’Reilly No Spin Zone.”
Credit where credit was due—the lady knew her television tropes.
At this point, Jesse could sense that his time was growing short. He’d been lucky so far that O’Donnell was willing to joke around, but it was time to go for the jugular.
“Rosie, he wants to know if you regret saying that 9/11 was an inside job?”
Rosie’s demeanor changed instantly. The smile melted from her face. The joking around was over.
“I did not say that,” she said. “He is quoting the wrong people.”
That’s when the guard moved in to shut me down.
“That is enough,” he said, stepping in front of me, blocking my shot. “Thank you. That’s enough. Sir. Enough. No more filming.”
He was reaching for my camera when Rosie called him off.
“Stop, Eddie,” she said. “That’s what they want you to do.” He looked back at her, then reluctantly stepped aside. Now Rosie was talking to me directly.
“Now, sir, could you put down your camera? Could you turn it off?”
Never . . . for any reason . . .
Without stopping the recording, I snapped the viewfinder window shut and lowered the camera to my side, hoping that I could fake Rosie into thinking I had turned it off.
It didn’t work.
“I said turn it off. Hello, I work in television, too,” she said. “Can you turn the lens down to the floor?”
“It’s off,” I lied. But she wasn’t having it.
“Okay, we’re done here,” Rosie said. “Good-bye.”
The bodyguards moved in, shoving me and Jesse away from Rosie’s perch on the mezzanine, and bodily escorting us down the stairs to the ground level. A store manager told us we were now officially trespassing in the store and that we had to leave, and we weren’t welcome back. Ever.
“We’re banned for life?” I asked, holding the still-running camera.
The manager nodded. “Yup. Life.”
As the bodyguards corralled us toward the exit, we could hear Rosie, still at her signing table on the mezzanine, yelling after us.
“Bill O’Reilly is a sexual harrasser! He’s a sexual harrasser!” she screamed, loud enough to be heard throughout the entire store.
The fans still waiting in line broke into cheers and applause.
And then Jesse and I were out on the street in front of the bookstore. The whole thing had taken maybe ninety seconds.
Jesse shot a glance at the camcorder, still clutched in my adrenaline-shaky hands. “Did you get it?” he asked.
“God, I hope so,” I said.
We walked a few blocks and found a Japanese restaurant, immediately knocking back shots of vodka with beer chasers to calm our jangled nerves. (Well,
my
jangled nerves. Jesse seemed as calm as ever.)
We reviewed the footage. Fortunately, I had gotten it all. Even after closing the viewfinder and lowering the camera, I had managed to keep Rosie more or less in frame. I had accomplished my part of the mission—I kept the camera running. I hadn’t stopped recording until the manager ushered us into the street.
Jesse’s fiancée picked us up in her car, and dropped me at the nearest train station. Before I left, Jesse reminded me of the fieldwork per diem: “If you want to take your girlfriend out to a nice dinner tonight, you can expense it,” he said. He may have been kidding, but knowing him, he probably wasn’t. Either way, I didn’t feel like risking it.
The original plan was for me to bring the footage into work on Monday, but I was still so hopped up on adrenaline that I couldn’t wait. I went straight from Penn Station to the office, where I transcribed the footage and e-mailed the text to the rest of the staff. I was proud of our excursion, and couldn’t wait until Monday.
As it turns out, I didn’t have to.
Rosie’s own camera crew, which I’d initially noticed but quickly forgotten about, had been rolling the whole time, recording the event for her website. She put up a video clip of the entire encounter on her blog, along with text written in a weird haiku format (as was her wont at that time) calling Jesse and me “khaki-clad henchmen.”
The story became instant national news and was picked up by all the entertainment shows. And unlike the shot I had taken—which showed only Jesse and Rosie—I was visible in the new footage. You could see me holding the camera and intently watching the viewfinder.
My mom called me on Sunday to tell me that one of the neighbors had seen me on
Access Hollywood
.
The Rosie ambush was a real turning point for me on the show. Bill was thrilled with the footage, lavishly praising Jesse’s interviewing and my camera work. The feeling of pride came again, but this time it wasn’t unwelcome. I’d been at Fox for more than three years. Participating in the attempted takedown of a liberal celebrity, an activity that would have horrified me at the beginning of my career, now felt like all in a day’s work. I still had my core progressive beliefs, but for the first time, I didn’t feel bad about contributing to the network’s push to seek and destroy liberals.
I’d gone over completely.
April 11, 2012—6:01
P.M.
In the end, the security goons didn’t come to get me.
Instead, they waited politely for me to come to them.
There they were, two of them, standing outside the office of the Fox News vice president for legal affairs, in a remote corner of the fifteenth floor where Stan had led me. The guards asked for my cell phone, and I pulled it out of my jeans pocket, hoping my hands weren’t shaking.
“We’ll just hold on to this for now,” one of the guards said. He was big, a tallish white guy, but nothing too intimidating. I estimated I could overpower him if need be.
Of course, the fact that I was even remotely considering this course of action is a dead giveaway that I wasn’t thinking clearly at that moment. What was I going to do,
fight
my way out of the building? My mere presence outside that office—the fact that they had somehow, despite all my precautions, caught me—had just proven that I didn’t have anything approaching the espionage skills of James Bond; I don’t know why I was entertaining the notion that I might have his hand-to-hand-combat expertise.
But the guard wasn’t really what was worrying me. All I could think was that if Bill O’Reilly was on the other side of that door, there was a good chance that he’d hulk out with rage and twist my head clean off my shoulders, as easily as unscrewing the cap off a Coke bottle.
And at that moment I don’t think I’d have tried to stop him, either.
But O’Reilly wasn’t in the office. It was just the VP of legal, a woman named Diane, along with a man from the IT department and a woman from human resources. Stan followed me in and shut the door behind him.
Diane invited me to sit down, and I took a seat while four pairs of eyes followed my every move.
I’m not proud of this next bit.
I wish I had handled it differently, anyway.
What I
should
have done is admitted it right there. I should have just smiled, thrown my hands up, and said, “All right. You got me.”