Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
The saga’s bizarre final act commenced in January 2004.
Feeling underpaid at Fox, Mackris left for a position on Paula Zahn’s CNN program, but soon found she was unhappy in the job, and asked O’Reilly if she could return. In mid-April, she joined O’Reilly for dinner at Milos, an upscale Greek restaurant a few blocks from the Fox studios. She told him she would return to Fox but only if he laid off the dirty talk. He agreed. “Of course,” O’Reilly said, according to her account, “because then you’d be working for me and I’d have power over you, so that couldn’t happen.” O’Reilly had other fantasies on his mind that night. He launched into a rant about his nemesis, Al Franken. “If you cross Fox News Channel, it’s not just me, it’s Roger Ailes who will go after you,” he assured Mackris. “I’m the street guy out front making the loud noises about the issues, but Ailes operates behind the scenes, strategizes and makes things happen so that one day BAM! The person gets what’s coming to them but never sees it coming. Look at Al Franken, one day he’s going to get a knock on his door and life as he’s known it will change forever,” O’Reilly said. “That day will happen, trust me.… Ailes knows very powerful people and this goes all the way to the top.”
“Top of what?” Mackris asked.
“Top of the country. Just look at who’s on the cover of his book,” O’Reilly replied, referring to Bush and Cheney. “They’re watching him and will be for years. He’s finished, and he’s going to be sorry he ever took Fox News Channel on.”
Mackris rejoined O’Reilly’s staff in July. A few weeks later, O’Reilly called her at her apartment on the Upper West Side after he had interviewed two porn stars and allegedly talked dirty to her while masturbating. Shortly after 11:00 p.m. on September 1, O’Reilly called Mackris on her cell phone. Mackris returned the call a few minutes later. She turned
on a tape recorder. She later said she told O’Reilly she was not interested but he steamrolled ahead. He explained he was watching a “porn movie” and “babbled perversely” about having sex with her. Mackris alleged O’Reilly was pleasuring himself during the phone call.
As Brandi negotiated with Morelli, Ailes learned the tawdry details of the allegations. He faced no good options. The press would run wild if Mackris sued. The story line was a ready-made tabloid soap opera: here was one of Bill Clinton’s fiercest pursuers entangled in his own sex scandal with a female employee twenty-two years his junior. Even worse, O’Reilly—whose wife had just given birth to their second child a year earlier—was scheduled to promote his new book,
The O’Reilly Factor for Kids
.
In one passage, he wrote: “Guys, if you exploit a girl, it will come back to get you. That’s called ‘karma.’ ” Ailes was furious.
So was Murdoch, who made it clear that O’Reilly—and not News Corp—would be responsible for any settlement. Ailes may have been livid at his star, but he needed to protect Fox’s biggest brand.
Morelli continued to play hardball and reject Fox’s offers, which were said to approach $2 million.
Morelli’s refusal to descend out of the stratosphere of $60 million pushed Ailes into a corner.
He huddled with Brian Lewis to map out possible attack lines.
There were unanswered questions that could pick apart Mackris’s narrative.
Why did she return to work for O’Reilly if she had been harassed by him? Why didn’t she file a complaint with Fox’s HR department or anyone in management? Why was she dining out at expensive restaurants with O’Reilly and winding up alone in hotel rooms late at night? And just who was Andrea Mackris, really?
Lewis worked his sources inside the newsroom to find out. He was pleased to learn Mackris was unpopular in some corners. A colleague revealed that Mackris was struggling financially.
“When she was with her boyfriend, he made a lot of money, and she had a good life,” a friend said. And Fox found evidence that complicated Mackris’s claims of being distressed working for O’Reilly. Just three weeks before filing her lawsuit, she gushed about Fox in an email to a friend at CNN. “To answer your question, things are: wonderful, amazing, fun, creative, invigorating, secure, well-managed, challenging, interesting, fun and surrounded by really good, fun people. i’m home and i’ll never leave again,” she wrote.
The more Lewis learned, the better he felt about O’Reilly’s chances to survive the tsunami of schadenfreude that would blow his way. Sure, the tapes, if released, would be humiliating. But ultimately, it was a he-said,
she-said situation. There was enough raw material about Mackris that Fox could use to construct an image of her as an opportunist shaking down a celebrity. When O’Reilly asked Lewis at one point how bad things looked on a scale of one to ten, Lewis replied, “Personally, I think it’s a nine. Professionally? It’s a four.”
On the evening of Tuesday, October 12, O’Reilly’s personal lawyer, Ronald Green, joined the talks. He accompanied Brandi to Morelli’s office to try to hammer out a deal. After a half dozen meetings, Morelli was still holding firm.
“If you don’t resolve this case for the $60 million tonight, we are going to go public with this tomorrow,” he told Green and Brandi.
Green got back to O’Reilly.
“This is indeed absolute extortion,” Green said. O’Reilly agreed. He wanted to go to war. They launched the preemptive strike at 9:01 the next morning.
Green filed a lawsuit against both Mackris and Morelli in Nassau County Supreme Court. Morelli filed Mackris’s suit hours later. The dueling lawsuits set up competing narratives. Mackris was telling a story about sex. O’Reilly tapped an equally potent force: politics. It was the tactic Ailes had deployed in his PR campaign against Time Warner. O’Reilly’s suit asserted that he was the victim of a plot to “extort ‘blood money’ ” by liberals who wanted to destroy Fox News in the final weeks of the 2004 presidential race. The campaign had begun.
From the outset, Ailes and Brian Lewis sought to be in control of the message. Ailes made sure O’Reilly got the directive: if he opened his big mouth, he could eventually lose his show.
Except for a few fleeting comments, O’Reilly remained silent about the headlines. But O’Reilly had loud voices speaking for him. Fox’s PR department and his lawyer, Ronald Green, fed the pack of tabloid reporters a steady supply of nasty gossip about his accuser.
To gather dirt, O’Reilly hired the celebrity private investigator Bo Dietl. Sources with damaging anecdotes were tracked down.
“This could be a message to people,” Dietl said on MSNBC on the evening of October 15. “When you file these frivolous lawsuits … we’re going to investigate you and we’re going to uncover things.”
Fox had a crucial ally in the war over O’Reilly: Murdoch’s
New York Post
.
On October 15, the front-page headline blared “EXCLUSIVE: O’Reilly Accuser in Bar Blow Up.” The article, the first in a series of personal attacks on Mackris, quoted a pastry chef named Bethenny Frankel accusing Mackris of provoking a fight with her at the bar of the Peninsula Hotel after Frankel asked to borrow a chair from her table. “She literally
verbally attacked and abused and harassed us … like a raving lunatic,” Frankel told the tabloid.
A few days later, one of O’Reilly’s private investigators convinced Matthew Paratore, the owner of a bar and restaurant on the Upper West Side that Mackris frequented, to talk to O’Reilly’s lawyers.
On October 19, the
Post
ran a story headlined “BOOZY BOAST,” which quoted Paratore alleging that Mackris had recently dined with Al Franken and that a few months before returning to Fox, she bragged about writing a book to “take [O’Reilly] down.”
O’Reilly’s lawyer also told the
Post
that Mackris once drunkenly started stripping off her clothes in front of Paratore. “If you think I’m going to fuck Bill O’Reilly, I’m going to fuck you even more,” Green quoted her as saying.
Mackris’s camp worked the
Post
’s archrival, the
Daily News
.
On October 17, the paper reported Mackris had the upper hand. “FOR EXTORTION, O’REILLY’S SUIT MIGHT NOT FIT: Accuser May Have Outfoxed Network Star, Legal Experts Say,” a headline declared.
On October 20, Mackris and Morelli sat down with the
Daily News
for her first extended print interview.
In response, Fox News worked to inject its point of view into the
Daily News
’s coverage. Green went after Mackris viciously.
He told the paper Mackris was “insolvent” and that when she was a White House intern in 1991, she gave herself the nickname “Andrea Mattress.” “It speaks volumes to what was going on then,” he said.
Brian Lewis told people he was thrilled with how the campaign was going, but O’Reilly was getting weak-kneed. Several days after filing the lawsuit, Morelli consented to allow O’Reilly’s lawyers to listen to excerpts of Mackris’s audio recording. By Friday, October 22—ten days into the scandal—settlement talks resumed.
“Word came down Bill wanted to settle,” one person who heard the tapes said. The following Thursday, it was over.
The
Daily News
played it big. “CALL HIM OWE-REILLY!” the headline blared. O’Reilly, the tabloid reported, paid Mackris as much as $10 million to make the whole thing go away.
“This brutal ordeal is now officially over, and I will never speak of it again,” O’Reilly told
Factor
viewers that night.
Lewis was disappointed. He told executives that Fox could have prevailed if he had been allowed to continue the PR campaign.
The success of Fox’s PR offensive was validated by the most important measure: ratings. Like Bill Clinton, O’Reilly survived a sex scandal by retaining the support of his fans.
Ratings for the
Factor
jumped 30 percent during the heat of the scandal.
On Monday, October 25, the show
pulled in 3.7 million viewers. After it was all over, Ailes recalled that he had been confident that O’Reilly would weather the worst of it.
“About a week after we were in the middle of it, and I sent word down to the executive producer, ‘How’s Bill doing?’ And he said the staff just says, ‘It must be going well, because he’s back to being a prick.’ ”
I
n the winter of 2005, a quieter but more consequential struggle was about to unfold within News Corp. For all his conservatism, Rupert Murdoch did not have an ideological litmus test, and a younger generation of executives, many of them Democrats, had moved into positions of influence at the highest reaches of the company, leaving Ailes encircled by executives who welcomed Fox’s profits but chafed at the network’s conservative message. The trigger for this shift was the departure of Chase Carey, Murdoch’s co–chief operating officer, who left to become CEO of DirecTV, the satellite TV service News Corp controlled. Carey was a powerful Ailes ally and boardroom protector. He had backed Ailes during Fox’s launch and gave Ailes wide latitude to run his affairs—as long as Ailes met his numbers. Carey’s exit was accompanied by the rise of a competing power center inside the company: Peter Chernin.
Chernin, who held the president and COO title following Carey’s departure, was already a Hollywood eminence, with all the cultural and political baggage—and ego—that implies. Chernin based himself on Fox’s studio lot in Century City and devoted a considerable amount of his time to News Corp’s entertainment assets.
Chernin also fashioned himself as an operator—in the movie business, the players were in the political game—but his politics were considerably to the left of the News Corp norm.
Wall Street valued Chernin’s polished mien, especially after Murdoch’s brush with prostate cancer in 2000, but the management ranks at News Corp did not readily bow to his commands. Chernin promoted loyalists into key positions. The most visible casualty of Chernin’s drive to consolidate power was the heir apparent.
Lachlan Murdoch was thirty-two when Chernin took over, and held the title of deputy chief operating officer. Rupert had hoped that Lachlan would train under the experienced entertainment executive. Lachlan even bought a house in Los Angeles and took an office on the Fox studio lot. But Lachlan felt frozen out in California. Chernin did not see himself as a regent to chaperone the king’s
successor and left him out of management decisions. The mounting tension between Chernin and Lachlan created a polarizing dynamic. Ailes started out a bit player in this boardroom drama but ended up delivering a performance that many would remember long afterward.
Lachlan decided to give up on California to focus on his portfolio of businesses in New York.
As deputy COO, he was responsible for the
New York Post
, HarperCollins, and the Fox Television Stations Group. But he could not fully escape Chernin’s reach. Their relationship finally ruptured over internal arguments over retransmission rights to cable operators. Lachlan wanted cable systems to pay News Corp cash; Chernin wanted to negotiate channel slots to launch the Fox Reality channel. The debate came to a head during a tense conference call with senior executives. Rupert sided with Chernin. Feeling betrayed and lost, Lachlan began spending more time at the
Post
, a Murdoch pet that Chernin had no interest in caring for.
But in seeking to avoid Chernin, Lachlan confronted another formidable power: Ailes. Ailes wanted Lachlan to take his programming ideas for the Fox broadcast stations. He pitched Lachlan on giving Geraldo Rivera a syndicated broadcast show. He also pressed Lachlan to develop a procedural drama called
Crime Line
. Lachlan resisted. He told Ailes he would look at some pilots but did not make any promises. The truth was, he did not need Geraldo.
In early 2005, he recruited Australian tabloid television pioneer Peter Brennan to relaunch
A Current Affair
. And
Crime Line
, Lachlan told his staff, would likely cost millions.
Rejecting the show was the “100 percent right decision,” he told News Corp executives.
So Ailes undercut Lachlan. He opened a back channel to Lachlan’s deputy, Jack Abernethy, the CEO of the Stations Group and an Ailes loyalist going back to their CNBC days. Before being promoted by Lachlan in 2004, he worked alongside Ailes as Fox News’s CFO. Ailes also went over Lachlan’s head. Having been blocked by Lachlan on
Crime Line
, Ailes pitched the show directly to Rupert over the summer of 2005.
“Do the show,” Rupert told him. “Don’t listen to Lachlan.”