Thursday, August 11, 2016

Fox News Creepy

Another former Fox News celebrity has stepped forward with allegations against Roger Ailes. This time it's Andrea Tantaros:
In an interview, Ms. Tantaros, a former daytime host, said that the former chairman, in one-on-one meetings, complimented her figure, asked questions about her dating life and requested a hug, making her uncomfortable.
I don't want to dismiss that, because it is absolutely not something women should have to put up with at work. But it makes Ailes seem more like a pathetic schmuck than a dangerous predator. Compare him to Bill Cosby, for heaven's sake. These stories make me wonder if the female hosts at Fox talked about him behind his back and made up insulting nicknames for him.

There does seem to have been at least one woman who didn't run from Ailes. That was Laurie Luhn, whose sordid story you can read at New York Magazine:
So far, most of the women who have spoken publicly about harassment by Ailes in the wake of Gretchen Carlson’s lawsuit had said no to Ailes’s sexual advances. They ran out of hotel rooms, they pulled away from embraces, they complained or avoided or generally resisted, even when it hurt their careers. This is the account of a woman who chose to go along with what Roger Ailes wanted — because he was powerful, because she thought he could help her advance her career, because she was professionally adrift and emotionally unmoored.
So maybe Ailes was always on the lookout for another adrift and unmoored woman he could bully. But he was just no match for the tough, beautiful women he hired for his news operation. He could hug them and make them wear skirts, but he never seems to have gotten any further.

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