by Joe Muto
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-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 role-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 beca
use 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.”
—
So our closing question is: Did he do it? Is he guilty of sexually harassing one of his underlings?
My closing answer is: Hell, I don’t know.
We do know that he almost certainly said some of the things he was accused of saying. The lengthy transcripts in the lawsuit point to the existence of audiotapes. Plus, some of the moments in the lawsuit seem simply too O’Reilly-esque to be fake. For example:
“Immediately after climaxing, Defendant BILL O’REILLY launched into a discussion concerning how good he was during a recent appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno: ‘It was funny, they used a big clip of me . . . Right after [NBC News anchor Tom] Brokaw, and Brokaw was absolutely the most unfunny guy in the world, and the audience got a big charge out of my . . . It was good.’”
Bragging about how funny he was, and taking delight in showing up a fellow newsman, especially one with more mainstream cred than him—this is all classic Bill. The fact that he is supposed to have done it immediately after completing phone sex makes it both disgusting and hilarious, but it seems too true to his personality to be made up.
So, if we assume he said the things he said, doesn’t that make him guilty? It would seem so. But there’s one thing holding me back from declaring O’Reilly’s guilt: My former boss is many, many things, but he’s not a stupid man. And to say the things he allegedly said to an employee without believing she was fully on board is a colossally stupid thing to do. So the most charitable explanation for him is that he deluded himself into thinking that Mackris was into it as much as he was.
Believe it or not, I do have some residual affection for the guy, and I want to believe that my interpretation is correct, even though I completely recognize that it’s an incredibly weak defense to say something like “He can’t possibly be guilty—he thought she wanted it!” (Not to mention that it comes perilously close to victim blaming, as if it’s her fault for not making it clear enough that the advances weren’t welcome.)
I can honestly say that there was at least one positive that arose from the whole
debacle—my harassment class–derived paranoia meant that I completely shunned any pursuit of workplace relationships. That’s not to say that a few didn’t fall drunkenly into my lap over the years, but they were never premeditated, which was just as well, because in my experience they were always more trouble than they were worth.
And as Bill found out the hard way, hitting on a coworker is all fun and games until somebody’s picture ends up in the Daily News with the headline A LOOFAH AFFAIR.
April 11, 2012—5:58 P.M.
The elevator ride with Stan was awkward, to say the least.
He hadn’t said much when he’d come to fetch me from the green room: “Some people want to talk to you about this Fox Mole stuff,” he’d said. “I need you to come with me.” I followed him from the green room through the lobby to a bank of elevators, which my still-in-shock brain curiously noted was almost the same path I used to take when running scripts in those early months.
Stan punched the key for the fifteenth floor, and the elevator started rising. He stared straight ahead, while I leaned against the back wall of the car, my head swimming, my legs suddenly weak.
I snuck a glance at Stan. He looked tired. I realized I had barely seen him in his office all day. No doubt he’d been at meetings with God knows who, dealing with my fuckery.
