In our fifth Slate Plus bonus episode from Slow Burn Season 10, host Josh Levin talks with New York Times reporter Emily Steel. Steel and her colleague Michael Schmidt won a Pulitzer Prize for their investigation of Fox News star Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment settlements. Steel explains how re-reporting one claim from 2004 uncovered at least six payouts, totaling about $45 million.
Slate Plus members can listen to an audio version of this conversation. To learn about the challengers who took on Fox in the public eye, listen to Episode 6, “What Hath We Wrought?” By joining Slate Plus, not only will you unlock exclusive Slow Burn episodes, but you’ll also access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Visit slate.com/slowburnplus to get access wherever you listen.
Transcript:
NARRATION: Hello and welcome to this Slate Plus bonus episode for Slow Burn Season 10: The Rise of Fox News. I’m Josh Levin.
In our final episode of the season, you heard about the culture of sexual harassment at Fox News. Producer Andrea Mackris’ 2004 lawsuit against Bill O’Reilly offered the first public glimpse into that environment. But back then, a lot of journalists didn’t take Mackris’ allegations seriously. Claims from her and other women at Fox were also settled with agreements that forbid those women from telling their stories.
Because of that, it wasn’t until years later that the public truly understood what was happening inside Fox News. The New York Times’ Emily Steel is one of the reporters who exposed that culture, and her work led directly to Bill O’Reilly getting fired. I started out by asking her how she first got assigned to look into Fox News.
Emily Steel: It was the summer of 2016. There was this big explosive story where Gretchen Carlson, who was an anchor at Fox News, filed a lawsuit against Roger Ailes, who was then the chairman of Fox News, alleging that she had been a victim of sexual harassment. I was one of the reporters who started to dig into that story.
Frankly, we were pretty behind on the stories. There were other reporters who were just beating us with story after story.
Dean Baquet was the executive editor at the paper here and he was trying to think how could we get ahead with this coverage because it was such a huge story. He thought, “Why don’t we see what we could learn about the culture at Fox News and the culture of sexual harassment, and how the Murdochs handled behavior like this?”
I was teamed up with Mike Schmidt, the brilliant investigative reporter. Basically what we did is, we went back and we pulled up the lawsuit that Andrea Mackris had filed against Bill O’Reilly and Fox News and the lawsuit Bill O’Reilly had filed preemptively against her. We went back and we read all of the coverage.
I was 32 at the time, which was about the same age that Andrea Mackris was when she filed this lawsuit. And I started to pull up the stories that were written about her and I just remember thinking, Oh my goodness, what a different time this was.
Most of the bylines on the stories that were written about the lawsuit and that were written about her were mostly men. The way that she was depicted was very much like she was a slut who was out to take him down.
I just thought if we’re trying to figure out what happened and we’re trying to figure out what the truth was and we’re trying to follow the facts—maybe it’s worth going back and asking questions about what really happened. Would people maybe have gotten distracted by some of the salacious bits in the lawsuit and then missed some of the more important allegations?
We just made this massive list of everybody in her world and then we made a massive list of everybody in that Fox News world.
This was pre-#MeToo. So we were also just trying to understand: What is the law? What is the law regarding sexual harassment? What is the psychology of this behavior? Is it about sex? Is it about power? Is it about intimidation? What is actually going on here?
We talked to lawyers and we talked to therapists and we asked, “Does somebody reach their fifties or sixties and just start acting like this?”
What they said is that it’s very, very, very rare for this to be a one off. It usually is a behavior that a person in power has deployed over and over and over and over and over again.
And so we thought, ‘Oh, is there something more here?’
And so we went back to the people, this long, long, long, long list of people at Fox News that we’ve been talking to and we said were there other women? Were there other people that had had issues with Bill O’Reilly? Were there other people who were at Fox News and had worked on O’Reilly’s show and then just suddenly disappeared and you never heard from them again?
Pretty soon we started to find this history of women who had made allegations against Bill O’Reilly and then were silenced. We had to figure out how can we follow the facts and how can we figure out what really happened.
Josh Levin: Was it rare for allegations like the ones Andrea Mackris was making to kind of burst into public view like they did in 2004?
Steel: Extremely rare. Typically what would happen is, a woman experiences behavior that she thought was harassment. She would call up a lawyer. The lawyer would say, “What evidence do you have?” And they would put together this complaint. The lawyer then would contact the company, or the person who was harassing her, and they would strike some sort of settlement. Pay her money. In exchange for the money, she agrees to be quiet. Then you never hear about any of this. It never goes forward.
The fact that this lawsuit became public was so shocking and so rare.
Levin: Do you have a sense from your reporting about why it went public and why it didn’t fall into the pattern of those other ones you talked about?
Steel: What people told us is that O’Reilly wanted to get out ahead of this. His team and Fox News thought that they would be able to win in the public sphere, they’d be able to win the PR campaign.
They adopted this very aggressive strategy that almost was like a stark warning of what could happen to other women if they came forward with these complaints. And so it wasn’t just about Andrea Mackris but it was about protecting that entire culture.
So what happened was even before she filed suit, Fox News and O’Reilly surprised her with a suit of their own. They asserted that she was trying to extort them for $60 million with these—what they said were—scandalous claims about him. It was this huge, conservative public relations campaign about this.
O’Reilly said on his show: This is the single most evil thing I have experienced and I have seen a lot. But these people picked the wrong guy.
A public relations firm was hired to help shape that story in O’Reilly’s favor. They hired a private investigator named Bo Dietl who was supposed to dig up information about Mackris. Soon after that, that’s when all of these unflattering stories appeared in the tabloids.
Levin: So it worked?
Steel: It worked. There were two weeks of these sensational headlines. There was a huge back and forth and back and forth. Then O’Reilly ultimately agreed to pay her about $9 million.
Levin: Was that publicly reported at the time, the amount of the settlement?
Steel: The amount of money was not publicly reported at the time, but we were able to confirm that.
[MUSIC]
There were two things that happened with the Mackris lawsuit. One was it showed kind of this template for his behavior. Where he created this bond, offered advice, and then pursued these relationships that caused them to fear that if they rebuffed him that their careers would stall.
Then it also created a playbook for how O’Reilly and Fox News would respond when people came forward with these allegations against him.
Levin: I wanted to ask about this PR campaign. One element of it was—and this is from Bill Carter’s reporting in ‘04—”Fox and O’Reilly say they’re being victimized by Ms. Mackris and by her lawyer, Mr. Morelli, whom they accused of having a political motive for attacking Fox News because he is a supporter of Democratic Party candidates.” How is that used as part of the PR campaign—that allegation that this was a political campaign? Or O’Reilly was a target, and Fox were targets?
Steel: Well, it’s kind of been the ethos of Fox News from the beginning. That Fox News is the outlet that will tell its viewers the truth and O’Reilly long has kind of depicted himself as the victim. He continued to do that even in 2016, in 2017, when we first published our stories. He said he was a very powerful man who was on the public stage and when you are so rich and so powerful and so influential, people will come forward and try to attack you with anything that they have. And, that these claims were false. That he was the victim here. That he’s just a father who may have settled these allegations to protect his family.
It really kind of plays into that narrative of Fox being the alternative to the mainstream media. That the leaders at Fox News are working so hard and sacrificing so much and that they are victim to this very polarized society where people will come up with these politicized attacks against them. And that they have to rise above and defend themselves against these bogus claims.
Levin: Just before your reporting broke open the O’Reilly story, there was a story that you did that quoted Andrea Tantaros lawsuit. And she said in the suit: “Fox News masquerades as a defender of traditional family values. But behind the scenes, it operates like a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency, and misogyny.” Did that hold up in your reporting?
Steel: Yeah, I think it did. I mean, what we found in our reporting was that even after Roger Ailes had been ousted, Fox News continued to reach settlements over allegations of sexual harassment and other misconduct. The women who brought those claims left the company. The men continued in their positions of power until they were reported on publicly.
Levin: O’Reilly said on his show, “If somebody’s paying you a wage, you owe that person or company allegiance. You don’t like what’s happening in the workplace, go to human resources or leave.” The question that brings up is what was the role of loyalty as a currency at Fox? How big of a role did it play and why there seemed to be this culture of harassment and secrecy?
Steel: I think that what Gretchen Carlson did when she filed that lawsuit against Roger Ailes was so bold and so powerful that at the time it was shocking. It was just like the story of the summer. It was leading into the Republican National Convention. It was just like such a huge, huge, huge story.
The fact that the Murdochs—instead of protecting Roger Ailes like they typically did—actually investigated those complaints, the dam opened then. Because women at Fox News, who for so long said that they just kind of squeezed into these jelly bean colored dresses and went on air and dyed their hair and made themselves look like Barbies so that they could be part of this very powerful media brand.
When Gretchen Carlson came forward with her lawsuit, some women at Fox News started to think, Wait, we don’t have to do this anymore. We can talk about this. People will pay attention.
It took a little while. But we started to hear from a lot of women at Fox News. It was people who were new in their careers and it was people who had been there for a very long time. They told these stories that were just like horrifying conditions that they had to work in.
It was kind of like they all had these terrible experiences. But they didn’t really talk with each other about it. There wasn’t like a sisterhood of unity because there was so much competition between the women at Fox News to get ahead. That it just bred this environment where this bad behavior could fester.
So when Gretchen Carlson came forward and she said, This happened to me, and then other people said, This happened to me, and they were taken seriously and Roger Ailes was ousted. I think that people thought, Okay, there’s going to be change. Something is happening here.
The Mackris issue was a long time ago. But this was even a long time ago in the world of #MeToo. This is before #MeToo. This is before Harvey Weinstein. This is a time where women were still ridiculed for coming forward and talking about these issues publicly. They were worried that they wouldn’t be taken seriously. They were worried that they would be attacked. And so it was really brave and really bold for these women to come forward and talk.
But then what happened is that, when we were reporting about O’Reilly, what we learned is that it wasn’t a huge culture shift at Fox News. They didn’t overhaul the entire operations at the network. What they did is they ousted Roger Ailes and then they continued to protect other people, namely Bill O’Reilly.
[MUSIC]
Then even in 2016, 2017—I don’t want to overinflate the work that we did and the importance of it—but we kind of took a different tactic with this reporting. Our editor said we need to follow the money. We need to follow the documents.
It added this backbone to the reporting that hadn’t existed previously with issues like sexual harassment.
What we were able to do is we were able to follow the trail of settlements where we were able to show that Fox News and Bill O’Reilly had paid more than $45 million to settle claims of harassment against him. We were able to show how the network knew about these allegations and how these women were silenced. How the network continued to protect and to pay more money to its most powerful star.
We were able to document all of that. It built this foundation of evidence that then these women could stand on top of. So that when they shared their stories, or we were able to get details about their stories, people actually took them seriously for the first time.
[MUSIC]
Our reporting showed that O’Reilly was fairly targeted in his behavior and that there really was a pattern where he would create a bond with some women. Then offer them advice and promise to help them professionally. He would pursue sexual relations with them—that then caused some of them to fear that if they rebuffed them that their careers would stall.
It wasn’t like every single person that worked with him had these allegations or complaints of bad behavior. But it was like a very targeted group of people.
People go into this business for a variety of reasons. But a lot of them feel a calling. I think that talking to so many people who have worked at Fox News, they really believed in that mission of the fair and balanced nation. That it was Fox News against the mainstream media and that they are the ones who are sharing the truth with the world.
I think that there really was this culture of loyalty. Especially under Roger Ailes, there were so many women who had complaints and had allegations against him. But at the same time people were so loyal to him and they also feared him.
So I think it was a really complicated place to work where I think people felt proud to work there. They really believed in the cause and they really believed in the mission. Maybe they felt like this was just part of the equation of working there that this was just kind of like how women in the building and the office were treated. To get ahead you had to play the game and this is just kind of the way that went.
But then I think people also felt like once they had been there for a while that they wouldn’t be able to go anywhere else. So then if something like this happened to them, their career would be ruined.
Most of these women who came forward, who either filed public lawsuits or who reached these private settlements, very few of them have gone on to have powerful and successful and influential careers outside of Fox News.
[MUSIC]
After our story became public, it got so much attention and O’Reilly was eventually ousted. This is pre-#MeToo. People on Twitter were sharing this hashtag: #FireO’Reilly. Then they were sharing their own stories of sexual harassment.
It was kind of like an awakening to the editors at the Times of “Wow, this is a much bigger issue. [It’s] something that’s happening systematically across our society, and how can we report on this?’
The Times had reporters fan out and dig into these issues in Hollywood, an auto factory in Michigan, Silicon Valley, all across the country… all across America.
Then my colleagues Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published their reporting on Harvey Weinstein around the same time that Ronan Farrow published his story about Harvey Weinstein. Then the #MeToo movement really burst into the public sphere. There’s so much irony about this. There were Hollywood celebrities who were talking about #MeToo. It was like this huge moment in America where women could finally share their stories and be taken seriously. But then a lot of these women, who formed the backbone of our reporting and were the crux of these tales and allowed us to expose the systemic issue, had been pressured into settlements and were silenced and they couldn’t say anything.
I just wonder what complicated feelings those women must have about this movement and this moment because they were so crucial to the history of it all. And yet they still couldn’t talk. And they still can’t talk. They’re still silenced.
This bonus episode was produced by Rosie Belson, with help from Sophie Summergrad and Lizzie Jacobs.