After former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment suit against her former boss Roger Ailes, her lawyer said lots of women had come forward to tell their own allegations of harassment by the Fox News head she described as “the Bill Cosby of media.” None of their stories had been made public until Saturday, when New York magazine writer Gabriel Sherman published the allegations of six women, two of whom spoke on the record. And while none of them claim Ailes used any sort of drugs as part of his harassment, all their stories follow a similar pattern that suggest he wasn’t shy about using his position of power to get what he wanted from women.
The events described by the six women date back to 1965, and the latest allegedly took place in 1989. Although all the allegations are shocking, the worst involves a former model who claims Ailes tried to coerce her into performing oral sex on him when she was 16:
Ailes took me into this big office and locked the door with a key. He reclined on a couch in a seating area under a map that had flags of all the cities they were syndicated in. He proceeded to pull down his pants and very gingerly pull out his genitals and said, “Kiss them.” And they were red like raw hamburger … I was a kid, I’d never seen a man’s privates before. I jumped up, but the door is locked and nobody’s out there. He chased me around the office and at some point it dawned on him that this just wasn’t going to happen. He finally pulled up his trousers.
Most of the allegations are from people who were trying to get a job from Ailes. But in one case, Kellie Boyle, a former Republican National Convention field adviser, admired him and met with him a couple of times. “You know if you want to play with the big boys, you have to lay with the big boys,” Ailes allegedly said to a 29-year-old Boyle. Ailes allegedly told her he could be her “friend” to help her career. “Would I have to be friends with anybody else?” Boyle allegedly asked. “Well you might have to give a blowjob every once in a while.”
The other woman to speak on the record was former model Marsha Callahan. And the way she tells it, Ailes wasn’t exactly subtle:
I recall very clearly, he said he’d put me on the show but I needed to go to bed with him. I was a really shy girl, but I was a little cheeky so I said, “Oh yeah, you and who else?” And he said, “Only me and a few of my select friends.”
Earlier in the week, Sherman wondered whether Ailes’ “luck may have finally expired” after surviving numerous scandals. Fox’s parent company has said it is carrying out an “internal review” on Carlson’s allegations. And it seems likely more women will be coming forward in the future. “It’s been amazing,” Carlson’s lawyer told the Guardian earlier this week. “My website, my email and my office phone have been deluged with women telling similar stories.”
Ailes’ lawyer, Barry Asen, issued a response to the story on Saturday afternoon, claiming the latest allegations were a tactic to “litigate this” in the media. “It has become obvious that Ms. Carlson and her lawyer are desperately attempting to litigate this in the press because they have no legal case to argue,” he said, according to CNN’s Brian Stelter. “The latest allegations, all 30 to 50 years old, are false.”
This story has been updated since it was first published.
