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On Monday, Al Jazeera reported that former Fox News executive Roger Ailes was being considered for the job of Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy in the State Department—a job in which Ailes, who resigned from Fox this summer after being charged with sexual harassment and crude behavior by a number of women who’d worked with him, would have responsibility for the United States’ foreign public relations efforts (and for the State Department’s domestic communications arm).
(To be clear, the State job would not involve running the Voice of America/Radio Free Europe networks—but those could also be ideologically revamped under Trump.)
On Tuesday, Trump’s transition team denied the report:
And later on Tuesday, another female News Corp employee accused Ailes of wildly inappropriate behavior in a lawsuit. From the New York Times’ piece on the allegations made by local New York Fox affiliate reporter Lidia Curanaj:
According to the complaint, Mr. Ailes asked her to stand up and turn around during a one-on-one interview, so that he could “see [her] from behind” … After his private meeting with Ms. Curanaj, Mr. Ailes contacted [a mutual acquaintance] and asked him, “How’s the sex?” and whether she “put out” sexually, according to the suit.
Typically this kind of badly timed allegation would sink someone’s chances of working in an incoming administration, but this is Trump we’re talking about, so who knows?
