The significance of his sudden demise couldn’t be overstated. Such a powerful media figure being taken down by female underlings—and for something that had been greeted with a yawn in so many workplaces for so long—marked a radical shift.
I knew Roger from my earliest days at TODAY. Back before he became the great and powerful Oz of right-wing media, he and his ideological opposite Bob Squier had a regular segment where they would opine about the political news of the day. Roger was always a gentleman to me, although he had no choice; I was an anchor and he was a guest.
A member of the crew once overheard Ailes chatting with Bryant before his segment, telling him about being at home in bed with a woman who wasn’t his wife. When his actual wife （at the time） pulled up unexpectedly, a panicky Ailes tried an interesting diversionary tactic—setting a small fire and running out yelling, “Fire! Fire!” so the lady in the house could avoid the lady of the house by slipping out the back door. Apparently, a big laugh was had by all in the studio.
In 2014, when John and I were at the Breakers over Presidents’ Day weekend trying our best to get some R and R before John’s surgery, we saw Roger sitting in an enclosed courtyard with his doting, enabling third wife, Beth. He looked awful—wheelchair-bound, drawn and pasty, like the late-stage Charles Foster Kane. We went over and said hi, and, as always, he was friendly and kind. Who knew he was such a monster?
THE DIZZYING MONTHS following Ailes’s departure had a two-steps-forward-one-step-back quality. There was Trump’s “Grab ’em by the pussy” tape—which somehow wasn’t deemed offensive enough to keep him from being elected president of the United States. But it was enough to inspire five million fed-up pink-pussy-hat-wearing women to take to the streets in cities around the world for the first ever Women’s March, the largest single-day protest （MESSAGE TO TRUMP: KEEP YOUR TINY HANDS OFF MY UTERUS; A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE RESISTANCE; GRAB ’EM BY THE MIDTERMS） in American history.
On January 10th, the New York Times broke the story that Fox had quietly settled a sexual-harassment lawsuit against pugilistic populist Bill O’Reilly. In a letter to Fox News, attorneys for anchor Juliet Huddy alleged she’d been subjected to relentless come-ons （including constant calls and masturbatory sounds on the other end of the line） and that O’Reilly punished Huddy’s noncompliance by picking apart her work and sidelining her. Fox settled with Huddy just weeks after Ailes went down, after the network had vowed that such behavior would no longer be tolerated. But Bill O’Reilly kept his job. Then four more women and a collective $13 million payoff surfaced. Advertisers fled and protesters descended on News Corp headquarters. The jig was up. Fox had no choice but to part ways with their biggest star.
Five months later, with a book to promote, Bill O’Reilly was ready to do his first post-Fox interview. He decided to do it with…Matt Lauer.
The set was sober and spare, just Matt and O’Reilly sitting on a pair of gray chairs.
“You were accused of sexual harassment,” Matt says, pronouncing it “hair-ess-ment,” for some reason. “You said at the time you did absolutely nothing wrong. You stand by that?”
“I do,” O’Reilly replies almost breezily. Then things get strange.
Glasses on, Matt bears down. “You were probably the last guy in the world that they wanted to fire. Because you were the guy that the ratings and the revenues were built on. You carried that network on your shoulders for a lot of years. So doesn’t it seem safe to assume that the people at Fox News were given a piece of information or given some evidence that simply made it impossible for you to stay on at Fox News?”
If Matt sees any potential parallels between himself and O’Reilly, he doesn’t show it.
O’Reilly, meanwhile, is glowering and harrumphing, counting the seconds until he gets to plug his book, offering cynical responses like “Those lawsuits involved many other people, not just me.”
After nearly five minutes of this, Matt says, “Over the last six months since your firing, have you done some soul-searching? Have you done some self-reflection? And have you looked at the way you treated women that you think about differently now than you did at the time?”
Matt’s final question, delivered in a low, somewhat pitying tone: “Were there any self-inflicted wounds here, Bill?”
THE DRIP-DRIP-DRIP OF speculation about other prominent, powerful men became a full-on deluge. In October, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s investigation of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein exploded on the front page of the New York Times, tracing his nearly three-decade pattern of （among other things） luring actresses and female employees to his suite in the luxury hotels where he did business, stripping naked, and pressuring them for massages; allegations of sexual assault and rape would come next.