Dirty laundry anyone? New York magazine released a huge piece on Gretchen Carlson and the upheaval caused by her lawsuit with allegations of the sexually inappropriate work environment over at Fox News. It covers how her legal team came up with an inventive plan to work their way around the corporate mediation clause in Fox’s contracts—a pretty standard way to keep dirty laundry behind closed doors). The most damning news is that there seems to be very tangible evidence of fallen-CEO Roger Ailes’s incredibly gross behavior.
Taking on Ailes was dangerous, but Carlson was determined to fight back. She settled on a simple strategy: She would turn the tables on his surveillance. Beginning in 2014, according to a person familiar with the lawsuit, Carlson brought her iPhone to meetings in Ailes’s office and secretly recorded him saying the kinds of things he’d been saying to her all along. “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago, and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better. Sometimes problems are easier to solve” that way, he said in one conversation. “I’m sure you can do sweet nothings when you want to,” he said another time.
After more than a year of taping, she had captured numerous incidents of sexual harassment. Carlson’s husband, sports agent Casey Close, put her in touch with his lawyer Martin Hyman, who introduced her to employment attorney Nancy Erika Smith. Smith had won a sexual-harassment settlement in 2008 for a woman who sued former New Jersey acting governor Donald DiFranceso. “I hate bullies,” Smith told me. “I became a lawyer to fight bullies.” But this was riskier than any case she’d tried. Carlson’s Fox contract had a clause that mandated that employment disputes be resolved in private arbitration—which meant Carlson’s case could be thrown out and Smith herself could be sued for millions for filing.
The Murdoch family quickly removed Ailes but things continue to unravel as more and more women come forward to share their nightmarish experiences at Fox News. There are even allegations that Ailes may have been demanding sex from a girl as young as 16-years-old.
I’ve got two words for Roger Ailes and Fox News executives. Bus ted.