Flat-footed

Outfoxed?

Gretchen Carlson’s harassment suit against Fox News chairman Roger Ailes seems to catch the network flat-footed

By Hadas Gold and Alex Weprin

Fox News was enveloped in silence for most of Wednesday, as news ricocheted around New York and Washington of former host Gretchen Carlson’s lawsuit depicting the network’s legendary CEO and chairman Roger Ailes as a pervasive harasser of women.

Under previous legal assaults – including a long-ago sexual harassment claim against the network’s top star, Bill O’Reilly – the network’s defense of itself has been fast and furious.

This time, however, seven hours came and went without word from the network. And when it came, initially from parent network 21st Century Fox, it was a surprise: A promise to conduct an internal investigation of Carlson’s claim that Ailes repeatedly made inappropriate comments about her looks and then declined to renew her contract for refusing to sleep with him. The network also vowed to look into her depiction of her former “Fox & Friends” co-host, Steve Doocy, as a sexist colleague who treated her like “a blond female prop.”

“While we have full confidence in Mr. Ailes and Mr. Doocy, who have served the company brilliantly for over two decades, we have commenced an internal review of the matter," a statement from a 21st Century Fox spokesperson said.

Ailes, in a statement released moments later and attributed to him on behalf of Fox News, blasted Carlson’s suit, calling it “defamatory,” a retaliation to a decision by the channel not to renew her contract due to what he called her “disappointingly low ratings.”

But in the intervening hours a sense of uncertainty was very much in the air, as the 76-year-old Ailes, famous in Washington since serving as Richard Nixon’s image maker in his 1968 comeback, faced a clear battle.

There was a notable lack of major Fox News anchors and talk-show stars, many of whose careers were carefully molded by Ailes and are fiercely loyal, stepping forward to defend the salty-tongued executive, as they have done in the past when he has come under fire. The lawsuit went completely unmentioned on Fox News’s broadcast through the evening and during Carlson’s former 2 p.m. hour. (Howard Kurtz, host of Fox News’ media show “MediaBuzz,” published a story about the lawsuit on Fox News’ website on Wednesday evening.)

Speculation ranged widely about why Fox News appeared to be caught off-guard by the suit. It became even more rampant with the apparent distance between the statements from Fox News -- which offered the expected aggressive defense -- and parent company 21st Century Fox.

There was also no public support for Carlson from Fox News’ on-air personalities.

Several Fox News employees, past and present, said they were aware of some of the things Carlson claimed in her suit.

"Everyone on staff knew about or saw Doocy make inappropriate comments, but most people just rolled their eyes at it,” a former staffer for “Fox and Friends” told POLITICO.

Carlson had written about her experience with sexual harassment in the TV business in a memoir last year – though she did not name names -- and in 2013, on her "Fox & Friends" co-host Brian Kilmeade's radio show, she joked: "Pants were not allowed on 'Fox & Friends,'" after showing up to the radio studio in jeans.

But in that same memoir, Carlson praised Ailes, writing:

“[We] seemed to have a real connection. He saw something in me that he liked – what he called my ‘killer instinct.’ He once noted that I would stop at nothing to do the job. He got me. Over the years I’ve come to value our time together. He encourages me to be myself, to relax and to not try so hard to look smart. ‘People know you’re smart,’ he says.”

Huffington Post's Michelle Fields, a former Fox News contributor, published an article on the site Wednesday afternoon citing anonymous sources saying that Ailes was known for making inappropriate remarks about women.

Fields hardly needed anonymous sources for that last bit: Ailes has made public remarks in the course of his career that many classified as sexist. In 1994, appearing on the Don Imus radio show two years before the launch of Fox News, Ailes declared that Mary Matalin and Jane Wallace, co-hosts of CNBC’s “Equal Time,” were like “girls who if you went into a bar around seven, you wouldn’t pay a lot of attention, but [they] get to be 10s around closing time.”

At the time, Ailes was an executive at CNBC, and the network defended the remarks as appropriate in the context of a comedy show like Imus. Wallace did not agree.

“He had no right to say something like that,” she later told Gabriel Sherman, author of a 2014 unauthorized biography of Ailes. “He was our boss. It was completely sexist. It was disgusting. It was outrageous. I thought it was a hideously awful thing to say.” But she did not take the matter up with Ailes. “I didn’t say so out loud, I was working for the guy.”

Many more such reports were contained in Sherman’s book, “The Loudest Voice in the Room.” The book has been dismissed repeatedly as a tissue of lies and gossip by Ailes and other Fox officials.

Among the allegations in that book: “Shelley Ross, a former newspaper reporter turned television producer, experienced an interview in which Ailes posed romantically suggestive questions and made flirtatious comments about her appearance. ‘This is making me uncomfortable,’ Ross recalled telling Ailes… In a follow-up telephone interview, she told Ailes that she would never date a boss. Ailes’s reaction was, according to Ross, ‘Don’t you know I’m single?’ When Ross said she was no longer interested in the position, Ailes began apologizing profusely. ‘This must be middle-aged crazy. I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘If you come to work for me, you know, we’re not going to have any problems.’”

Ross went on to work for Ailes, and said she had a good experience with him. But when Ailes was asked by a reporter in the mid-1990s about the comments he reportedly made to Ross in her job interview, according to Sherman’s book, Ailes called Ross “crazy” and a “militant feminist.”

In another instance cited in Sherman’s book, while interviewing Randi Harrison, a producer, Ailes allegedly said, “If you agree to have sex with me whenever I want I will add an extra hundred dollars a week” to her salary. Ultimately, with no other job offers, Harrison took the position and said: “Every woman who worked on the show, I’d wonder about.”

The surprise is that the newsroom culture described in the suit sounds more like the kind of thing featured in a memoir about the business in the ‘70s and ‘80s – or even in 1994 -- than today.

But Carlson’s lawsuit is notable for its specificity and for its claims that Ailes himself suggested a sexual relationship as a way of advancing Carlson’s career. At times, quotes that seem lifted verbatim, as if from a recording, appear in the lawsuit, prompting many media watchers to wonder whether Carlson’s lawyers have recordings of Ailes.

For instance, the suit alleges that last September, when Carlson met with Ailes over concerns of her treatment at the company, Ailes told her, “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," adding that "sometimes problems are easier to solve” that way.

Responding to the specific question of whether Carlson had recordings of any of these remarks, Nancy Erika Smith, a lawyer with Smith Mullin P.C. who is co-counsel for Carlson, told POLITICO that they are “very confident in the quotes in the complaint,” but wouldn’t discuss what kind of evidence they have until they’re in a courtroom.

Carlson’s legal team may be relying on today’s publicity to bring some evidence in. Frequently when detailed suits become public knowledge, they spur people to come forward to help. Smith told POLITICO Wednesday that at least 10 people have come forward to them, but noted that they had not been vetted in any way.

Nor is Carlson’s the first suit to be brought against Fox News or one of its executives or personalities for sexual harassment, but they have never stuck — something Smith said informed her firm’s strategy for Carlson.

In 2004, O’Reilly settled out of court in a case that accused him of “repeatedly engaging in offensive sex talk with [Andrea Mackris, a producer on his show], of having unwanted phone sex with her while using a vibrator on himself, and of describing his fantasies about having sex with her in a shower.”

At the time that Mackris’s suit was filed, Fox News stood strongly behind O’Reilly. And a countersuit was filed the same day.

“[Carlson] never threatened a lawsuit,” Smith told POLITICO. “One reason you wouldn’t go to them first, they sued the lawyer for Andrea Mackris when they approached them before suing O’Reilly. Most lawyers are not going to go to them first. They chilled us.”

That could provide a plausible explanation for Fox News’ silence in the hours after the suit was made public: They weren’t prepared to deal with it. But that would seem to be contradicted by Ailes’ statement, which suggests that he’d have seen this coming before June 23, when Carlson’s contract was up — and would have been well prepared for her “retaliation.”

Smith, Carlson’s lawyer, said that they did not give the network a heads up about the complaint, though she noted, without saying how long Carlson had been in contact with her firm, that Carlson had been weighing whether to act on how she had been treated since that September meeting. On June 23, when her contract expired, Carlson had been due to take a pre-planned vacation and return on Wednesday, the day the suit was filed, her lawyer said. Fox News made no announcement that Carlson was no longer with the network, and Carlson said on Twitter that she was simply “on vacation.”

Fox News did not respond to specific questions about the timing of the statements or whether the network had any indication that Carlson would be filing a lawsuit.

In two other cases, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought forth cases against Fox News. One, in 2005, accused a Fox vice president of sexual harassment and claimed that he “subjected [a female employee] and other women to a hostile work environment, routinely using obscenities and vulgarities to describe women or their body parts.”

Fox denied any wrongdoing, agreeing to a settlement of $225,000 in 2006.

In the second case, in 2010, the EEOC filed suit accusing Fox of retaliating against a reporter for raising complaints three years earlier about discrimination on the basis of her age and gender. In a subsequent contract which the reporter refused, Fox referenced the allegations and stated that she could “not serve as an anchor/co-anchor, or an occasional anchor/co-anchor during the Term hereof, unless Fox, in its sole discretion, decides otherwise.”

The case was dismissed as without merit by a federal judge. The reporter is still with the channel, serving as chief intelligence correspondent, appearing frequently in recent days as she reports on Hillary Clinton’s use of a homebrew e-mail server.

Doocy, for his part, is not a target in Carlson’s suit. Rather, Carlson claims that Ailes did not take action after Carlson complained about Doocy’s behavior, which allegedly included “a pattern and practice of severe and pervasive sexual harassment.”

Indeed, the tension between the sexes was often lurking just beneath the surface of the show, and sometimes was even there for viewers to see.

In one infamous instance, Carlson walked off the set of “Fox & Friends” in June of 2012 in a segment where they go over the day’s headlines, after Kilmeade said, "Women are everywhere. We're letting them play golf and tennis now. It's out of control."

Carlson was laughing as she walked off, but also saying “You know what? You read the headlines, since men are so great. Go ahead.”

"All right, finally! Leaving an all male crew," Kilmeade responded.

“In your glory, go for it!” Carlson bellowed back.

The next day, Carlson played off the incident as a joke.

But Carlson complained to her bosses about her treatment by Doocy specifically, according to her lawsuit, which alleges that Ailes told her she needed to learn how to “get along with the boys.”

Carlson was last on air on June 23, the day her contract was due to expire. According to her lawyers, she was let go in the hours after her final broadcast.

On Tuesday, as on every day since Carlson’s last day, Kimberly Guilfoyle said she was “in for Gretchen Carlson.” By Wednesday, the day the lawsuit was filed, there was no mention of Carlson at all.

On Wednesday morning, Carlson and her show “The Real Story” still had a page on the Fox News website. By Wednesday afternoon, the page had been removed.

"Something has gone wrong..." Fox News' 404 page read, before the page was restored, scrubbed of Carlson’s image and name.