1908

As quite a few lawyers on Twitter commented:

Imagine a case where a jury would award $32 million dollars. Now imagine something much worse because that was the settlement.

1909


1910

Megyn Kelly went on the offensive against Bill O’Reilly and Fox News on Monday, calling out the cabler for what she characterized as its failure to address complaints about O’Reilly’s behavior during his time at the company.

Kelly, who left Fox in January for NBC News, went so far as to single out Fox News media relations chief Irena Briganti for “vindictiveness.” Kelly alleged that Briganti has spread negative information about some women who accused the late Fox News founder and CEO Roger Ailes of harassment.

Kelly challenged O’Reilly’s repeated assertion that no Fox News employees ever filed complaints against him with management or the company’s human resources department. Kelly said she emailed then Fox News co-presidents Bill Shine and Jack Abernethy regarding O’Reilly’s CBS appearance.

“I wrote, in part: ‘Perhaps he didn’t realize the kind of message his criticism sends to young women across this country about how men continue to view the issue of speaking out about sexual harassment,” Kelly said. “Perhaps he didn’t realize that his exact attitude of shaming women into shutting the hell up about harassment on grounds that ‘it will disgrace the company’ is in part how Fox News got into the decade-long Ailes mess to begin with. Perhaps it’s his own history of harassment of women which has, as you both know, resulted in payouts to more than one woman, including recently, that blinded him to the folly of saying anything other than ‘I am just so sorry for the women of this company who never should have had to go through that.’”

Kelly closed her segment by taking direct aim at Briganti, a 20-year veteran of Fox News.

“Women everywhere are used to being dismissed, ignored, or attacked when raising complaints about men in authority positions. They stay silent so often out of fear. Fear of ending their careers. Fear of lawyers, yes. And often fear of public shaming, including through the media. At Fox News, the media relations chief Irena Briganti is known for her vindictiveness. To this day, she pushes negative articles on certain Ailes accusers, like the one you’re looking at right now. It gives me no pleasure to report such news about my former employer, which has absolutely made some reforms since all of this went down. But this must stop. The abuse of women, the shaming of them, the threatening, the retaliation. The silencing of them after-the-fact. It has to stop,” she said.

1911

Wait, was it $32 million to one accuser? The Occam’s Razor of this says it must have been a serious assault or rape. What else could it be for so much?

Which begs the question, why isn’t he in jail? I’m guessing the terms of the settlement say she can never go report this to the police. He was scared of going to jail. And now he has the audacity to spout out about how he’s being unfairly treated. What a scumbag.

1912

Ya, it was to ONE person apparently.

Seriously, you don’t settle for $32 million unless the penalties for going to trial would be much worse… which means he did some really terrible stuff, and they had a strong case against him for it.

1913

IANAL and thankfully have zero understanding on how this works, but I’d suspect it had something to do with potential loss of income. Based on what O’Reilly makes, he had to think he’d be practically unemployable in the foreseeable future.

1914

The wording in the NYT piece was “Non consensual sexual relationship.”
(IOW rape.)

1915

Relationship? Is that how it’s termed now? Was this ongoing rape? Dear lord.

1916

If he’s denying that anything happened, is it possible that it could disqualify any NDA that his victim was required to sign?

1917

32 million is such a weird number. Was 31 million just not enough?

1918

Probably 50 million plus and settled down.

1919

Interesting little article about how a sexual harassment claim pretty much ruined Scottie Hughes’ career:

In this case, I think there is another facet to this story. After Trump was elected, there was something of a glut of shameless, clueless Trump apologists running around, and almost all of them were dropped from their semi-regular gigs. Roger Stone, Katrina Pierson, Corey Lewandowski, Jeffery Lord, Tomi Lahren – all of them have seen their mainstream TV-time severely curtailed or eliminated completely after Trump became POTUS.

So while I find it very easy to believe that Hughes has been blacklisted at Fox for her accusations, I’m not sure that her lack of offers from the networks or cable channels is related. She was always one of the least-credible of Trump Surrogates, brought on to a show mostly because she could be counted on to say something stupid (like that Trump’s “locker room talk” is OK because 50 Shades of Gray is a best-seller).

1920

I got it!

1921

Didn’t Fox just hire her for something?

1922

I wonder if the victim was under age because $32 million is something else.

Regarding Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly, what happened to them was awful, but I’m having a hard time working up sympathy for those two who willingly signed on to an organization whose sole purpose is to misinform, distort facts, and straight up lie behind the facade of news.

A Daily Show refresher of who Gretchen Carlson is.

And fuck Megyn Kelly for her running with the discredited and deceptive Planned Parenthood fetal tissue expose during her time at Fox.

1923

I think she is the one that just hired on to some new conservative network/site/whatever. I want to say “Trump TV”, but that doesn’t sound exactly right.

No pun intended. At least not fully.

1924

That’s Kayleigh McEnany. And it’s called “Real News Update”, because of course it is.

1925

Well, “Fake News Update” wouldn’t be a very good name.

Tomi Lahren is an American conservative political commentator and former television host, currently working for Great America Alliance, an advocacy organization that supports Donald Trump.

1926

$32m victim was a lawyer who was on O’Reilly’s show multiple times, so no, not a minor.

1927

Well, given what the publicity did to his, Ailes and Weinstein’s careers, a public trial is worse. It’s called hush money for a reason.