Roger Ailes was too toxic to remain at Fox. Why is he involved with Trump's campaign? (photo: Fred Prouser/Ralph Freso/Reuters/Getty Images/Slate)
04 September 16
A vicious misogynist and workplace predator is working with the Republican presidential nominee. This is not normal.
n a new New York magazine story,
the invaluable Gabriel Sherman gives us fresh details of the depravity
of ex-Fox News head Roger Ailes. Sherman quotes a former television
producer who says Ailes told her, “If you want to make it in New York
City in the TV business, you’re going to have to fuck me, and you’re
going to do that with anyone I tell you to.” He reports that Ailes’
longtime executive assistant, Judy Laterza, recruited comely young women
for her boss, including an intern who later told the Washington Post
that Ailes had propositioned her: “If you sleep with me, you could be a
model or a newscaster.” Sherman quotes Karem Alsina, a former Fox
makeup artist, describing female anchors coming to see her before
private meetings with Ailes: “They would say, ‘I’m going to see Roger,
gotta look beautiful!’” One of these anchors, said Alsina, “came back
down after a meeting, and the makeup on her nose and chin was gone.”
Sherman has reported even more disturbing stories about Ailes in the past. In July, he gave us the story
of Laurie Luhn, Fox’s former director of booking, who claims that Ailes
sexually extorted and psychologically tortured her for more than two
decades. Among other things, he insisted she perform an erotic dance
while he made a video, which, Ailes said, he was going to keep in a
safe-deposit box “just so we understand each other.” For his latest
piece, Sherman reports that he interviewed 18 women “who shared accounts
of Ailes’s offering them job opportunities if they would agree to
perform sexual favors for him and for his friends.” In some cases,
writes Sherman, Ailes “threatened to release tapes of the encounters to
prevent the women from reporting him.” Sherman also reports that
Gretchen Carlson, who is suing Ailes for sexual harassment, secretly
recorded his overtures.
There is abundant evidence, then, that Ailes is a
vicious misogynist and a workplace predator. So why isn’t it a bigger
deal that he’s advising the Republican presidential nominee?
To some extent we all know the answer. Donald Trump is
a maelstrom. There is so much chaos around him, and so many startling
violations of so many political norms, and no one has the bandwidth to
process it all. On Thursday, half his Hispanic advisers quit in the wake
of his demagogic Phoenix immigration speech. On Twitter, he’s feuding
with both Mexico’s president and Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, whom he called “crazy and very dumb.” As Paul Waldman points out in the Washington Post,
there’s been a notable lack of press attention to the illegal
contribution Trump’s foundation made to the PAC of Florida attorney
general Pam Bondi, at a time when Bondi was receiving complaints from
Floridians who said they’d been cheated by Trump University.
If the Clinton Foundation were accused of doing
anything this outrageous, it would be front-page news. The difference in
how the two candidates are covered stems, in part, from a long-standing
mainstream media tendency to view everything about Bill and Hillary
Clinton in the most invidious possible light. But it’s also a result of
the fact that Trump is consistently able to bury his old misdeeds with
new misdeeds, until all the outrages start to blur together. This week, Mother Jones published an exposé
of Trump Model Management’s violation of immigration law and
exploitative labor practices. There was enough there to eat up an
ordinary news cycle. Instead, the story was just a blip.
Still, in a better world, journalists would ask Trump
why Ailes, who was too toxic to remain at Fox, is involved with his
campaign. According to the New York Times, Ailes is advising Trump on the fall presidential debates. On Twitter, Sherman posted
a blurry CNN screengrab showing Ailes getting out of Trump’s plane in
Phoenix this week. He may not be on Trump’s payroll, but he’s part of
his inner circle.
So far, Trump has defended Ailes and cast aspersions
on the women accusing him. “I can tell you that some of the women that
are complaining, I know how much he’s helped them, and even recently,”
Trump said
in July. “And when they write books that are fairly recently released,
and they say wonderful things about him. And now, all of a sudden,
they’re saying these horrible things about him.”
It’s no surprise, of course, that Trump doesn’t take sexual harassment seriously. His own misogyny is extremely well-documented. His first wife, Ivana Trump, accused him of rape
in a sworn deposition, saying that he’d assaulted her in a rage after a
plastic surgeon she’d recommended botched his scalp surgery. (She’s
since said
she didn’t mean “rape” in a “literal or criminal sense,” but she’s
never recanted her description of what happened.) Trump’s new campaign
CEO, Steve Bannon, has been charged with domestic violence and accused
of sexual harassment. In such company, Ailes doesn’t really stand out.
That doesn’t mean we should treat his presence in a presidential
campaign as normal.
Trump should be asked about Ailes every day as long as
they’re working together, even informally. He should be asked not just
why he’s associating with Ailes, but whether Ailes is being left alone
with any of the women on his campaign. Keeping Ailes around, after all,
is not just immoral; he is a one-man hostile work environment. Perhaps
the involvement of a disgraced sexual sadist is low on the list of
things that are wrong with the Trump campaign. That’s not a reason to
ignore it.
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