Before #MeToo became a potent cultural force, women at Fox News were ringing the alarms about powerful men in Broadcasting and Entertainment. Everyone knows about Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly — movies and TV series have been made about them. But Andrea Mackris was the first one to blow the whistle on the fetid swamp when she accused Bill O’Reilly of very serious sexual harassment and had the tapes to prove it.
Like Carlson before her, she signed a settlement that contained an NDA and O’Reilly went on to harass a whole bunch of other women before finally being canned for doing it.
17 years later she’s breaking the NDA, describing herself as being under tremendous pressure at the time to sign it by her own lawyers as well as Fox’s and O’Reilly’s. They dispute her account saying there was no pressure and she signed it willingly:
Yet Mackris’ older brother Lou said he recalled his sister recounting her experience in Kasowitz’s boardroom shortly after it occurred. “She felt pressured, rushed, and forced to sign the NDA. Backed into a corner. There was no other option for her,” Lou Mackris told The Daily Beast. “It wasn’t about a settlement for her. She wanted this to stop and go back to work. Obviously, that didn’t happen.”
And Mackris’ former therapist, psychiatric social worker David Schwing, also recalled that she told him about the negotiations in real time. “The lawyers made her feel like she was crazy and were really screaming at her and she was screaming,” he said. “She was talking to me about it as her therapist because she couldn’t tell anyone else. One of them was screaming with his hands on the desk and the other was playing good cop. It’s been years but it was really traumatizing for her.”
It wasn’t just the lawyers. Mackris told The Daily Beast that she felt traumatized by opinion pieces attacking her credibility by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (dismissively titled “The Nonsense Factor”) and the Philadelphia Daily News’ Michael Smerconish (“The case against Bill O’Reilly is bogus,” wrote Smerconish, an occasional O’Reilly Factor guest and substitute host on his radio show) as well as by lurid headlines in the New York Post trashing her reputation (“‘LUNATIC’ O’REILLY GAL WENT NUTS IN A BAR,” screamed one). Yet Mackris ultimately signed the agreement.
Besides her silence, it required O’Reilly to drop his preemptive lawsuit claiming that she and her lawyers had attempted to extort him out of $60 million in hush money—an allegation she vigorously denies—but also permitted her alleged harasser to go on the air that night and act like the injured party for viewers of the top-rated The O’Reilly Factor: “This brutal ordeal is now officially over, and I will never speak of it again. This matter has caused enormous pain, but I had to protect my family, and I did. All I can say to you is please do not believe everything you hear and read.” O’Reilly added that there was “no wrongdoing in the case whatsoever by anyone.”
It’s a line Fredric S. Newman, who identified himself as O’Reilly’s litigation counsel, repeats today. In a letter to The Daily Beast, he claimed that “Ms. Mackris issued a public statement in 2004 in which she stated that ‘there was no wrongdoing whatsoever by Mr. O’Reilly.’”
Not true, Mackris, said: “I didn’t release a statement, he did. It was part of the NDA on October 28, 2004. I had no choice, no way out. He uses it to abuse me. That same document says Bill won’t breach, which he’s done over and over, calling me a liar. It cuts both ways.”’
In his letter, Newman also threatened to sue Mackris, The Daily Beast, the authors of this article personally, “and anyone else who acted in concert with you in connection with your proposed story.”
What he did not do—and what O’Reilly’s 2004 statement conspicuously lacked—was offer an apology, much less an acknowledgement of the behavior memorialized on Mackris’ audio recordings (which were promptly destroyed under the settlement terms), while executives at Fox News never held him accountable. “The company made billions of dollars over those 13 years of not investigating Bill,” Mackris said.
She had filed her stunning lawsuit against one of the richest and most formidable men in television news. And she had done it years before Gretchen Carlson’s 2016 sexual harassment and retaliation lawsuit resulted in the professional demise of Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, which was itself a precursor to the #MeToo movement that brought down movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, network news stars Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, CBS chairman Leslie Moonves, and so many others.
In the years since, Mackris has suffered the fate of many women in a variety of industries who have had the audacity to call out their more powerful male harassers, only to be legally gagged, psychically wounded, and discarded by the people in charge and society at large. She realizes, of course, that speaking to The Daily Beast about her own ordeal can be interpreted as violating her NDA, risking potential legal consequences.
“I may not get the past 17 years back,” she reflected, “but there is one way I can retrieve my power from this storm of lies, loss, greed and grief. It’s the same thing I did back in 2004 before Fox, Bill O’Reilly and their teams of willing executioners bound me to a contract that promises to ruin whatever is left of me if I dare do it again. Tell the truth. Walk free.”
After the lawsuit settlement, O’Reilly continued to thrive at Fox News for more than a dozen years as management rewarded him with increasingly lucrative contracts while he co-authored a series of popular history books published by Macmillan, and even made multiple friendly television appearances alongside Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. That is, until his record of sexual misconduct and multimillion-dollar payouts to his victims finally caught up with him in a New York Times investigation that forced a reluctant Rupert Murdoch to cut O’Reilly loose with a statement praising him as “one of the most accomplished TV personalities in the history of cable news,” plus a $25 million golden parachute.
This was the sort of thing she endured:
Dinners involving O’Reilly and women on his staff were common, Mackris said. “It was never untoward initially, especially in Philly.” She said she didn’t consider the possibility that O’Reilly had been grooming her for something less innocent. “There were 500 reasons for me not to think that way… I’d met his family. I’d been to his house. It just wasn’t part of my thinking.”
Things changed, however, when Mackris broke up with her live-in boyfriend of eight years, her then-fiancé, a lawyer with whom she shared a pricey apartment on the Upper West Side. The breakup was devastating enough. But when he moved out, she was earning $56,000 a year and couldn’t make the rent.
Mackris recounted: “I went to Bill Shine and I said to him, ‘Listen, I don’t know how to do this, but I have to ask for a raise… I don’t make enough to pay a basic rent in Manhattan and my student loans. I don’t want to have to leave to get the six figures I would get at CNN. I would really rather stay here, and that’s not a threat, I would really rather stay here.’”
Shine responded that he would speak to O’Reilly, who promptly invited her to dinner. It was May 2002.
At the restaurant, “he started to hit on me,” Mackris recalled.
“He was talking about vibrators and masturbating and he needed a younger lover. It came out of left field. He had never spoken to me like that. I’m raised by a very conservative Christian family. We didn’t really talk about the birds and the bees—kind of ‘we were dropped by the stork.’ Nobody talked like this. I certainly never had conversations like this with any guys I had known. I barely dated growing up. Daniel [her former fiancé] was my first real boyfriend. We’re pretty conservative people when it comes to sex and stuff.”
O’Reilly’s shocking sexual talk “wasn’t in my wheelhouse and it was like, what the hell is going on in front of me? And my body was on fire. I’m sure I was turning bright red. I remember walking out and he said, ‘Stick with me and you’ll go far.’…
“I remember thinking this person had my entire life in his hands. I’m alone in New York now. I didn’t have my ex—the love of my life, the man I thought I was going to marry, and all of this was blowing up. And here’s my boss who’s turning a really weird corner with me. He never ever had been talking sexually, and then all of the sudden he was getting pretty explicit, and then he’s like ‘I’ve got your back,’ and it was financial.”
Mackris went on: “Those dinners continued. They were never my idea. They were always his idea. When these young millennial women say, ‘Well, I just say no.’ I’m like ‘Well, that’s fucking fantastic for you. I’d love for you to do that to Bill O’Reilly.’”
For a miserable six months from January to July of 2004, Mackris did leave Fox News for CNN, where she was assigned to work for Ailes nemesis Paula Zahn, who had enraged the Fox News chairman by jumping to the rival network. On the phone, she complained to her former boss, “Bill, I hate it here. This place is a mess. I really want to come back,” and O’Reilly persuaded Ailes to allow it, and sweetened her salary by hiring her for his radio show in addition to her Fox News employment.
But by August, as she worked on O’Reilly’s broadcasts from the 2004 Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden, the sexual harassment had resumed: “It was the last night of the convention and we’d been working really hard all week, it was a real grind, and it was late at night. I’d gone on the subway and when I got out, I already had a message from him, so I figured immediately it was work-related. It was not. He was almost immediately masturbating, talking about all kinds of stuff, and a dildo up the butt.”
Mackris said she frequently tried to get O’Reilly to stop. “Because I was a confident, ambitious, smart, young lady and I said no, and no, and no, and no. I really thought I had been clear. I thought it had been more than obvious where I was coming from with him, and it did not matter. When you’re dealing with a malignant narcissist, who is a sexual predator, you saying no is really not the point. He’s not listening. So, it didn’t matter what I did. It wasn’t about me.
Read the whole thing at the Daily Beast. It is chilling.
I understand that Trump and O’Reilly are teaming up and going on the road for a series of paid “conversations.” Maybe Makris and E. Jean Carroll and some of the other dozens of women those two disgusting pigs harassed, assaulted and raped over the years should go on the road with them.