Fox's Ann Coulter 2.0
Conserva-babe and star-in-the-making Rachel Marsden has a, um, colorful past. What was Fox thinking?
By Rebecca Traister
Read more: Al Gore, Politics, Canada, News, Fox News, Dick Cheney, Rebecca Traister
Rachel Marsden, in images captured from "Red Eye."
March 29, 2007 | "Maybe [Pakistani cricket fans] should focus less on cricket and a little more on hygiene," opined Rachel Marsden on a recent episode of Fox News' middle-of-the-night talk oddity "Red Eye." Marsden was adding her two cents to a discussion of murdered Pakistani cricket coach Bob Woolmer, and seemed unaware that she had said anything offensive. But her co-hosts, Greg Gutfeld and Bill Schulz, looked appropriately aghast; Gutfeld was quick to assure viewers that "Red Eye," the Fox-for-frat-boys show he's been hosting with gross-out gusto since Feb. 6, did not endorse Marsden's views on Pakistani hygiene.
Her colleagues may have been momentarily tortured by Marsden's loose tongue, but whether they knew it or not, they had been sticking it to her just the night before, when they brought up the Duke rape case. Gutfeld had asked what should happen to the accuser if all charges are finally dropped, and Marsden had jumped in with unusual speed, pooh-poohing possible repercussions for the woman who claimed she was raped by members of the Duke University lacrosse team a year ago. "Charges are laid, charges are dropped," said Marsden. "It happens all the time. Unless she can get charged with mischief and they can prove she lied, then no, [she shouldn't be punished]. That's the process and the process works." But, argued Gutfeld, "Don't you think that being accused of rape is as bad as being raped? Those guys' lives were ruined!" Marsden bit back, "Let's give it 10 years and see if their lives were ruined."
It was all business as usual at "Red Eye," Fox's bawdy gabfest of a grab at a youthful audience, starring Gutfeld, comic foil Bill Schulz, and Marsden, a statuesque Canadian who dissects the news with as much Coulter-esque zeal as she can muster while rolling her eyes at her male counterparts. But in the Duke exchange, any viewer who knew anything about Marsden, whom Fox is clearly grooming for brand-name pundit stardom, might have felt a fleeting moment of sympathy for her. That's because the 31-year-old columnist is already well known in her native Canada as an oft-accused and once-admitted stalker who made questionable rape charges of her own 10 years ago, in a case that eventually cut short the career of a university president and changed the tenor of harassment cases all over Canada. In 1999, a professor at the same university went to the police with charges Marsden was stalking him, and in 2004 she pleaded guilty to criminally harassing a former Vancouver radio host.
Should executives at Fox News have hired Marsden as a nightly contributor to "Red Eye," on which panelists chew over topics like sexual harassment, without disclosing how her history might color her views? In their yen for young male viewers, and their desire for a righty riposte to "The Daily Show," is it possible they prized Marsden's looks so much that they believed no one else would ever get past them? Did they think they could groom her to be an incendiary attention-getting conserva-babe of Coulter-esque proportions, when getting that coveted attention would guarantee the revelation of her Fox-unfriendly past? Or perhaps it was her scandal-laced life that made her enough of a celebrity to secure her a nightly perch in the first place.
"Red Eye," designed to appeal to the demographic most likely to be found on a beer-soaked dormitory couch at 2 a.m., is chock full of fart gags and homoerotic innuendo. Into this Pabst-and-poop-joke cloud of testosterone, it's only natural that Fox would want to bring a woman. A fox, to put no finer point on it. Enter Marsden, who for several years has been featured as the "Canadian correspondent" on "The O'Reilly Factor," who formerly decorated her Web site with alluring photos of herself, and who was once named "Republican Babe of the Week" by JerseyGOP.com, an honor previously bestowed on Florida chad-harpy Katherine Harris, Laura Ingraham and, of course, Ann Coulter.
She also writes a weekly column for the conservative Toronto Sun, in which she revels in the sort of juvenile ad hominems about liberals beloved by righty louts. In the most recent, Marsden, an avowed disbeliever in global warming, ripped apart Al Gore's testimony in front of Congress, proposing that in a cross-examinations, lawmakers put this to the former vice president: "Al Gore could really pollute a bathroom ... Just look at the guy. If someone doesn't take away his pork 'n' beans, he's bound to get another one of those 'gut feelings' and mistake his own greenhouse gas production for science!"
Marsden grew up in a suburb of Vancouver. Her father, Claude, was a high school teacher who in 2000 had his teaching license suspended after admitting to an inappropriate relationship with a 16-year-old student. Marsden, in the bio on her Web site, describes growing up listening to Canadian talk-radio bulldog Jack Webster. "Listening to these radio shows during visits to grandma's house ignited a lifelong passion," writes Marsden, adding, "Rachel finds it cute when liberals think they have an original argument. Chances are she heard it for the first time at the age of 7." Marsden also writes that as a "former national level competitive swimmer who still holds records in BC, [she] lives for challenges and thrives on competition."
It was swimming that led Marsden to meet Liam Donnelly at the Westminster Club where they both swam in 1990, when she was 15 and he 22. Three years later she enrolled to study biology at the famously progressive, Utopian Simon Fraser University, where Donnelly was swim coach. In 1995, she accused Donnelly, who was not her coach, of sexual harassment and date rape, claiming that he repeatedly molested her over the course of a 16-month friendship/relationship. Donnelly claimed he was innocent, and on the advice of a lawyer, boycotted the university's investigation into Marsden's claims.
In 1997, SFU fired Donnelly. The university agreed to pay Marsden $12,000 to compensate her for injury to her feelings and the academic scholarship she lost during the case. It was reported that they denied her request to be part of the hiring process for a new swim coach.
Donnelly fired back, alleging that it was Marsden who had done the harassing. He handed over photos of the scantily clad student that he claimed she had slipped under his door, and released an e-mail she had sent him after the date of the alleged molestation that read in part, "I suggest that you just relax and let me undress you, touch you ... If you want, you can undo the garter and take off my stockings, take off my lace bra and underwear, and let your hands explore my body wherever they want to."