It should come as no surprise that Fox News didn’t mention the latest awful allegations about Bill O’Reilly’s behavior toward women on Monday night. But given the ugliness of the reports – Gawker says that his ex-wife accused him, in sealed divorce documents, of choking her and dragging her by the neck down the stairs of their Manhasset mansion – it’s hard not to wonder what, if anything, would get O’Reilly in trouble with Roger Ailes.
We already know he settled a sexual harassment lawsuit by Fox producer Andrea Mackris, whose details became the stuff of journalistic legend – we will never think of falafel, or loofah, the same way. Now, while we don’t know the entire truth about his divorce, or why he lost custody of his children, we know enough to say he probably shouldn’t be lecturing anyone on family values. (For the record, O’Reilly today denied the charges.)
Yet he will almost certainly continue to tell African American men how to behave with women, and how to parent, because Roger Ailes doesn’t care about hypocrisy.
Now, we do have one example of Ailes tiring of a tempestuous host: Glenn Beck, in 2011. But Beck’s insane shtick was tarnishing the brand. O’Reilly’s angry white man shtick is the Fox brand. Without some explosive new evidence – his ex-wife refuses to comment on the charges, and she apparently did not call police when it happened – O’Reilly is likely to survive.
That doesn’t mean he isn’t wholly reprehensible. The cluster of reports about O’Reilly’s divorce from Maureen McPhilmy are appalling. He used his clout as a donor to police charities to make trouble for McPhilmy’s new boyfriend (now husband), a Nassau County police detective. As a powerful (and hypocritical) Catholic, he’s tried to have their marriage annulled, which would negate the “sin” of divorce and allow the parties to marry again in the church.
That privilege used to be reserved for short term, childless (at one time, “unconsummated”), disastrous marriages that both parties quickly recognized as a mistake; now powerful Catholics, usually men, receive annulments for long-term marriages that produced children, and they often force them on unwilling spouses. (Yes, you’ll recall that Rudy Giuliani did that to his first wife.) And in the meantime, the Fox bully tried to get McPhilmy ex-communicated from the church for the “sin” of divorce, and succeeded in getting her local parish to reprimand her for taking communion.
This latest allegation is particularly awful because it comes from his 16-year-old daughter, who told a custody investigator, according to Gawker, that she witnessed the abuse before her parents separated five years ago. McPhilmy got sole custody at least partly because O’Reilly violated the terms of their joint custody agreement, hiring the children’s therapist, who was supposed to supervise the custody situation, as a member of his staff.
But at least he didn’t yell at his wife, “Hey M-Fer, I want more iced tea.”
Of course, even if you give O’Reilly the benefit of some doubt, it’s clear his family life is a mess. Yet he regularly rails at African American families from his lofty perch at Fox. “The reason there is so much violence and chaos in the black precincts is the disintegration of the African-American family…The lack of involved fathers leads to young boys growing up resentful and unsupervised,” he said last August.
In December, he continued to fulminate: “The astronomical crime rate among young black men—violent crime—drives suspicion and hostility. ... No supervision, kids with no fathers—the black neighborhoods are devastated by the drug gangs who prey upon their own. That’s the problem!”
Now O’Reilly’s kids are growing up with no father in the home – but apparently a judge thinks they will be better off that way.
O’Reilly has even called domestic violence “a terrible plague,” telling 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Ben Carson last year: “I’m telling you, battery against women in this country and around the world is just out of control.”
But why would Ailes care about any of that? His audience probably doesn’t care. Fox’s over-65, predominantly male viewers probably see both sexual harassment and domestic violence as issues hyped by feminazis and the liberal news media.
Ailes’s entire news operation is built on a central fiction – and the fiction is that it’s a news organization at all. So why would it be a problem if it’s fronted by a family values hypocrite who’s actually a serial abuser of women?
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