Megyn Kelly revealed that she complained to the co-presidents of her former employer Fox News about commentator Bill O’Reilly‘s behavior toward women.
“Fox News was not exactly a friendly environment for harassment victims who wanted to report, in my experience,” the NBC News anchor, 46, said on Megyn Kelly Today on Monday, October 23. “However, O’Reilly’s suggestion that no one ever complained about his behavior is false. I know because I complained.”
Kelly’s revelation came two days after The New York Times reported that O’Reilly, 68, paid $32 million to settle a sexual harassment claim with Fox News legal analyst Lis Wiehl in January. The network renewed his contract in February despite being aware of the settlement. O’Reilly denied the harassment allegations.
Kelly, who worked for Fox News from 2004 until this January, said she wrote an email to Fox News co-presidents Bill Shine and Jack Abernethy in November 2016, the same day she released her memoir, Settle for More, which included a chapter about her sexual harassment allegations against late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. That morning, O’Reilly became agitated when asked about the book during a CBS News interview, saying he was “not interested in making my network look bad.” Kelly filed her complaint soon after.
In the email, the political commentator wrote, “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. 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.”
O’Reilly was fired from the network in April after the Times revealed that he paid millions in settlements following allegations of sexual harassment. “This is not unique to Fox News,” Kelly said. “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. … 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.”
