No, Rupert Murdoch, Rape Is Not 'A Bit Of Flirting'
Last week, Rupert Murdoch made a bit of news when he appeared to dismiss Fox News's reputation as a 24/7 hostile work environment, saying "It's all nonsense" in an interview on Sky News in Britain when asked about the allegations. On CNN's "Reliable Sources" Sunday, former Fox News legal contributor Tamara Holder had a few thoughts about Murdoch, the shop he runs, and whether claims of rampant sexism are "nonsense." Holder settled a sexual harassment claim following an alleged 2015 assault by a Fox executive -- not former CEO and current worm meal Roger Ailes, but another guy -- in which she signed a nondisclosure agreement. But as she told host Brian Stelter, a clause in that settlement gave her leeway to speak out if she were "disparaged or maligned," and she felt quite confident that Murdoch's dismissive interview had maligned her and other women at Fox:
I don't have a job in TV anymore because the place that he has secured down like Fort Knox allowed abusive predators to prey on women who just wanted to work [...] That is not nonsense. This is people's lives.
In the Sky News interview, Murdoch downplayed all those silly ladies, explaining,
It's all nonsense. There was a problem with our chief executive. Sort of, over the years. But isolated incidents. As soon as we investigated it he was out of the place in hours -- well three or four days. And there's been nothing else since then.
Hours, three or four days, or actually more like two weeks of terrible publicity after Gretchen Carlson sued over repeated harassment by Ailes. What is time but an arbitrary construct anyway? But apart from Ailes, and OK, Bill O'Reilly, and maybe a bunch of other garbage men, nothing, Murdoch insisted. And all the criticism aimed at Fox is baseless and "largely political" you see, because conservatives are just plain oppressed in these oppressive times. Murdoch added that other networks are the ones where the bad stuff happened:
Liberals are going down the drain. NBC is in deep trouble. CBS, their stars. Uh, you know, I think it's a very interesting subject to go into at length. But, um, I mean there are really bad cases that people should be moved aside, and there are other things, um -- that probably amounted to a bit of flirting.
Murdoch didn't clarify whether he meant the "really bad cases" were at other networks, or in the business as a whole. In some remarkable ass-covering, Fox released a statement insisting that Murdoch hadn't dismissed women's allegations as "all nonsense," but that he was simply brushing aside the notion that the allegations had hurt Fox's business at all, which, yes, was embedded in the question he was asked, but Murdoch sure sounded like he was saying that he thought everything but the Ailes situation was "nonsense."
Holder didn't seem to understand that Murdoch was saying what the later memo insisted he was saying, either, possibly because she does not work for Fox News's PR department:
Let me be clear. I had a man pull out his penis in his office and shove my head on it. That was not flirting, that was criminal. That was not sexual harassment, there were no gray areas [...] This is criminal and I’m not the only case. There are women that can’t speak out.
Holder said that since Murdoch had disparaged her by dismissing the seriousness of the alleged fratboy culture at Fox, she felt obliged to speak out for other women who were silenced by signing NDAs. But she also said Fox News investors should know that some of their money isn't coming back to them in dividends: It's going to settle cases with women whose careers have been ruined.
Either Mr. Murdoch is a liar or he’s delusional and old and needs to get out. So if you’re an investor you need to decide if you want your money with a man who has continued to lie to you for the last 20 years. Your money, hundreds of millions of dollars of your money, has gone to settling cases with women over and over and over again. And we’ve been told we had to shut up, and that’s what we’ve done.
I’m stuck here talking about this because there are people like Rupert Murdoch who continue to deny that we were abused, and our careers were destroyed and our lives were destroyed. This is not political, this is people’s lives.
Fortunately, Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft, the Stupidest Man on the Internet, knows what's really important: Tamara Holder is a radical leftist (the only kind there is) who BROKE HER NDA, so obviously anything she has to say is a lie, and probably illegal for you to even listen to:
Besides, she got a lot of money for making up that story about having been sexually assaulted, so obviously she belongs in jail, the monster.
[ CNN / Gateway Pundit ]
Send out the flying monkey rage brigade.
I'd never heard of him 'till I came here.