With its tantalising blend of salaciousness and presidential impropriety, the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal was manna from heaven for Fox News. It was 1998 and the fledgling US cable channel – desperate to overtake its more established rivals – couldn’t have concocted a more perfect story if it had tried.
A sitting Democratic president caught in an affair with a young White House intern was custom-made to appeal to the station’s target Right-wing audience and while others baulked at airing some of the more tawdry details, Fox had no such qualms. The tactic worked spectacularly. As the channel relentlessly pursued the story, viewing figures soared. Within just four years of its inception, Fox hit the number one slot.
Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, one of the former Fox News presenters to file a lawsuit against Fox News boss Roger Ailes alleging sexual harassment
It was with some irony then that just as one sex scandal put Fox News firmly on the map, it was another that brought down its founder almost 20 years later. Roger Ailes had forged Fox News into a broadcasting powerhouse that had essentially paved the way for Donald Trump’s progress to the White House. But in 2016 Ailes was forced to resign as chairman and CEO when Fox presenter Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit alleging that he had sabotaged her career after she refused his sexual advances. It opened the floodgates to a devastating string of allegations against Ailes from more than two dozen women.
Ailes’s story predates the sexual abuse allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein by just over a year, yet it perfectly taps into the mood of the ensuing #MeToo era. It is now the subject of two star-studded screen dramas told from different perspectives.
The Loudest Voice, based on Gabriel Sherman’s best-selling biography, The Loudest Voice In The Room, recently aired on Sky Atlantic and focused largely on Ailes himself (portrayed by Russell Crowe). In the forthcoming movie Bombshell, however, the focus is squarely on the women who brought about his downfall, including Gretchen Carlson, played by Nicole Kidman, and the channel’s biggest female star, Megyn Kelly, played by Charlize Theron. Margot Robbie plays the movie’s third female lead, fictional producer Kayla Pospisil. As Theron recently remarked, ‘In Bombshell our monsters don’t always look like monsters, which is how it is in real life.’
Indeed, when Roger Ailes launched Fox News in 1996, far from being viewed as a monster he was seen as the ideal man to help Rupert Murdoch break the dominance of the liberal-leaning cable news channels CNN and MSNBC. He had previously worked on the campaigns for Republican presidential candidates Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and was fully aware of the importance of the power of television.
His understanding of how TV worked was no doubt aided by years of studying the medium as a young boy. Born in Warren, Ohio, Ailes suffered from haemophilia and was often absent from school, spending hours in front of the TV watching Westerns. His condition didn’t, however, prevent his father Robert, a factory foreman, from beating him regularly with an electrical cord. Once, his father urged Roger to jump from the top bunk bed into his arms, only to step back at the last minute. As he picked up his bruised son from the floor, he imparted his lesson: ‘Don’t ever trust anybody.’ The ruthlessness and paranoia that came to characterise Ailes’s professional career doubtless had their roots in his early childhood traumas .
In 1993, Ailes joined NBC and was credited with reviving the fortunes of its failing business channel, CNBC, tripling profits. But his time with the station was short-lived. He left after two years having been made to sign an agreement not to abuse staff members. It was to be a portent of things to come when he launched Fox News the following year.
Notoriously foul-mouthed and physically imposing, his brashness did nothing to deter Murdoch, who concluded when he met Ailes that ‘either this man is crazy or he has the biggest set of balls I’ve ever seen’. And he was proved right. When Fox News started, it had 17 million subscribers, but towards the end of Ailes’s tenure, the number had increased to 87 million. Yet according to former employees, his success was founded on a culture of fear. They claimed he spied on his own staff, installing cameras and reading their emails.
Nicole Kidman with her Bombshell co-stars Margot Robbie and Charlize Theron
Yet if keeping tabs on staff was bad enough, the most egregious abuse of his power concerned women. His biographer Gabriel Sherman uncovered several stories of such abuse, perhaps the most disturbing of which concerned Fox News’s former director of booking, Laurie Luhn. She alleged that Ailes had waged a 20-year campaign of harassment against her. Initially acting as her mentor, Ailes soon sexualised their relationship. He videotaped Luhn in a suspender belt, telling her, ‘I am going to put [the tape] in a safe-deposit box just so we understand each other’, had her perform oral sex on him and even had her engage in sex with other women. By the time she had been promoted to director of booking at Fox, she was expected to hire attractive female staff for him, or as he told her: ‘You’re going to find me “Roger’s Angels”. You’re going to find me whores.’
Other women who were reportedly subjected to harassment by Ailes included Randi Harrison, a young producer whom he offered £300 a week for a job, adding: ‘If you agree to have sex with me whenever I want, I will add an extra hundred dollars a week.’ Harrison was in tears by the time she left the building.
But it was the claims by two Fox News stars, Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson, which precipitated Ailes’s demise. Carlson, a former Miss America, claimed that at various times Ailes had made sexual remarks and even asked her to turn around so that he could ‘view her posterior’. She started secretly recording their meetings on her iPhone and during one exchange he told her: ‘I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better.’ Carlson had also complained about sexist treatment from Steve Doocy, her co-host on the show Fox & Friends, and was told by Ailes that she needed to ‘get along with the boys’. After being demoted on the show in 2013 and fired from Fox three years later, Carlson filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Ailes in July 2016, alleging that she had been let go for refusing Ailes’s advances.
A headline after the Roger Ailes story broke; Former Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly, who is played by Charlize Theron in the new film
Though he denied the charges, just days later a further six women came forward publicly accusing him of harassment. But it was when anchor Megyn Kelly added her voice to the discussion that the writing appeared to be on the wall for Ailes. One of Fox News’s biggest stars, she told investigators that in the early stages of her career he had made ‘unwanted sexual advances’ towards her and later described in an interview with Business Insider how he had tried to grab her three times, adding: ‘I had to shove him off of me.’
For Murdoch, this appeared to be the final straw. Though apparently the media tycoon’s first instinct was to protect the man who had worked for him for 20 years, Ailes was finally given an ultimatum: either resign by August 1 or be fired. Ailes resigned on July 21, receiving a £30 million payoff.
He died on May 18, 2017, leaving his wife of 19 years, Elizabeth, their son, Zachary, and an impressive list of achievements, tainted by his own flaws. The woman responsible for bringing those flaws to light, Gretchen Carlson, eventually received a public apology from Fox and a reported £15 million settlement.
Roger Ailes might have had the loudest voice in the room, but in the end, it was the women he abused who had the final word.
‘Bombshell’ is in cinemas from Friday