Sexual predation pays a hell of a lot better than sexual whistleblowing

The guys who did the bad things seem to have been rewarded with a lot more money than the girls to whom the bad things were done, writes Terry Prone.

Poor Bill. Poor Bill O’Reilly. No job. Fired. Fired for sexual harassment, according to those who wanted him out. Sexual harassment of one woman after another. Sequential, rather than spree, sexual harassment. Or, according to himself, fired as a result of a smear campaign orchestrated by a vast left-wing conspiracy.

That’s what we’re missing in this country. Vast left wing or right wing conspiracies. They’re the best excuse in the world, when you fail. Either you did nothing wrong at all, or you did a teeny weeny bit of wrong that these anonymous conspirators are blowing up into something huge. Hillary Clinton was always the victim of a vast right wing conspiracy. Bill is suffering from a conspiracy on the other side of the political spectrum.

Assuming, just for the hell of it, that poor Bill really is the victim of such a conspiracy, we have to fairmindedly say that it was one of the least effective conspiracies of all time. One good reason being that he was making Fox News a shedload of money, every year. Allegations against the guy who’s keeping you rich don’t tend to grab your attention the way allegations against an ordinary bloke or dame further down the line would.

But also, Fox News had suffered through this before, so they knew the rules. The rules being ‘deny’; ‘pay off complainants’; ‘buy silence’, and ‘hold on’. Those are the rules that had been applied less than a year earlier to Roger E Ailes, the chairman of Fox News since it was created. Roger E was a notorious hand-up-your-skirt guy from way back, but the Murdoch organisation went through their ritual dance until the last step of ‘holding on’ became untenable. At which point they stopped holding on to Roger E, mopping his tears with dollar bills. Forty million of them.

That’s one of the fascinating things about this scandal: that the guys who did the bad things seem to have been rewarded with a lot more money than the girls to whom the bad things were done.

Much has been made of the $13 million (€12.12m) paid out to women because of Poor Bill’s extra-curricular activities, but it’s in the ha’penny place when compared to the amounts he and Roger E trousered: $65m (€60.6m), the two lads took away between them, and even if the settlements with the harassed women bring that figure up to a nice round hundred million, divide the $35m (€32.6m) between up to a dozen women and the bottom line is that sexual predation pays a hell of a lot better than sexual whistleblowing.

Which is not even to take into consideration the fact that Poor Bill is likely to find employment somewhere else long before he runs out of the $25m (€23.3m) payment for the next year when he won’t be working. (The lawyers for each of these dirty old men know their stuff.) That’s because notoriety is as good a selling point as fame, these days, and America has lots of cable outlets where the advertisers would be only delighted to be sponsoring Poor Bill.

It’s easy to forget that when the dollar-mopping of Roger E’s departure tears was complete, Fox issued a statement to the effect that the corporation was against “behaviour that disrespects women or contributes to an uncomfortable work environment”. Do I hear a round of applause for an organisation standing by its values and stating its intent to create a corporate culture of equality and respect?

No? Well maybe the ovation could be a bit slow in coming because, at one and the same time as the issuance of that statement, the issuing company knew damn well that it was buying the silence of several high profile Fox women who alleged, among other things, that Poor Bill, having taken an interest in the careers of these women, had suggested, in one case, that he visit the rising star he was offering to mentor in her hotel room, and when she baulked, had astonishingly but totally lost all interest in promoting her.

In fact, despite multiple allegations of sexual harassment, despite the heightened awareness created by Roger E, and despite their own public positioning, Poor Bill had his lucrative contract renewed by Fox. We won’t even try to square up the conservative family values and traditional WASP Christianity which we’re told runs through the organisation with paying off the groped. No point.

The women’s silence was cheap at the price, in a context where few of those women could afford to face down one of the most popular figures in US mainstream media. Of course, if the vast left-wing conspiracy had been worth a damn, it would have found ways to protect them. Or maybe not.

Maybe in a context where a candidate can be found out in the crudest public commitment to sexual harassment, with the inbuilt statement that “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything” — and yet win the American presidency, even the most committed left wing conspirator might throw their hat at bringing down Poor Bill.

What brought him down, eventually, were advertisers. Advertisers ultimately control mass and social media. He who pays the piper gets a big say in who’s going to play the tune, and in this instance, Mercedes and others — almost 50 of them — decided that the public perception of their brand wasn’t going to be enhanced by association with a groper. They took their fair time working this out.

It was widely known for more than a decade that payouts had gone, with silencers attached, to some of Bill O’Reilly’s victims. Not a secret. Yet the advertisers didn’t move away from him, perhaps conscious that bad publicity in high-end mainstream media has done several individuals and corporations relatively little harm, in recent times.

But come on, since when have we vested the moral direction of the world in the hands of advertisers? They came through eventually, created a critical mass exodus, and Fox got the message. Not the message about respecting women and creating a comfortable work environment.

That’s not how they framed Poor Bill’s departure. Amid much garment-rending and gnashing of teeth, they lamented that they were losing the man they lauded as “one of the most accomplished TV journalists in the history of cable news”. But they went further. They said his success is “by any measure is indisputable.”

How about the measure of keeping your hands off the female talent? He wasn’t outstandingly successful by that measure. And that’s not going near the ranting, illogical, unsupported and insupportable theories he promulgated on the air, although to give him his due, he was remarkably successful at convincing viewers of manifest improbabilities.

But what’s really significant is that the Fox statement, weighed down as it was by praise of Poor Bill, never mentioned the women whose careers, in some cases, were effectively ended, because of his roving hands. Sure, God love them, they may have been distracted from their better angels by the tanking of their shares on the stock exchange. Or by the vast left-wing conspiracy. Or something.