Former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson has given her first interview since network co-founder and chairman Roger Ailes stepped down a week ago today.
Carlson tells the Washington Post her first reaction to Ailes’ resignation was “satisfaction, or no, I think validation. I felt angry that it took so long.”
Conversely, she was disturbed by the public statements of some Fox News women and men who came forward in the first few days to say glowing things about Ailes’s character, suggesting that he could never have engaged in sexual harassment.
Advertisement“Some of them were lawyers. They should have known better, so I was surprised. It was like, ‘Wow, you have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “But I was at Fox a long time. I know how it works. You could sense that it all was orchestrated.”
Without naming names, Carlson seems to be talking about FNC hosts Kimberly Guilfoyle, who talked with TVNewser 4 days after the suit was filed, and Greta Van Susteren, who talked with the New York Times, and who this morning, took to her own blog to set the record straight.
Van Susteren writes in part, “I never heard of the sexual harassment allegations – no one ever came to me and said anything to me about it – not once; I never saw it; It never happened to me; I said that Gretchen Carlson was unhappy when she was at Fox News (she told me that a few years back when we both happened to be in London covering the same story but never said it was sexual harassment.)”
As for Carlson, she said she “appreciated” that Fox News star Megyn Kelly came forward and “told the truth, and I know it was risky.” But Carlson said it’s not just Kelly’s reported statements to internal investigators that led to the downfall of Ailes, but rather “the multitude of women,” now more than a dozen, who have told their stories of harassment.