'The mission was to bring down Bill OReilly': The final days of a Fox News superstar
By Manuel Roig-Franzia and Ben Terris April 21 at 6:50 PM
The accuser was wavering. She wanted to go public, to tell the world about her claims that the Fox News megastar Bill O’Reilly ogled her at their workplace and suggestively called her “hot chocolate.”
But Perquita Burgess was afraid, her attorney Lisa Bloom said. Afraid of Twitter trolls and other haters. Afraid that a powerful man would ruin her life for daring to cross him. So, Bloom invoked civil rights history to say the words that finally persuaded Burgess, a former Fox temp worker who is African American.
“Do you think Rosa Parks decided she was not going to do what she needed to do because people were going to say nasty things to her?” Bloom said, citing the heroine of the Montgomery bus boycott. “This is your time.”
She also explained to her client in stark terms what she hoped to accomplish: “The mission was to bring down Bill O’Reilly.”
The accusations by Burgess — who first disclosed her claims anonymously through her attorney on Tuesday and has now publicly identified herself — added one more discordant note to a crescendo of scandal that has shaken America’s most watched cable news network over the past year. At a moment when the conservative juggernaut might have been strutting with Republicans in the White House and firmly in control of Congress, the network is instead operating in an almost continuous cycle of bad publicity and damage control.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-mission-was-to-bring-down-bill-oreilly-the-final-days-of-a-fox-news-superstar/2017/04/21/00862918-2601-11e7-bb9d-8cd6118e1409_story.html?utm_term=.d01b849383e0&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1
