New Fox Harassment Allegations: A Contributorship... Was Contingent Upon Sex
Source: Mother Jones
A former frequent on-air guest at Fox News says that a Fox consultant and top lieutenant to Roger Ailes, the network’s late founder and longtime CEO, sexually harassed her repeatedly for more than a year, including dangling the possibility of a paid job at Fox if she would have sex with him.
The allegation appears in a written declaration by Caroline Heldman, an associate professor of politics at Occidental College who made numerous guest appearances on Fox starting in 2008. The Fox consultant, Woody Fraser, is a veteran television producer who helped create shows such as Good Morning America and Nightline and worked closely with Ailes at Fox for nearly a decade. Fraser’s relationship with Ailes dated back to the 1960s, when he hired a young Ailes to work on The Mike Douglas Show. “It was the best hire I’ve ever made,” Fraser told an Ailes biographer.
Heldman wrote in her declaration—signed under penalty of perjury and prepared as part of a potential lawsuit involving separate Fraser accusers—that Fraser “used coded language (an ‘arrangement’) on three different occasions, once in New York and twice in Los Angeles, that he wanted to have a sexual relationship with me.” Heldman says she repeatedly rejected his advances. She goes on to note: “Mr. Fraser insinuated on several occasions that a contributorship at Fox was contingent upon me having a sexual relationship with him. Even though I was a popular guest with numerous appearances and high ratings (according to Mr. Fraser), I was not offered a contributorship because I rebuffed Mr. Fraser’s sexual advances.”
Heldman spoke on the record with Mother Jones about Fraser’s alleged harassment and her interactions with other Fox personalities, including Bill O’Reilly. She says that Fraser’s “quid pro quo” comments and the worst of his sexual harassment occurred in person. But her declaration quotes from multiple email exchanges in which Fraser makes inappropriate comments to Heldman. “Hi. You are amazingly beautiful and so very intelligent,” Fraser wrote to her on July 29, 2010. “Good thing im [sic] married and you r [sic] taken.” In another exchange, on August 19, 2010, he wrote, “too bad u don’t like older guys anymore.” Heldman provided those emails and several others to Mother Jones.
Read more: http://www.motherjones.com/media/2017/08/fox-news-sexual-harassment-heldman-fraser-ailes/
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