Fox News in January had a $32 million dollar agreement with Bill O’Reilly to resolve sexual harassment allegations. These allegations included females saying that he had sent them sexual content such as gay pornography. 21st Century Fox, Fox News’ parent company, stated that they knew about the accusations made by the women.
Although this agreement was established, 21st Century Fox still decided to renew his contract and gave him a four-year extension that would entail $25 million a year.
Time and time again they opted to shut down as much as they could when Rupert, James and Lachlan Murdoch, top executives at 21st Century Fox, attempted to keep him for business reasons despite having an even bigger scandal that was quickly growing bigger by the second.
Fox News responded to the whole ordeal by saying that Fox News “surely would have wanted to renew” and “he was the biggest star in cable TV.”
They also showed the contract added that if new allegations were made O’Reilly would be dismissed. They said, “the company subsequently acted based on the terms of this contract.”
O’Reilly claimed that he “never mistreated anyone” and that the allegations were “politically and financially motivated, and we can prove it with shocking information, but I’m not going to sit here in a courtroom for a year and a half and let my kids get beaten up every single day of their lives by a tabloid press that would sit there, and you know it.”
Lis Wiehl, a former Fox News legal analyst, worked with O’Reilly for 15 years and filed a lawsuit against him because of sexual harassment, but she would soon be paid to stay silent and not sue.
The company was then informed about the deal but were not told about how much money was given, a big worry for O’Reilly’s lawyers. O’Reilly believed that they “leaked sensitive information.”
The settlement then became a problem for British regulators looking over 21st Century Fox’s bid. A report says that they were “concerned that board members regarded Mr. O’Reilly’s settling cases personally as somehow a point in his favor.”
After the meeting between the British regulators and Century Fox executives, O’Reilly was fired.
O’Reilly recently stated that “this is horrible, it’s horrible what I went through, horrible what my family went through. This is crap, and you know it.”
