Well this went from bad to worse.
Based on what Carlson’s camp is saying, it appears her lawsuit could unleash a torrent of new allegations from other women. “He’s the Bill Cosby of media,” Carlson’s lawyer, Nancy Erika Smith, told me today. “My office is being deluged with calls and website contacts from women. I don’t even have a count anymore … Women as young as 16 who said he demanded oral sex. Another said during an interview that he said, ‘Take off your bra.’ She was devastated.” Smith told me she’s forwarding the names of women who agreed to be interviewed to journalists. The New York Times currently has multiple reporters working on the story.
So far, no women have gone on the record. But Carlson isn’t the first to publicly challenge the Fox chief. In my 2014 biography of Ailes, I reported three incidents where Ailes made inappropriate sexual comments at women in professional settings. One of the women, Randi Harrison, said that when she interviewed for a producing job at NBC in the early '80s, Ailes said he’d increase her salary by $100 a week in exchange for sex. After the incident, Ailes’s friend John Huddy tracked Harrison down and asked her at a bar if she was wearing a wire.
