The Women Who Recruited For Roger Ailes

Gabriel Sherman writes:

According to interviews with Fox News women, Ailes would often begin by offering to mentor a young employee. He then asked a series of personal questions to expose potential vulnerabilities. “He asked, ‘Am I in a relationship? What are my familial ties?’ It was all to see how stable or unstable I was,” said a former employee. Megyn Kelly told lawyers at Paul, Weiss that Ailes made an unwanted sexual advance toward her in 2006 when she was going through a divorce. A lawyer for former anchor Laurie Dhue told me that Ailes harassed her around 2006; at the time, she was struggling with alcoholism.

Ailes’s longtime executive assistant Judy Laterza — who became one of his top lieutenants, earning more than $2 million a year, according to a Fox executive — seemed to function as a recruiter of sorts. According to Carlson’s attorney, in 2002, Laterza remarked to a college intern she saw on the elevator about how pretty she was and invited her to meet Ailes. After that meeting, Ailes arranged for the young woman to transfer to his staff. Her first assignment was to go down to the newsstand and fetch him the latest issue of Maxim. When she returned with the magazine, Ailes asked her to stay with him in his office. He flipped through the pages. The woman told the Washington Post that Ailes said, “You look like the women in here. You have great legs. If you sleep with me, you could be a model or a newscaster.” She cut short her internship. (Laterza did not respond to a request for comment.)

I spoke with another Fox News administrative assistant who said Laterza invited her to meet Ailes in 2004. The woman, then 25, told Ailes that her ambition was to do commercials. Ailes offered to pay for voice lessons (she declined) and helped her land an agent at William Morris. A few months later, Ailes summoned her to his office for an update. She told him how excited she was about the opportunities, and Ailes invited her for a drink. She suggested happy hour, but he demurred. “For a man in my position, it would have to be alone at a hotel,” she recalls him saying. “Do you know how to play the game?” She tried to get out of the situation as tactfully as possible. “I don’t feel comfortable doing this,” she said. “I respect your family; what about your son?” She remembers Ailes’s reply: “I’m a multifaceted man. That’s one side of me.” As she left the office, she says, Ailes tried to kiss her. “I was holding a binder full of voice-over auditions that I put between us. I was terrified.” She says she never heard from the William Morris agent again.

The fact that these incidents of harassment were so common may have contributed to why no one at Fox came forward or filed a lawsuit until now. Ailes’s attitudes about women permeated the very air of the network, from the exclusive hiring of attractive women to the strictly enforced skirts-and-heels dress code to the “leg cam” that lingers on female panelists’ crossed legs on air. It was hard to complain about something that was so normalized. Other senior executives harassed women, too. “Anyone who claimed there was a hostile work environment was seen as a complainer,” says a former Fox employee who says Ailes harassed her. “Or that they can’t take a joke.”

… Karem Alsina, a former Fox makeup artist, told me she grew suspicious when Fox anchors came to see her before private meetings with Ailes to have their makeup done. “They would say, ‘I’m going to see Roger, gotta look beautiful!’ ” she recalled. “One of them came back down after a meeting, and the makeup on her nose and chin was gone.”

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How Rupert Murdoch Tried To End The Trump Candidacy

Gabriel Sherman writes:

Then came Donald Trump. Kelly’s feud with the GOP nominee was one of the dominant story lines of the presidential election; it also exploded the fragile balance of relationships at the top of Fox News.

According to Fox sources, Murdoch blamed Ailes for laying the groundwork for Trump’s candidacy. Ailes had given Trump, his longtime friend, a weekly call-in segment on Fox & Friends to sound off on political issues. (Trump used Fox News to mainstream the birther conspiracy theory.) Ailes also had lunch with Trump days before he launched his presidential campaign and continued to feed him political advice throughout the primaries, according to sources close to Trump and Ailes. (And in the days after Carlson filed her lawsuit, Trump advised Ailes on navigating the crisis, even recommending a lawyer.)

Murdoch was not a fan of Trump’s and especially did not like his stance on immigration. (The antipathy was mutual: “Murdoch’s been very bad to me,” Trump told me in March.) A few days before the first GOP debate on Fox in August 2015, Murdoch called Ailes at home. “This has gone on long enough,” Murdoch said, according to a person briefed on the conversation. Murdoch told Ailes he wanted Fox’s debate moderators — Kelly, Bret Baier, and Chris Wallace — to hammer Trump on a variety of issues. Ailes, understanding the GOP electorate better than most at that point, likely thought it was a bad idea. “Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee,” Ailes told a colleague around this time. But he didn’t fight Murdoch on the debate directive.

On the night of August 6, in front of 24 million people, the Fox moderators peppered Trump with harder-hitting questions. But it was Kelly’s question regarding Trump’s history of crude comments about women that created a media sensation. He seemed personally wounded by her suggestion that this spoke to a temperament that might not be suited for the presidency. “I’ve been very nice to you, though I could probably maybe not be based on the way you have treated me,” he said pointedly.

After the debate, Trump called Ailes and screamed about Kelly. “How could you do this?” he said, according to a person briefed on the call. Ailes was caught between his friend Trump, his boss Murdoch, and his star Kelly. “Roger lost control of Megyn and Trump,” a Fox anchor said.

The parties only became more entrenched when Trump launched a series of attacks against Kelly, including suggesting that her menstrual cycle had influenced her debate question. Problematically for Ailes, Fox’s audience took Trump’s side in the fight; Kelly received death threats from viewers, according to a person close to her. Kelly had even begun to speculate, according to one Fox source, that Trump might have been responsible for her getting violently ill before the debate last summer. Could he have paid someone to slip something into her coffee that morning in Cleveland? she wondered to colleagues.

While Ailes released a statement defending Kelly, he privately blamed her for creating the crisis. “It was an unfair question,” he told a Fox anchor. Kelly felt betrayed, both by Ailes and by colleagues like O’Reilly and Baier when they didn’t defend her, sources who spoke with her said. “She felt she put herself out there,” a colleague said.

Frustrated at Fox, Kelly hired a powerhouse agent at CAA and began auditioning in earnest, and in public, for a job at another network. In interviews, she said her ambition was to become the next Barbara Walters and to host prime-time specials. She wanted to prove to the industry she could land a “big get” — and the biggest get of all was Trump. So Kelly went to Trump Tower to lobby the candidate for an interview. It worked — even Trump couldn’t resist the spectacle of a rematch — but in the end the show failed: The ratings were terrible and reviewers panned her generally sycophantic questions. Worse for Kelly, it eroded her burgeoning status as a tough journalist who stood up to Trump. Afterward, her relationship with Ailes further deteriorated. According to Fox sources, they barely spoke in recent months.

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Laurie Luhn, alleged ‘whore’ for Fox pervert Roger Ailes, doesn’t seem so innocent in this scheme

Linda Stasi writes: Laurie Luhn, the latest woman to accuse ex-Fox boss/perennial pervert Roger Ailes of sexual harassment, is now saying she only became the disgusting old pervert’s “whore” because she thought it would advance her career.

And it did. She went from his cash whore to his on-the-books madam. And now she’s so upset — after 20 years and a $3 million settlement — that she had to tell all: to New York magazine reporter Gabriel Sherman.

Meantime, during those 20 years Luhn accepted more no-show jobs than Dean Skelos’ son. In fact, at one point she was making $250,000 a year as a Fox events planner without events. Well, that’s not quite true, since she actually planned some events. Like? Like trysts with Ailes and then, after he got tired of her, trysts for Ailes.

She indicates it started out innocently enough with her simply wanting a job in media.

Seriously? If a disgusting creep dangles a job, and then asks you to show up at a hotel in a garter belt, chances are good he’ll be dangling more than just a job.

In this case, she says he dangled what one of his victims described as his “raw hamburger meat.” OK, that’s enough to wreck the sex lives of every adult in America right there.

Did she think part of the job description as media adviser was exotic dancer? Who wouldn’t confuse the two?

When the dancing was done, “Ailes told her to get down on her knees in front of him,” she said, and put his hands on her temples … ‘Tell me you will do what I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it. … Do you understand? You will follow orders.’”

Did she run out screaming into the night into the nearest precinct to report him? No, instead she continued in an arrangement that paid her well.

Ailes told her she was his whore. And she was. After he got her to involve other women in S&M sex, he’d leave a grand on the dresser.

When he put her on the Fox News payroll, he allowed her to hire staff — good-looking only.

stasi31n-2-web

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Black Lives Matter Turns Against Israel

Dennis Prager writes: Many progressive Jews are shocked that Black Lives Matter (BLM), a movement they support, has turned out to be virulently anti-Israel — to the extent that in its new platform, it charges Israel with “genocide” against Palestinians. Their response calls to mind an event of nearly 50 years ago.
In 1970, the most famous American classical musician of the 20th century — Leonard Bernstein, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic and a major composer (“West Side Story,” operas, etc.) — along with other men of the left, both black and Jewish, threw what probably became the most notorious private fundraiser in American history at his Manhattan penthouse.
The honored guests were the Black Panthers, an America-hating, police-hating radical Black group, a sort-of predecessor to BLM. In the words of liberal writer Adam Gopnik in the latest issue of The New Yorker, the Panthers were “mindlessly cruel, misogynistic gangsters, capable of acts of torture and murder … ”
Here is how Panther leader “Field Marshall” Don Cox began the evening:
“We call [the police] pigs. … We recognize that this country is the most oppressive country in the world, maybe in the history of the world. The pigs have the weapons and they are ready to use them on the people. … They are ready to commit genocide against those who stand up against them.”
Bernstein did not express a word of protest, let alone end the fundraiser, after hearing police labeled “pigs” and America labeled “the most oppressive country in the world.” In fact, Bernstein (who, to make the parallels even sharper, was very pro-Israel) pledged his entire fee for conducting the opera “Cavalleria Rusticana” to the Panthers. Four other prominent Jews — film director Otto Preminger, lyricist Sheldon Harnick (“Fiddler on the Roof”), lyricist and composer Burton Lane (“Finian’s Rainbow”) and renowned art dealer Richard Feigen — then made their pledges.
Prior to the Bernstein event, another Jew in the arts, film director and producer Sidney Lumet, also threw a party for the Black Panthers at his home.
As New York Magazine reported:
“Ray ‘Masai’ Hewitt, the Panthers’ Minister of Education and member of the Central Committee … laid it on the line. … If buildings were burned and other violence ensued, that was only part of the struggle that the power structure had forced the oppressed minorities into.”
No country in history has treated its Jewish citizens as well as the United States has, yet left-wing Jews have supported almost every left-wing group that depicts America as an oppressor (and as war-mongering, imperialist, systemically racist, etc.).
But this love for the left has never been reciprocated. The left (not traditional liberals, it must be noted) has been Jew-hating (and later, Israel-hating) throughout its history.
Jews adored Karl Marx for well over a century, but that grandson of two Orthodox rabbis wrote one of the most influential anti-Semitic books of the 19th century (“On the Jewish Question”).
Shortly before he died last year, Robert Wistrich, the head of Hebrew University’s Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, wrote a devastating book on left-wing anti-Semitism (“From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel”).
And one of America’s most prominent liberals, professor Alan Dershowitz, has just written an article titled “Are Jews Who Refuse to Renounce Israel Being Excluded From ‘Progressive’ Groups?”
Professor Dershowitz’s answer is, of course, yes. The “progressive groups” cited in the Dershowitz article have contempt for America — and America-hatred and Israel-hatred always go together.
“Last year,” Dershowitz wrote, “Rabbi Susan Talve, a longtime activist on race issues in the St. Louis area, was told that her advocacy for Israel was incompatible with the objectives of Black Lives Matter: ‘Solidarity from Ferguson to Palestine has become a central tenet of the movement’ she was informed, because ‘Israeli and U.S. state oppression are deeply interconnected.’
“Similarly,” Dershowitz noted, “a student who attended a Black Lives Matter rally at Northwestern University last year was told, ‘you support Israel, so you cannot also support us.’ ”
Dershowitz then lists other major left-wing groups that are anti-Israel:
“MoveOn, CodePink, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter [have] become openly opposed to the nation state of the Jewish people.”
And all these groups are supported by left-wing Jews.

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Some Deep Thoughts on ‘War Dogs’

Ann Marlow writes for Tabletmag.com:

The pair of Jewish losers at the heart of the new arms-smuggling serio-comedy ‘War Dogs’ remind us that losers who dream big may be losers, but at least they dream big”

As we’ll learn, Efraim is a shadow of a human being, without the ability to connect to others through friendship, love, or family. Yet he’s also charismatic because he is someone who loves how he spends his time. We’re supposed to identify with David, an attractive nebbish in a pink polo shirt carting a massage table around, but we’re mesmerized by Efraim, loud, crude and one-dimensional though he is.

Efraim and David spend almost all their waking hours in an office that’s basically a desk and a Scarface poster, staring at a U.S. government defense-procurement website and trying to figure out a way for their tiny firm, AEY Inc., to fulfill the contracts too small for established businesses to want to bid on. The movie makes it look like enormous fun. Because their business day begins again at midnight Miami time, morning in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the boundaries of work and play are diffuse. Because of this, and because these guys are in their 20s, there’s a lot of weed smoked and, eventually, coke snorted. It’s not so different from The Social Network, except that Mark Zuckerberg was creating something, and Efraim is just a middleman between arms buyers and sellers.

But the biggest difference between these guys and Silicon Valley is in style. The dudes are Jewish, just like Zuckerberg, but they’re from an insular, probably lower-middle-class Jewish background, while Zuckerberg went to Exeter and spent a couple of years at Harvard. (It seems Diveroli and Packouz are Sephardic.) They could just as well be Italian- or Irish-Americans—anyone who grew up in a tight-knit ethnic enclave, who got seed capital from a guy with a chain of dry cleaners (in real life, apparently, the financier was a Mormon in Utah) not a venture capitalist. Efraim has more in common with Melanie Griffith’s working-class striver from 1988’s Working Girl than with the privileged wonks of The Social Network; he was kicked out of high school after ninth grade and was just 18 when he started AEY. (The movie has them the same age, early 20, but David is really four years older.)

Of course, Efraim isn’t meant to be a role model. He’s open about his use of prostitutes; in fact, he’s unable to imagine any other kind of relationship with a woman. When he sees a girl he likes in a nightclub, he offers her $1,000 to blow him in his car, saying, “Why don’t we pretend we’ve had the three dates.” (Her boyfriend saunters by and decks him.) There are signs early on that Efraim’s also unable to be the “best friend” to David that he claims.

The two men get a huge, historic ammunition contract—but they make a sloppy mistake, and their comeuppance is only a matter of time. And as the business expands, Efraim spends more time doing cocaine and becomes suspicious and mean. We sense his unraveling in a scene of a trainee orientation. At the end of his spiel, Efraim asks if the trainees have any questions. “What does AEY stand for?” one guy asks. Efraim says, “It doesn’t stand for anything. Like IBM. Does IBM stand for anything?” The trainee says, “Well, actually it does. It stands for International Business Machines.” And Efraim shouts at him, “Get the fuck out of my office!” Then, “Anyone else have a question?” Silence. That bullying moment is, in fact, pure Trump. And you know then that Efraim is killing his newborn company…

War Dogs doesn’t offer any easy answers; the potential happy ending for David comes with moral ambiguity. Everything costs something. But the movie forces us to ask: Why not try for the big time, whatever that means to you?

I would have thought the message was don’t cheat people because people remember when they’ve been ripped off. And if they’ve been ripped off by Jews, they may well hold their resentment against all Jews.

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