On October 28, 2004, Andrea Mackris, then a 33-year-old Fox News producer on the cusp of a promising career, didn’t want to accept her boss Bill O'Reilly's offer to settle her sexual harassment lawsuit against him for $9 million.
The money, along with a draconian non-disclosure agreement that Mackris said she has no memory of being shown until more than a decade later, was designed to buy her eternal silence about her headline-making lawsuit’s allegations. Backed up by audio recordings of O’Reilly’s late-night phone calls, the suit detailed the Fox News star’s persistent and menacing verbal assaults during her nearly four years of working for him. They included unwelcome demands for phone sex and mutual masturbation, as well as O’Reilly’s infamous alleged fantasy of soaping her down in the shower with either a “loofah” or a “falafel thing.”
Mackris recalled to The Daily Beast for the first time intimate and graphic details of O'Reilly’s alleged harassment, including lewd, menacing telephone calls and conversations in which she says he forced her to listen to his sexual fantasies about her. “I’m going to make you play," O’Reilly would tell Mackris. “Here was my boss, a man who held my career and future in his hands, acknowledging that he knew I’d never consented but he didn’t care,” Mackris said.
After the settlement of the Mackris lawsuit, O’Reilly continued to thrive at Fox News for more than a dozen years as management rewarded him with increasingly lucrative contracts while he co-authored a series of popular history books published by Macmillan, and even made multiple friendly television appearances alongside Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. That is, until his record of sexual misconduct and multimillion-dollar payouts to his victims finally caught up with him in a New York Times investigation that forced a reluctant Rupert Murdoch to cut O’Reilly loose with a statement praising him as “one of the most accomplished TV personalities in the history of cable news,” plus a $25 million golden parachute.
But even now, O’Reilly is by most accounts flourishing as the star of his eponymous subscription-supported streaming service, hosting a weeknight radio show on New York’s WABC, periodically appearing on Chris Ruddy’s Newsmax and Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and continues to be celebrated as a broadcasting legend, as in a recent podcast interview by Talkers magazine publisher Michael Harrison.
By contrast, Mackris, who was forced to give up her Fox News job as part of her lawsuit’s resolution, has lived a life mostly of quiet desperation, in which the settlement check has surely provided financial security and a degree of solace, but in the end hasn’t eased her struggle to obtain work in a profession she loved.
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