Are Roger Ailes’ days numbered? The eccentric chairman of Fox News has always had his quirks – there was his war with a 16-page local tabloid in his home of Philipstown, New York. There are his office windows, allegedly combat-hardened against possible attack by gay terrorists – the network denied this. And there’s his occasional choice of talent who chase off lucrative advertisers.

Now, many are asking whether his latest scandal, over a lawsuit alleging extensive and protracted sexual harassment of the former Fox & Friends anchor Gretchen Carlson, will be the end of his career. Late Friday, Ailes’ lawyers tried to force the case into closed arbitration, arguing that it was an employment dispute that fell under the terms of her contract and should to be handled away from prying eyes. Carlson is suing Ailes directly, not the network.

But as of Saturday, half a dozen more women have come forward, alleging a pattern of abuse across Ailes’ career.

Gabriel Sherman, chronicler of Ailes’ TV work from the Nixon administration to the present day, has suggested that the chairman of Fox News’s “luck may have finally expired”; Carlson’s lawyer Nancy Erika Smith told the Guardian that allegations of Ailes’s misconduct from even more women are forthcoming.

Others have spoken anonymously about behavior similar to the descriptions of Ailes in the lawsuit, and on Saturday, Sherman published firsthand accounts of six more women who said Ailes had tried to coerce them into sex. Kellie Boyle, a former Republican National Convention field adviser, told him that Ailes had told her he would be her “friend” and help her career for sexual favors. Boyle said she asked Ailes, “‘Would I have to be friends with anybody else?’ And he said, ‘Well you might have to give a blowjob every once in a while.’”

Another woman, a former model who used a pseudonym, said she was 16 at the time of Ailes’ advances.

One of Ailes’ attorneys, Barry Asen, rejected the accusations in a statement. “It has become obvious that Ms Carlson and her lawyer are desperately attempting to litigate this in the press because they have no legal case to argue,” he said. “The latest allegations, all 30 to 50 years old, are false.”

Not to be outdone, Smith immediately hit back. “Barry Asen, Ailes’ lawyer, accused Gretchen of ‘litigating in the press’ and, without any investigation, within three hours, claimed that the allegations are false,” she said. “How does he know that? Women have the right to speak out – whether Ailes likes it or not – even about trauma they endured years ago and that haunts them to this day.”



“Bullying and threats will not silence these brave women,” she wrote.

If Ailes were to bow to external pressure, it would be a first. “Roger Ailes always survives,” said Andrew Tyndall, of the the Tyndall Report, a TV news industry newsletter. Anyone expecting the public to suddenly turn on Ailes in a way it hasn’t before is likely to be disappointed, Tyndall said, adding that part of Fox News’s classic-TV appeal is a re-creation of the permissive atmosphere that has historically made life unbearable for women in entertainment.

“People talk a lot about how [the network] is right-leaning and how it’s conservative, but a lot of that comes from unreconstructed, pre-feminist stereotypes,” Tyndall said. “Ailes is accused of performing male chauvinist sexual behavior; that’s part and parcel of the Fox brand. No one is shocked that his attitude toward women would be gross.”

The primary charge laid at Ailes’ feet is that he demanded sex from Carlson and cited her refusal in discussions of her business relationship with the network. There are many other indignities listed in the suit – some attributed to Steve Doocy, one of Carlson’s closest coworkers for many years – and it will likely be the merits of those accusations that determine the magnitude of the fallout, rather than a widespread uprising against sexism among Fox News viewers.

Rupert Murdoch with Roger Ailes in 2007. Photograph: Louis Lanzano/AP/PA Photos

But if Ailes is a master of media culture to such an extent that he’s invulnerable to cultural attack, his relationships within the broader Fox family may be of greater concern, and not just with Carlson. In January, Sherman reported that Rupert Murdoch, co-chairman of 21st Century Fox, which owns the network, had materialized in the Fox News daily executive meetings, where he sat quietly, casting a long shadow. By the end of the month, Murdoch had departed, making it known internally that the odd Fox-Trump feud brewing at the time was the problem of that network’s brass, not his.

Then there is the coolness between Ailes and the younger Murdochs, James and Lachlan, who were promoted last year to CEO and executive co-chairman, respectively. Lachlan’s position is coequal with his father’s, but when his elevation came, Ailes put out his own press release saying he’d only report to Murdoch. The Murdochs clarified things in a second release contradicting Ailes’ own.

If 21st Century Fox has a quality that separates it from the other news companies, it’s lack of sentiment. Cable television, done right, is monstrously lucrative – networks receive a payout per subscriber from every company distributing their channel, and Fox News is in more than 94m homes. That payout is usually in the low double-digit cents – for many years the industry average was a quarter, though it has fallen since – but 25 cents multiplied by 50m, for every month of the year, is $150m all by itself.

According to the analytics firm SNL Kagan, Fox News’s average subscriber fee is more than a dollar. That means 21st Century makes at least $1.13bn in passive income from the network before it sells a single advertisement.



Not even Ailes’ harshest critic could credit that success to anyone but the man himself. The network is lean, as well: its highest-rated shows tend to be the work of cheaply produced panel discussions or talented solo acts – Bill O’Reilly has a solid broadcast TV background, but he’s also an experienced talk radio host, as is Sean Hannity.

Ailes makes sure his talent is well compensated, and he enjoys theatrical gestures of support: he gave NPR’s Juan Williams a $2m contract when the radio network fired him after Williams said, as a guest on Fox News, that he didn’t like sitting near Muslims on airplanes. The upshot, until now, has been a cost-effective team of deeply loyal anchors and reporters.

But Carlson’s suit has created a rift. Greta van Susteren, one of the network’s primetime hosts, called Carlson “disgruntled” and the timing of her accusation “suspicious”; another host at the network, Jeanine Pirro, said: “I don’t know that she, the plaintiff, even has a friend in that building.” Fox’s in-house media commentator, Howard Kurtz, has been silent on air, though he posted a brief story online quoting sparely from the suit and widely from Ailes’ own statement and positive things Carlson had said about the network over the years.

Still more women are expected to come forward. Smith told the Guardian several women had come forward to discuss Ailes’ behavior from jobs long past, some dating back decades. At Fox, “[t]he stuff about showing of the legs – that was not even a secret – that was open company policy,” one former staffer told the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove.



21st Century has announced an inquiry into Ailes’ behavior. If Lachlan and James are looking for a way to shuffle the 76-year-old network head into retirement, they may have found it. Ailes is one of television’s impresarios, an executive who legendarily micromanages his product, and if he goes, the network will be a radically different place.