The “Fox and Friends” host Gretchen Carlson recently filed a sexual-harassment lawsuit against Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News. Photograph by Slaven Vlasic / Getty

In early July, after the Fox News host Gretchen Carlson had filed a sexual-harassment lawsuit against Roger Ailes, the network’s chairman, but before a number of other women said that they, too, had been harassed by him—and long before reports emerged that Ailes was negotiating an exit under pressure—Fox resorted to a familiar tactic in such cases. It made available to the press notes that Carlson had written to Ailes after the alleged incidents had taken place. The notes were handwritten, and in one case included a smiley face. They read like the communications of an ambitious person trying to ingratiate herself with a powerful boss she knows has soured on her. “Thank you for offering me the opportunity to host the West Point Choir Christmas Special," she wrote on November 11, 2015. “Maybe for the next Fox debates, you could incorporate my experience, smarts and wit—on stage—or doing the FoxNews.com analysis after. I know I wouldn’t let you down.” In other notes, Carlson, a Stanford graduate and former Miss America, talks about what a hard worker and a loyal employee she has been, cites her ideas for prime-time specials and her desire to substitute for the Fox anchors Megyn Kelly** **and Greta Van Susteren, and mentions she has been invited by a member of Congress to speak “at a conference of inspirational women.” She’s leaning in, but it’s too late. The West Point Choir special is not a good sign.

Dredging up evidence of continued contact between a harasser and his accuser is a common maneuver—going back at least to the Clarence Thomas hearings, when his defenders pointed out that Anita Hill had followed Thomas, her boss, from the Department of Education to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and stayed in touch with him over the years. That kind of accommodating behavior can be puzzling when viewed from the outside, even for people who are inclined to be sympathetic to the accuser. But the truth is that women have been known to put up with sexual harassment at work for many reasons: because they want to avoid the career-trashing labels of “whiner” or “troublemaker”; because they’re trying to deal with it on their own; because they worry about the fallout in their personal lives; because, when the person’s not harassing them, he may be encouraging them, sometimes more than anyone else in the workplace; because they have families to support and can’t afford to lose a job.

Some harassees are perfect victims—they cleanly and clearly refuse all propositions and call out all inappropriate comments, do not suffer any setbacks at work that might be construed as their own fault rather than retribution, and then file an amply documented complaint with the correct authority in a non-vindictive spirit. But many are like the rest of us, to varying degrees scared, ambivalent, embarrassed, reluctant to harm someone we might in some ways like and admire.

Some harassers are probably the perfect villains—Dabney Coleman in the movie “9 to 5,” chasing his female employees around the desk like a crazed circus bear. If the allegations against Ailes are true, he will have come fairly close—an old-fashioned quid-pro-quo harasser who conditioned advancement on providing sexual favors. In Carlson’s suit, she claims that at a meeting with Ailes in September, at which she was hoping to discuss what she said was her discriminatory treatment at Fox, the seventy-six-year-old Ailes told her, “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago, and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better.” (The weird specificity of that repeated phrase, “good and better,” seems worth pointing out, if only because it would have been hard to make up.) The suit alleges a number of other offenses by Ailes—including “ogling Carlson in his office and asking her to turn around so he could view her posterior” and asking her how she felt about him, followed by the question “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” Many harassers are a lot less boorish.

In a statement to the press, Ailes denied the allegations, saying, "This is a retaliatory suit for the network's decision not to renew [Carlson’s] contract, which was due to the fact that her disappointingly low ratings were dragging down the afternoon lineup. When Fox News did not commence any negotiations to renew her contract, Ms. Carlson became aware that her career with the network was likely over and conveniently began to pursue a lawsuit." But the moment her Fox career seemed to have ended is precisely when someone in her position might file a suit, and not unreasonably. She might think, or hope, that she could quietly refuse sexual propositions and keep her job, until it became clear she couldn’t—that she was in fact dealing with a quid-pro-quo arrangement.

It seems legitimate to question why women don’t speak up earlier or cut off contact with their harassers—we learn something about the dynamic by asking, and in some cases the answers may reveal fault lines in their story. But that’s not the same as blaming them for maintaining contact, let alone assuming they’re lying if they did.

Still, the women at Fox News do make a particular bargain. In theory, of course, sexual harassers can be found in any workplace, but it’s easy to believe that they would flourish at a company where the fetishization of hot female news presenters is part of the business model. It isn’t just that Fox hires attractive women as news anchors—that’s a given on any network—but that the management apparently discourages those women from wearing pants, and has them seated so their legs are shown to maximum advantage, in almost uniformly short skirts. And then, not infrequently, their male co-hosts point that out. “If those legs of yours were a foot shorter, do you think you’d be here?” the former host Bob Beckel asked one of the Fox women, Kimberly Guilfoyle, in 2014. A video montage put together by Bloomberg Politics shows Carlson deflecting comments about her appearance and her role from her male “Fox and Friends” co-hosts over the years (“bra stories: defer to the babe,” referring to her as a “skirt”) with a mixture of flirtatious banter and what looks like exasperation. Fox News makeup artists are known for producing a homogeneous beauty-pageant look, not only for the anchors but also for women who come on to offer their expertise—Middle East scholars, for example, as the journalist Liza Mundy pointed out in a 2012 article for The Atlantic. Meli Pennington, a makeup artist and blogger Mundy interviewed, described the way the Fox-lady look appealed to male viewers, especially older ones: “You think of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends. As he got older, they all get brighter and blonder. Look at Anna Nicole Smith. It’s like the large-print edition of women.” The network’s frequent gimmick, as a number of Fox observers, including Gabriel Sherman, the author of a biography of Ailes, have pointed out, is to pair grumpy older men with sexy young women.

In the Fox News world, not playing along with all of this would presumably mean you may had donned the straitjacket of political correctness—the dreaded force that also leads to the War on Christmas. (That’s been a big issue of Carlson’s.) Complaining about something like sexism would make you worse than a bad sport or even an uptight bitch—it would make you a political apostate, part of what’s wrong with America.

Yet, even in that atmosphere, Carlson’s complaint couldn’t quite be ignored. Fox took it seriously enough to hire an outside law firm to conduct an independent investigation. And now it seems clear, based on a number of reports this week, that Ailes is on his way out, after thirty years, pushed by James and Lachlan Murdoch, the sons of Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News’s parent company. As the Washington Post reported today, “The Murdoch sons, eager to assert authority over their father’s vast media and entertainment holdings, were reportedly at odds with Ailes long before Carlson’s suit emerged, and their efforts to dump Ailes hint at the degree of their animus.” It’s hard to imagine a cultural revolution at Fox that would truly upend the gender politics there, but it’s significant that Megyn Kelly, a power at the network who has a reputation for being a bit of a feminist, in the Fox context anyway, is now reportedly on the record as one of Ailes’s accusers. This week the large print is in the headlines about Ailes and his likely ouster from the brand he built.