President Donald Trump said Bill O’Reilly should not have settled the lawsuits against him. The two are pictured in 2012 at a New York Yankees game. | Getty Trump calls Bill O’Reilly a ‘good person’ amid harassment revelations

President Donald Trump called Bill O’Reilly a “good person” who did nothing wrong in an interview Wednesday with The New York Times, jumping to the defense of one of his most vocal media supporters despite revelations that Fox News and the host have reached settlements with five women who accused him of harassment.

Trump said O’Reilly should not have settled with the women who accused him. Details of the incidents were published last weekend by the Times.


“He’s a person I know well — he is a good person,” Trump told a pair of Times reporters in an Oval Office interview. “I think he shouldn’t have settled; personally, I think he shouldn’t have settled… Because you should have taken it all the way. I don’t think Bill did anything wrong.”

Two of the five settlements detailed by the Times were previously known. Taken together, they represent payments of roughly $13 million from either O’Reilly or Fox News’s parent company, 21st Century Fox. More than 20 advertisers have pulled out of O’Reilly’s top-rated Fox News show, where praise for Trump is frequent, as a result of the report.

Trump, too, has faced allegations of sexual assault. During last year’s presidential campaign, the Times published the accounts of a woman who said the president had groped her breast and attempted to put his hand up her skirt when the two were seated next to one another in the first class cabin of a flight in the 1980s.

In a separate allegation that appeared in People magazine, writer Natasha Stoynoff said that during a 2005 visit to the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort for a story on his recent wedding to Melania Trump, Trump pinned her against a wall and forcibly kissed her.

Trump has denied each of the allegations against him.