Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly alleges in her forthcoming book that former network boss Roger Ailes sexually harassed her soon after she joined the network in 2004, according to media reports.
A person familiar with Kelly’s upcoming memoir, “Settle for More,” verified passages on the alleged sexual harassment to The Wall Street Journal that were first reported by Radar Online.
Radar reported that in the passages, Kelly accused Ailes of making several unwanted sexual advances toward her when she was working as a Washington correspondent for the network, including trapping her in his office for a “cat and mouse game.”
“Roger began pushing the limits,” she wrote, as quoted by Radar. “There was a pattern to his behavior. I would be called into Roger’s office, he would shut the door, and over the next hour or two, he would engage in a kind of cat-and-mouse game with me — veering between obviously inappropriate sexually charged comments (e.g. about the ‘very sexy bras’ I must have and how he’d like to see me in them) and legitimate professional advice.”
Kelly alleged that Ailes promised her career perks in return for “sexual favors,” and that he tried “physical advances,” according to the Radar report. Once, she wrote, he tried to kiss her and she pushed him away, prompting him to threaten her future at the network.
When she rejected him, she wrote, “he asked me an ominous question: ‘When is your contract up?’ And then, for the third time, he tried to kiss me.”
Kelly, whose current contract with Fox is up in July 2017, wrote that the alleged harassment stopped after about six months, around the same time she reported Ailes’ behavior to a supervisor, Radar reported.
She went on to say that when fired Fox host Gretchen Carlson filed an explosive sexual harassment complaint against Ailes this summer, he pressured Kelly and other women at the network to speak out in support of him. According to Radar, Kelly wrote that she repeatedly refused to do so because “there was no way I was going to lie to protect him.”
Ailes resigned from the network in July, amid mounting allegations of sexual harassment that he had strenuously denied through his lawyers. After he resigned, the network settled with Carlson for $20 million and issued her a rare apology. Fox remains embroiled in a legal battle with former Fox host Andrea Tantaros, who also alleges Ailes harassed her.
A spokesman for Fox declined to comment to the Wall Street Journal on Kelly’s book. An anonymous source told the newspaper that the chapter outlining Ailes’ alleged harassment was a late addition to Kelly’s book, which is expected to hit bookshelves on Nov. 15.
