(VANITY FAIR) It has been exactly two months since Gretchen Carlson, a former Fox News anchor, sued her old boss, Roger Ailes, for sexual harassment. The suit inaugurated a frenetic series of events, not only within Fox News’s subterranean newsroom—where staffers feared for their jobs and, in one case, even the network’s future—but also throughout the media, as other women came forward to share their own stories of harassment. It all resulted in Ailes’s dramatic, and nearly mind-boggling, ouster from the news network that he co-founded 20 years ago. (Ailes has repeatedly, and fervently, denied all allegations of sexual harassment.)
On Friday, Ailes biographer and New York writer Gabriel Sherman, who has broken key elements of the story, published a lengthy cover article detailing Ailes’s downfall. As I have reported, Ailes’s own apparent paranoia increased around the time that Sherman began reporting his unauthorized biography, which was published in early 2014. According to a person close to Ailes, he hung a wooden door, now dismantled, that obscured any view into his office suite; according to numerous people, he also recorded anyone who entered. Ailes kept guns in the office (a Glock and Smith & Wesson were discovered by 21st Century Fox after his ouster). Carlson and others, including former Fox News booker Laurie Luhn, also detailed Ailes’s alleged harassment, much of it outlined by Sherman in his coverage.
