While Megyn Kelly played a key role in the investigation into her then boss, Roger Ailes, after he was accused of sexual harassment last summer by her colleague Gretchen Carlson, the Fox News anchor has stayed silent on the subject. Even after Ailes resigned from the network in July, and Fox settled with Carlson for $20 million, Kelly has remained quiet in public, reportedly saving her version of the story for her forthcoming book, Settle for More, due out on November 15. (Ailes has repeatedly denied all wrongdoing.)
On Thursday, several explosive details of Kelly’s account leaked online. According to RadarOnline.com, which allegedly obtained a copy of Settle for More, Ailes told Kelly multiple times that he could advance her career in “exchange for sexual favors” and made “physical advances on her.”
“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 alleges, according to Radar.
Kelly says she rejected every advance, but her former boss “crossed a new line” in 2006, when he allegedly grabbed her and tried to kiss her on the lips. “He asked me an ominous question, ‘When is your contract up?’ And then, for the third time, he tried to kiss me.” (On Monday, Vanity Fair’s Sarah Ellison reported that Fox News has offered its biggest star north of $20 million a year to stay at the network.)
She writes that she reported him to a supervisor, and the harassment stopped after six months. But she decided to come forward when she heard Carlson’s allegations, even though she knew there might be professional fallout from her decision. “Crossing him was a major risk,” she writes in the book, according to Radar. “But what if—God forbid—he was still doing it to someone?”
Radar says Kelly called Lachlan Murdoch, co-chairman of 21st Century Fox, directly, and told him and the firm’s general counsel about Ailes’s behavior. Afterward, she participated in the internal investigation launched by the company and, as Ellison has reported, urged her colleagues to come forward, as well.
A representative for Ailes said that he “denies her allegations of sexual harassment or misconduct of any kind” and pointed to a 2015 video in which Kelly praised Ailes, describing him being “nothing but good to me.” A representative for Kelly is not commenting on the book until its publication date.
