I. “Leave Him Alone”

In the morning of July 6, James and Lachlan Murdoch were on opposite sides of Sun Valley, Idaho. Lachlan was finishing a workout at the decidedly downtown Ketchum YMCA. James was hiking down a bike trail after attending an early-morning session at the annual Allen & Co. conference. Every July, the conference jams the small Friedman Memorial Airport with the Gulfstream jets of the world’s media and technology billionaires, who gather in the ski town to negotiate their own preservation. James and Lachlan had both attended the conference before, but they were always in the shadow of their father, Rupert Murdoch. This year was different. For the first time, they were there on their own terms, at least for the moment, and it might have felt as if they were finally operating by their own rules.

At a little after 10 A.M., Mountain time, Lachlan pulled out his cell phone and dialed Julie Henderson, the executive vice president and chief communications officer at 21st Century Fox, the Murdoch family company, to check in. “Have you seen the suit?” she asked. “What suit?” he replied. Henderson explained that Gretchen Carlson, a former co-host of Fox & Friends, had sued Roger Ailes personally for sexual harassment.

Lachlan dialed James, who had been named C.E.O. of 21st Century Fox a little more than a year earlier. Lachlan, the older of the two, had contented himself with the role of executive co-chairman of Fox and co-chairman of its sister company, News Corp. “Have you seen the lawsuit against Roger?,” Lachlan asked. James had not. The brothers had been rivals much of their lives, vying for the attention and good opinion of their father, the founder and executive chairman of both companies. The relationship between Rupert, who is now 85, and his sons could be complicated. It could also be oddly corporate. It took a meal at the Allen conference in July 2013 for the three men to get together and hammer out how they would all share power at the top of the Murdoch companies. Rupert always did what he thought made sense for the business, and the sons sometimes ended up as collateral damage. Lachlan, for instance, had left for Australia in 2005 after Rupert sided with Ailes over his son in a Fox Television dispute. Rupert had always been protective of the boys, but it was not always clear that they were his top priority.

Now, unexpectedly, the sons were facing a test together: one of their father’s closest deputies was being accused of a very serious offense. The brothers had a long and fractious relationship with this man. James’s wife, Kathryn Murdoch, found Ailes particularly distasteful. When their promotions had been announced, in 2015, Ailes had publicly said that he would continue reporting directly to Rupert, only to be brought up short: he would, in fact, have to report to Rupert’s sons. And at this moment, in July, as a crisis arose, Rupert himself was unavailable: he was in the air, on his way back from France, where he had been spending time on his boat in the Mediterranean with his fourth wife, Jerry Hall. What came next proved easier to accomplish because Rupert Murdoch was not immediately there to weigh in.

James and Lachlan agreed to meet back at the Sun Valley Resort, just north of Dollar Mountain, where they were staying, courtesy of Allen & Co. Julie Henderson forwarded the lawsuit to them and to Gerson Zweifach, the general counsel of 21st Century Fox, who was at his desk in New York. By Murdoch standards, Zweifach was a new hire. He had joined the company in 2012, lured away from Williams & Connolly as Murdoch desperately sought help in containing the phone-hacking scandal in Britain, which was enveloping his newspapers there. The group arranged a conference call. Zweifach then contacted Fox News to ask about the circumstances of Carlson’s departure. He didn’t know Carlson or many of the other personalities at Fox News, which operated with great autonomy within the broader media conglomerate. Part of the reason for that was the nature of Murdoch’s laissez-faire approach to management, but part of it was also the nature of Roger Ailes, who fiercely guarded his business and his control over it. “Leave him alone,” Rupert used to say about Ailes, according to a former top executive. “He knows what he’s doing.”

Zweifach quickly learned that Carlson’s contract had expired and was not being renewed. Carlson herself had learned this summarily only on June 23. She had come off the set of her show, The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson, and been called into a meeting with Fox News general counsel Dianne Brandi and Bill Shine, a senior executive vice president. Since then, the company had heard nothing—until the lawsuit. The silence was a warning to anyone versed in corporate escape routes. Typically, if someone is trying to simply negotiate a better severance from a company on the way out the door, the person will engage in a negotiation over terms before filing suit. Carlson hadn’t done that, a sign that her intentions were more complicated, and possibly included deep anger and a desire to expose certain facts to public view. In fact, Carlson had been speaking to her attorney, Nancy Erika Smith, of the firm Smith Mullin, about her treatment at Fox and a possible suit against Ailes, since the fall of 2015. She had spent the past year gathering evidence by surreptitiously recording a number of conversations with Ailes. She hadn’t been planning to actually file until September 2016, but by not renewing the contract Fox News had inadvertently sped up the time-table. Carlson quickly called her attorney, who was recovering from surgery on a hamstring. They rushed to ready their legal action.

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The unexpected events of that July 6 morning in Sun Valley would call to action an army of lawyers and advisers on various sides of the fault lines that ran through the relationships among Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Rupert Murdoch’s sons. These three parties had coexisted, not always happily, for years, and the lawsuit of one woman was about to unleash forces that had long been held in check. This account includes the perspective of most of the people involved, either directly or through intermediaries.

II. The Strategy

By 12:30 P.M., Eastern time, James, Lachlan, Zweifach, and Henderson were on the conference call. The conversation lasted only about a minute and a half. Zweifach suggested that, rather than simply standing behind Ailes and letting the suit play out, the company should conduct an internal investigation and chart its own course. The brothers quickly agreed. Nobody mentioned the decade-long phone-hacking scandal in Britain, where a strategy of cover-up and stonewalling had finally erupted into a full-blown existential crisis for Murdoch’s News Corp. James Murdoch was hauled with his father in front of a committee of Parliament to answer for the company’s alleged misdeeds. Shareholders sued Rupert Murdoch and other board members. News Corp. was cleaved in two: 21st Century Fox, which encompassed Fox Television, the 20th Century Fox movie studios, and Fox News; and News Corp., which kept the Murdoch newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, along with the HarperCollins book-publishing business.

On this first, short phone call about the situation at Fox News, nobody made any extraneous comments about Ailes, but they didn’t have to. Ailes was a famously involved manager who handpicked the talent he wanted and then dictated to them what they would say on the air and how they would say it. His crude and cavalier behavior toward women was well known inside the company. “Turn around and give me a spin” was Ailes’s frequent greeting for Fox News’s female personalities. A step further was: “Does Rupert know you’re more than just a hot blonde?,” as he is said to have once asked a female executive. To another woman, when she was pregnant, he allegedly said, “I could tell. You know how I could tell? Because your breasts look big.” What Carlson was alleging—outlined in great detail—was much worse. In one meeting in September 2015, when she complained about the discriminatory treatment she said she had suffered, Ailes said to her, according to her suit, “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.” (When asked about these and other details, Susan Estrich, the lawyer Ailes hired to lead his defense against Carlson’s suit, replied, “Virtually all of the information implicit in your questions is false. You are relying on inaccurate rumors, innuendo, and flat-out wrong assumptions and sources.”)

Zweifach had been brought in as general counsel specifically to make sure that nothing like the phone-hacking scandal ever threatened the company again. Launching an internal investigation was a change from the way things had been done in London. But the biggest difference was that Rupert Murdoch was no longer the only one in charge: his sons had started making decisions without him. In this moment, they may have sensed an opportunity, which they may also have seen as an obligation. The brothers had intervened in a close relationship involving their father at least once before: they had confronted Rupert about Wendi Deng, his third wife—bringing up her treatment of him and her suspected flirtations with former British prime minister Tony Blair, among others. Rupert, visiting Lachlan, had on one occasion voiced some suspicions about Wendi’s fidelity, and Lachlan shot back, “Of course she’s cheating, Dad. Everyone knows that but you.” (Blair has denied any affair with Deng.) The sons together approached Rupert with a dossier they had compiled on Wendi.

Rupert’s absence from Sun Valley when the crucial first phone call was made would have serious implications for Ailes, who for 20 years had always had Rupert watching his back. The brothers e-mailed their father with the news of the lawsuit while he was still in the air, but they didn’t tell him about the internal investigation until he joined them in Sun Valley. The senior Murdoch and Ailes had worked together to create Fox News. But with Murdoch less centrally in the picture, his sons quickly made the decision not to throw the company’s weight behind Ailes but to do the exact opposite. Launching an internal investigation—focused on Ailes rather than broadly on the entire culture of Fox News—could be like a drone strike. It offered the chance to remove the leader while leaving virtually everything else, including $1.5 billion a year in profits, more or less intact. Lachlan and Rupert spoke to Ailes by phone that afternoon. Ailes professed his innocence and, according to a person familiar with the conversations, seemed open to the idea of an investigation. “I have nothing to hide,” he told them.

One factor behind the decision to launch an investigation was that it offered protection from confrontation. “For the first time we were united,” said a person close to the brothers. “Why? Because it was Roger Ailes.” Under the best of circumstances Ailes was hard to handle. One former colleague describes him as “batshit crazy” even in normal moments. Looking back, this colleague said, everyone who knew Ailes knew that “he would go to a whole new level of crazy” over the Carlson lawsuit. An internal investigation created a buffer as the company explored the allegations. “There couldn’t be any one person” who would deal with Ailes or talk to him about the charges, the colleague added. “Nobody could serve as the tip of the spear.” Everyone on the conference call knew that Ailes in his prime was a better street fighter than all of them put together. A faceless law firm gathering information would give them cover: there would be no one for Ailes to hit back at. The decision to investigate Ailes, rather than simply defend him, put the events of the next two weeks on an irreversible path. “Everything flowed from that,” said the colleague.

Another factor driving the decision-making was the need to move quickly: the Republican convention, which for Fox News amounts to the Super Bowl, was kicking off in Cleveland on July 18—in 12 days. The imminence of the convention highlighted the stakes of what the Murdoch brothers had just done: they had put at risk Ailes’s incredibly lucrative years at the Murdoch family company. Going after Ailes, as daunting as it may have seemed, might also have been the easiest part. When the call was over, Henderson began drafting a statement of the kind that is meant to buy time. When finally issued, it would express “full confidence” in Ailes. It would go on to say that the company took the allegations “seriously” and was initiating an internal review.

III. Advice from Trump

Roger Ailes was not in the office on July 6, the day Carlson’s suit was filed. He had grown increasingly secretive in recent years. Some colleagues described him as distracted by perceived attacks; others said he was more paranoid than he’d ever been. Many noticed that Ailes’s physical health had deteriorated. He had started to walk with a cane, and occasionally with a walker. He had been overweight for years and had lost most of his hair, giving him a mien that detractors likened to that of Jabba the Hutt. Ailes was at his home in suburban Cresskill, New Jersey, when Irena Briganti, his executive vice president of corporate communications, spoke with him about the lawsuit. Carlson’s attorney, Nancy Erika Smith, put out a press release and posted the suit on her firm’s Web site. Smith also sent the suit by e-mail to Barry Asen of Epstein Becker & Green, Fox News’s longtime employment law firm. Despite his apparent physical frailty, Ailes remained robust in his desire to fight Carlson’s claims. He wanted to deny all of the allegations vehemently, and he wanted the company to back him up, as it always had. But Murdoch’s sons had already made a decision, and it was they who were with Rupert in Sun Valley that afternoon.

While Ailes privately said he welcomed an internal investigation, because it would exonerate him, he insisted on being able to put out a statement defending himself. Carlson had sued him personally, specifically to keep the matter out of private arbitration, which would have been the likely result of a suit against the company. Still, Ailes was a company officer, and the company clearly had a stake in the case. The statement by the company—the one Henderson had been drafting—and any statement by Ailes needed to be coordinated. This took hours of negotiation. Peter Johnson Jr., Ailes’s personal attorney, was on the phone from his office on Wall Street, discussing language with Henderson. Ailes would not show Henderson the full version of his own proposed statement until 21st Century Fox handed over its version. For much of the afternoon, Henderson worked with the Ailes camp as well as Zweifach and the Murdochs to come up with language that everyone could live with. Rupert Murdoch insisted on saying that Ailes had served “brilliantly.” But the commitment to an internal investigation remained intact.

Meanwhile, Ailes and his allies began orchestrating a counterattack against Carlson. Ailes and his wife, Beth, took naturally to political warfare. The two had met when Beth was the director of daytime programming at CNBC and Ailes was running that channel. More recently, Ailes had purchased two local newspapers, The Putnam County News and Recorder and The Putnam County Courier, making Beth the publisher of each. Beth was a publisher with the same kind of aggressiveness that Roger Ailes used on a larger stage.

The week of Carlson’s lawsuit, Beth Ailes contacted Kimberly Guilfoyle, a Fox News co-host, to ask her to help rally support. Some people did not need to be encouraged. Greta Van Susteren and Jeanine Pirro, both hosts of their own shows on Fox News, had already offered to speak out. “When I read what was clearly absurdities, in this complaint, I said to myself, ‘How sad that you’ve got this woman who is making these complaints when there are real victims out there,’ ” Pirro told The Wrap. Van Susteren was quoted in People, saying she thought Carlson was a “disgruntled employee.” She added, “I’ve often been alone with Roger Ailes in his office over the course of 15 years and I’ve never seen anything like what I’m reading about.” Brit Hume, a senior political analyst, tweeted, “Here’s another suggestion. Why didn’t she quit & sue instead of suing only after she got fired?”

On Friday, July 8, Ailes held a conference call from Creskill to strategize about his response. He badly needed to organize a war cabinet for the upcoming fight. He was waging a public-relations battle and a legal battle at the same time. Because he had been sued personally, and because 21st Century Fox was not going to automatically defend him, he could not immediately rely on the Fox News apparatus he had put to such effective use in the past. He had to put together a new group of counselors on the fly, one that might draw heavily from his contacts at Fox News but was also personal to him. Ailes had consulted with his longtime friend Donald Trump about the matter, and Trump had suggested that Ailes hire Michael Sirota, a New Jersey–based attorney who specialized in bankruptcy and commercial litigation, and who was a partner at the New Jersey office of the firm Cole Schotz. (Carlson’s suit had been filed in New Jersey Superior Court.) Trump’s suggestion of an attorney of this sort seemed to have more to do with Trump’s worldview than with Roger Ailes’s current peril. Sirota, for his part, suggested that a local public-relations executive, Karen Kessler, join the conversation, as someone who could help make sure Ailes’s legal filings in the Carlson case got positive press attention. But Kessler, according to a source who heard the conversation, “had no sense of Roger whatsoever.” She may have understood him more than she let on. According to another person on the call, Kessler told Ailes that “media people and politicians are our most challenging clients,” because they think they know best how to manage their own media strategy, and they also tend to want to fight every battle. “You are a combination of the two,” Kessler said to Ailes. At one point, Kessler facetiously told him not to worry about the case: “I tell all my clients, just go watch the Golf Channel and relax.” The source who recalled this moment remembers thinking, “Oh my God, honey, you have no idea who you are dealing with.” Kessler was never retained.

Ailes also turned for advice to Arthur Aidala, of the firm Aidala Bertuna & Kamins, who specializes in criminal defense and is also a Fox News commentator on law enforcement and criminal justice. Beth Ailes seemed to have taken a liking to Aidala, and Aidala knew the family well. First off, Aidala advised Ailes not to hire anyone connected with Donald Trump—the optics of being so directly associated with Trump were too unpredictable. Over the weekend, at Ailes’s request, Aidala contacted additional on-air personalities at Fox News and urged them to support Ailes with public statements. “Arthur called all kinds of talent and asked them to speak, and he made it more of a mess,” the source told me. Speaking of Ailes, the source added, “The one thing you could never do was listen to everything he wanted done.”

That Saturday, July 9, New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, who had written an unauthorized biography of Ailes, published a story quoting six additional women who claimed to have been sexually harassed by him. Some of the women’s stories contained similar elements, including alleged requests by Ailes that they wear garter belts when they met with him. All of the women were from Ailes’s pre–Fox News days, and some went back to when Ailes was a producer for The Mike Douglas Show, in the 1960s. Ailes responded immediately, through attorney Barry Asen, who released a statement saying that Carlson and her lawyer were “desperately attempting to litigate this in the press because they have no legal case to argue.” It would be understandable if Asen’s ability to move seamlessly from representing Fox News in employment matters to representing Ailes’s personal interests felt natural. Until now, there had been little distinction between Ailes and the news channel he had created.

On Sunday, July 10, Ailes spoke with Rudy Giuliani, a senior adviser at the firm Greenberg Traurig, and asked for his help. Ailes had been Giuliani’s media adviser during his 1989 campaign for mayor of New York, and Giuliani had officiated at Ailes’s third wedding, to Beth. Giuliani promptly got in touch with Gerson Zweifach, saying that he was calling on behalf of Ailes. Zweifach had already decided to hire the law firm Paul, Weiss to conduct the internal investigation into Ailes’s behavior. According to two executives close to the investigation, Giuliani said that he wanted to participate actively in the investigation. Zweifach refused, telling Giuliani that any such participation could mean that none of the information gathered in the investigation would be privileged, and it could, in effect, allow Gretchen Carlson’s attorney to obtain, through discovery, the testimony of everyone who participated. (A person close to Giuliani disputed this version of events, but offered no specific corrections.)

With Paul, Weiss on board, Zweifach told its lawyers to act fast. There was no time to “get everything off the hard drives, texts, and e-mails,” as one of the executives close to the investigation recalls. The company “wanted to move quickly to preserve the business and do something about the women who may have been victimized.” Moving quickly also had the consequence of limiting the scope of the investigation. This was not to be an open-ended inquiry like the one on Bill Clinton that had produced the Starr Report. It would not look into whether employees at Fox News were regularly spied on and intimidated by superiors; whether demeaning comments about women were something that female employees at Fox News simply had to accept; or whether Rupert Murdoch himself had known anything about Ailes’s behavior. Certain as the Murdoch brothers were that they had to conduct an internal investigation, they were equally certain that they wanted to protect the company they had spent most of their lives learning how to inherit. Their greatest uncertainty may have related to their ability to maintain Ailes’s business success at Fox News.

The lawyers for Paul, Weiss handling the investigation, Michele Hirshman and Ted Wells, asked Zweifach where they should begin. Lachlan Murdoch had received calls from a few of Fox News’s female stars, reporting similar complaints about Ailes. This was an obvious starting point, and 21st Century Fox gave the lawyers from Paul, Weiss a list of top female on-air talent whom they should be sure to question.

IV. “Go Clean This Up!”

Around noon on Monday, July 11, Rudy Giuliani walked out of St. Patrick’s Cathedral into a gorgeous 80-degree summer day. He had been attending the funeral of his friend Peter Powers, who had been his deputy mayor back in the 90s. Walking beside Giuliani was Marc Mukasey, who had become something of a protégé and was the son of Giuliani’s good friend Michael Mukasey, the former U.S. attorney general. It was an emotional day for both men, but they quickly turned their focus to Roger Ailes. They had all known each other a long time. During the 1989 mayoral race, when he was barely out of Dartmouth, Mukasey had delivered doughnuts to Ailes. Now a top attorney at Greenberg Traurig, Mukasey responded to questions about his and Giuliani’s work for Ailes: “Rudy and I provided personal, private legal counsel to Roger, whom we’ve known for years. Our conversations about the matter are private.”

On that Monday, Ailes was back in his second-floor office suite at 1211 Sixth Avenue. Beth was at his side, as she would be nearly nonstop for two weeks. Ailes’s attorneys Peter Johnson Jr. and Barry Asen were there, as was Dianne Brandi, Fox News’s general counsel—a sign that Ailes was not fully detached from the Fox News legal infrastructure. The group was joined by Rosemarie Arnold, a New Jersey–based personal-injury attorney. They strategized about how to fight the Carlson allegations.

That afternoon, Giuliani and Mukasey would be arriving at the Fox News offices, ready to do battle. But first, Zweifach had to introduce Fox News executives to the lawyers conducting the investigation and inform them exactly how it would proceed. He gathered them in a conference room on the third floor. Among those present at the meeting were Ailes’s main deputy, Bill Shine; Fox News’s C.F.O., Mark Kranz; Brandi; and the head of Fox News’s programming, Suzanne Scott. Zweifach introduced them to Hirshman and Wells, the Paul, Weiss attorneys, and told the Fox executives that the staff were expected to be cooperative and candid, and shouldn’t fear any reprisals for speaking up.

Then Zweifach and the lawyers rode the elevator down to the second floor, to Ailes’s office suite. They walked down the hallway and toward the camera Ailes had placed outside his door for reasons of personal protection. Ailes had long been concerned about terrorist attacks and other threats to his personal safety. He also kept two handguns in his office, one Glock and one Smith & Wesson, for which he had a concealed-carry permit. Zweifach met with Giuliani and Mukasey in a conference room adjacent to Ailes’s office. The orchestration of various meetings among conflicting parties, under one roof but in separate offices, introduced an element of surreal stagecraft. According to an executive present at the meeting, Giuliani asked Zweifach, “Why do we need a corporate investigation? Why not just defend the case?” Zweifach responded, referring pointedly to the phone-hacking scandal, “We tried it that way five or six years ago ... and we ended up with a huge case that threatened the company. We are doing it differently this time.”

After about 10 minutes, Ailes lumbered in, accompanied by Peter Johnson. Beth Ailes remained behind. The men discussed the way the investigation would unfold. Throughout, Ailes appeared relaxed. At one point, according to someone familiar with the exchange, one of Ailes’s attorneys said to Zweifach, “Your predecessor wouldn’t have handled it this way.” Zweifach replied, “Maybe that’s why he’s my predecessor.” Ailes laughed.

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Two days later, on July 13, Ailes held a strategy session with his key advisers. Beth Ailes announced that she had reached out to Megyn Kelly twice, to see if she would be willing to issue a statement of support for Roger. Other anchors had spoken out in defense of Ailes against the Carlson allegations, but Kelly had been conspicuously silent. Now she had just sent a text message. Beth Ailes read it aloud, according to a person who was in the room: Kelly was sorry, but she had been advised by the company not to speak publicly about the matter during the investigation, and she could not, therefore, speak out against Carlson. “I hope you understand,” Beth Ailes read, adding that Kelly was being “cold” after all Ailes had done for her. By that time, according to a person familiar with what occurred, Kelly had already spoken to Lachlan Murdoch to report the general dismay among some staff, which she shared, about the pressure to come to Ailes’s aid and paint him as a white knight—pressure she felt was being exerted by Fox stars such as Kimberly Guilfoyle, Bret Baier, and Greta van Susteren.

Over the course of four days that week, the Paul, Weiss lawyers interviewed at least 24 women from Fox News in a conference room on the 29th floor of the law firm’s Midtown Manhattan office, at 51st and Sixth, three blocks away from 21st Century Fox’s headquarters. They heard multiple complaints of sexual harassment involving Ailes, including from some of the highest-profile personalities on Fox News. Megyn Kelly was among them. Several of the women had recorded conversations with Ailes. A number of the accounts told to the investigators shared a distinct similarity. According to three people briefed on the investigation, oral sex was mentioned frequently. The speed of the investigation was striking, but so was the fact that it was narrowly focused: the lawyers at Paul, Weiss had been hired to give legal advice to 21st Century Fox about the company’s liability risk with regard to Roger Ailes’s alleged misconduct. An executive familiar with the internal review told me that all of the women questioned were asked whether sexual harassment at Fox News went beyond Ailes. They all said no, this executive maintained. People I spoke to at Fox News did express skepticism that other senior executives could have been unaware of Ailes’s alleged behavior.

Since the investigation was focused on Ailes and never officially expanded to examine the broader culture of Fox News, there were a lot of things that investigators did not look at. Several women surfaced with complaints that Paul, Weiss had not contacted them about their own stories of Ailes’s harassment. But the law firm’s assignment “was not to find every single individual who had a bad experience with Roger Ailes; it was to provide legal advice on the Gretchen Carlson lawsuit,” a person close to the investigation explained. “The purpose was not to be a therapy session for the women involved,” this person added.

The lawyers from Paul, Weiss briefed Zweifach at least once a day on the results of what they were hearing. Zweifach, in turn, briefed the Murdochs. A 21st Century Fox executive recalls Rupert saying late that week, after he had heard multiple reports from the investigation, “I think we know where this is going.” Meanwhile, Roger Ailes was increasingly stung by Megyn Kelly’s continuing public silence. According to an executive familiar with the matter, after reporters asked Fox News’s spokesperson, Irena Briganti, why Kelly had not said a word in support of Ailes, Ailes wanted Briganti to issue a pointed, nasty comment: “Everyone has the right to remain silent.” Briganti never put out such a statement and advised that no response was the best response. According to the executive, Beth Ailes, who was in the office daily, advocated attacking Kelly through friendly media outlets, such as Breitbart News. She also asked Todd Starnes, a conservative columnist and Fox News radio host, to write a blog post about Kelly’s public silence. (He never did.) Roger Ailes told his core group of advisers several times that week that there needed to be more negative stories about Carlson. (Ailes’s lawyer Susan Estrich strongly disputed this narrative but provided no specific factual correction.)

How Estrich came to represent Ailes is a story in itself. Estrich, a well-known feminist lawyer, at Quinn Emanuel, in Los Angeles, had faced off with Ailes when she was running Michael Dukakis’s campaign. At the time, Ailes was media adviser for George H. W. Bush’s team, who routinely referred to Estrich as Susan Estrogen. But in the years since, the two had developed a friendship. Estrich appeared frequently on Fox as a liberal commentator, and found Ailes to be a loyal friend during a long hospitalization in 2014. Now Estrich had been brought in as Ailes’s primary attorney. “I’m advising him because I’ve known him for 25 years,” Estrich told me. “There have been various points in my life where I’ve needed help and support, and he’s always been there.”

Estrich, a rape survivor, who told me she has spent her career defending women against sexual abuse and harassment, maintained that “the person I’ve read about in the news accounts is not the person I’ve known for 25 years,” and called the portrayal of Ailes in the press “a caricature.” Besides, she insisted, “many of the complaints I was reading about in the press don’t amount to sexual harassment.” Even if those reports were true, “tacky behavior, inappropriate behavior, overtures you’d prefer not to have—that is not sexual harassment. We are not talking about creating a workplace where women cannot comfortably advance and do their jobs.” But that was exactly what Carlson’s suit alleged, and is a sentiment that was repeated by other women I’ve spoken to about their experience at Fox News.

On July 16, James Murdoch flew to Europe for business. Before he left, James advocated dismissing Ailes immediately, according to an executive close to him, but came to accept that it was in the company’s interest to hold off and persuade Ailes to resign. That would also allow Fox News to try to get through the Republican convention without the distraction of an Ailes dismissal. Nonetheless, over the weekend, the company drew up a separation agreement for Ailes, outlining the terms of his departure. On Monday, July 18, Rupert Murdoch talked with Ailes and told him he had to go. Later that day, Zweifach sent a draft of the separation agreement to Estrich. The next day, Ailes confessed to a colleague, “Murdoch wants me gone.” All he could do now was try to influence public perceptions.

That same day, Tuesday, July 19, New York magazine reported that Megyn Kelly had told the Paul, Weiss lawyers that Ailes had sexually harassed her early on in her time at Fox News. Ailes wanted to respond to the report with a statement drawing attention to all the positive comments Kelly had made publicly about Ailes over the years, both in her book and elsewhere. Briganti said she couldn’t issue a statement attacking an anchor who was working for the network it was her job to promote. Estrich was in the office and, as Ailes’s lawyer for the crisis, it made sense for her to do it. She decided to send the statement to Matt Drudge, who would be sure to post it on the Drudge Report. But when Estrich attempted to e-mail the file that contained the positive comments by Kelly, she inadvertently attached the file that included the draft separation agreement announcing that Ailes would be leaving Fox News with a payout of $40 million. Calls immediately started flooding in from reporters looking to confirm the sensational news. “Go clean this up!,” Ailes yelled to Briganti. She called Drudge to beg him to remove the post, which he did. Meanwhile, Peter Johnson, Susan Estrich, her law partner Jim Asperger, and Roger and Beth Ailes were gathered in Ailes’s office, strategizing about various details of Ailes’s severance, such as Fox News’s insistence on a non-compete clause, and also how to present the entire arrangement to the world. One person familiar with the negotiations speculates that Ailes wanted his $40 million to be seen as a golden parachute, not as a payoff to simply go away.

V. The Lockout

That night, Ailes left the office, his briefcase by his desk, expecting to return the next morning. He spent the evening watching the Republican convention. Late Tuesday night, the Murdochs resolved to keep Ailes out of the building and cut off his access to staff. Early Wednesday morning, while Ailes was on his way to the office, the head of security at 21st Century Fox told Ailes’s driver to circle the block a few times in order to delay his arrival, giving Fox time to deprogram his access cards and disconnect his phone and e-mail. Ailes, not entirely surprised by the development, told his driver to take him to the offices of Quinn Emanuel, Estrich’s law firm, where he could work. He tried to reach several Fox News executives that day, but all of them had been told to cut off all contact with him. By the end of the day he had signed the separation agreement.

On Thursday, July 21, Ailes made his way to Rupert Murdoch’s triplex apartment in One Madison, a luxury tower overlooking Madison Square Park. Rupert wanted to have one last meal with Ailes, to end their long partnership on a cordial note—but also to be sure that Ailes understood that this was, indeed, the end. Gathered for lunch in the modern dining room with floor-to-ceiling views of the Flatiron District were Ailes, Susan Estrich, Peter Johnson, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, and Gerson Zweifach. Rupert had told Ailes that he was going to temporarily take over the running of Fox News. Ailes suggested that they walk into the newsroom together after lunch, to present Ailes’s departure as a smooth transition of power. Rupert, who had been firmly requested not to allow any such thing, deflected the discussion. “I need to do this, and I need to do it myself,” he told Ailes. The luncheon was an awkward affair. No one ate very much, despite the large platters of salads and sandwiches in the center of the table. Lachlan Murdoch, whom one executive described to me as “a great therapist,” was attempting to smooth things over and keep everyone on track. By this point, Zweifach and Estrich had engaged in heated negotiations. Indeed, some questioned whether Estrich had really sent the draft of the $40 million separation agreement to Drudge by mistake. Instead, they speculated, it might have been a deliberate leak to focus attention on the large sum Ailes was taking home from the company, and make his departure seem like something of a triumph. Estrich dismissed this notion entirely. “It was a technological error,” she told me. “No more or less.” In reality, Ailes was owed $20 million of the $40 million based on his previous year of work, and the additional $20 million was the severance payment stipulated in his contract, whether he was fired for cause or agreed to resign. Ailes did agree to a non-compete clause that would prevent him from working for a rival network, or starting one—but would not prevent him from working for a presidential campaign, such as Donald Trump’s.

But it didn’t appear that Rupert Murdoch was terribly distressed to have Ailes gone. “He can be done with people really quickly,” one of his executives told me, “and he’s not very emotional about it.” The executive added, “He’s done with Roger.” When people become a liability to Murdoch, they are simply moved aside.

Rupert wanted to address the staff himself, to announce the news of Ailes’s departure. The lunch at the triplex ran long, pushing Rupert’s planned address back to four P.M. He arrived with Lachlan and Julie Henderson and read the announcement to a camera in a small conference room off the main Fox newsroom. The message was streamed to Fox News staff all over the world, including the scores of reporters and technicians on duty at the convention in Cleveland. After he finished reading the statement, Murdoch walked into the newsroom and repeated the message in person to the people there on the floor, saying, “I want to make sure you hear it directly from me.”

Internal investigations are good at knowing what not to ask, and the Murdochs had avoided having to answer any of the deeper questions about how Fox News was run. In September, 21st Century Fox settled with Carlson for $20 million, on Ailes’s behalf. He contributed nothing to the settlement and has apparently been using his free time to advise Donald Trump on debate strategy. Some of Ailes’s key deputies remain at the company. Some have been elevated. But Roger Ailes is gone. Now, without a powerful foil in their midst, the Murdochs have only themselves to contend with.