Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Fox CEO Roger Ailes on Wednesday, effectively busting down the doors for a flood of other women armed with their own tales of the network head’s gross behavior.
More than a dozen women contacted Carlson’s attorney to lodge complaints against Ailes, six of whom agreed to speak with New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman. The accounts are, of course, uniformly horrifying, but here are the most fetorous excerpts from the whole, stinking thing:
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In 1989, Kellie Boyle was working in communications for the Republican National Committee. She jumped at the chance to meet Ailes, who she described initially as being “very charming.” After dinner one night, he offered to drive her to her friend’s house:
So we get in the car and that’s when he said, ‘You know if you want to play with the big boys, you have to lay with the big boys.’ I was so taken aback. I said, ‘Gosh I didn’t know that. How would that work?’ I was trying to kill time because I didn’t know if he was going to attack me. I was just talking until I could get out of the car. He said, ‘That’s the way it works,’ and he started naming other women he’s had. He said that’s how all these men in media and politics work — everyone’s got their friend.
After denying his offer to give him a blow job, Boyle heard that “word went out” that she wasn’t to be hired.
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In the late 1960s, then-model Marsha Callahan was asked by Ailes—at the time a producer on The Mike Douglas Show, to come to his office wearing a garter belt and stockings.
So I go into his office and right away he says, ‘Sit on the sofa and lift your skirt up.’ I had to do these different poses. And then, I recall very clearly, he said he’d put me on the show but I needed to go to bed with him.
She was called in to do the show anyway.
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Susan, also a former model, was also set to appear on The Mike Douglas Show in 1967. She says Ailes locked her in a room with him:
He proceeded to pull down his pants and very gingerly pull out his genitals and said, “Kiss them.” And they were red like raw hamburger. He was pretty meticulously dressed, with long white shirttails coming out.
She was 16 at the time.
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Jane, also a former model, met Ailes in his office for an audition in 1984:
He pulled out a garter belt and stockings and told me to put them on. I was very nervous; I didn’t know what to do. He was standing there and I put them on. He wanted me to model them for him. After that, something sexual took place, but I blocked it out of my mind.
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Diana, a former model, met Ailes in the mid ‘60s while auditioning for The Mike Douglas Show:
He had a room and one by one he would take us behind closed doors. When my turn came I went in and he didn’t waste any time. He grabbed me and had his hands on me and he forced me to kiss him. When I recoiled he said, ‘Well, you know no girls get a job here unless they’re cooperative.’
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Pat, a recent communications graduate, who was told by Ailes in 1975 that she’d have to have sex with him if she wanted to make it.
I remember running out of that apartment like my hair was on fire and standing on the sidewalk crying, thinking, What’s that guy think I was, a prostitute?
Ailes, of course, claims that Carlson’s allegations are false, calling them “offensive” and “defamatory.” Let’s see what he has to say about these women, and the others who will doubtlessly surface with more.
Image via Getty.