Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will sit down Tuesday night with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly for his first interview since the second debate and since video leaked of him bragging about sexually assaulting women.
Last week, the Fox News host called Trump’s 2005 comments “crude guy talk,” which downplays the seriousness of Trump bragging about using his celebrity status to physically assault women.
O’Reilly is an interesting choice of an interviewer. In 2004, Andrea Mackris, a former coworker, sued him for sexual harassment. She said he spoke to her about masturbation and his sexual fantasies. As New York magazine recounted, the most famous part of that lawsuit involved a loofah:
O’Reilly allegedly touched himself while detailing a shower fantasy featuring Mackris and “that little loofah thing” but later in the call, evidently flustered, referred to the prop as a “falafel thing.”
O’Reilly ― who has held himself up as a public moralist ― settled the lawsuit that year and told his viewers there was “no wrongdoing in the case whatsoever by anyone.”
More recently, former Fox News host Andrea Tantaros also accused O’Reilly of harassment, saying he invited her to his beach house for privacy and speculated that she has a “wild side.”
And in 2006, O’Reilly commented on a young woman who was raped and murdered by pointing out what she was wearing and how much she had had to drink:
Now Moore, Jennifer Moore, 18, on her way to college. She was 5-foot-2, 105 pounds, wearing a miniskirt and a halter top with a bare midriff. Now, again, there you go. So every predator in the world is gonna pick that up at two in the morning. She’s walking by herself on the West Side Highway, and she gets picked up by a thug. All right. Now she’s out of her mind, drunk.
When I wrote about those comments in 2009 as a blogger for ThinkProgress ― noting that O’Reilly was going to speak at a fundraiser benefiting rape survivors ― he sent his producer, Jesse Watters, to ambush me while I was on vacation.
Trump continues to be advised by Roger Ailes, who was ousted from Fox News after multiple women at the network accused him of sexual harassment. O’Reilly, not surprisingly, defended Ailes.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.