CNN news anchor Alisyn Camerota says that when she was working at Fox News she and other women there endured more than just sexual harassment.
“Certainly, there is sexual harassment and it is unpleasant, and it was certainly unpleasant to be on the receiving end of that,” Camerota said in an interview for BuzzFeed. “But even on the days when that wasn’t happening, there was an all-powerful man who held the keys to your future in his palm and who wielded power in a really sort of unpleasant, bullying way.”
Camerota worked at Fox for more than a decade as a reporter and weekend anchor. She left the network in 2014 after Roger Ailes, the former Fox News chief executive, sexually harassed her.
“Roger Ailes was — could be charming,” Camerota told Variety in 2017. “He could be quite charismatic. He could be uproariously funny. He could also be a bit of a bully, and mean. And he also was often kind of grossly inappropriate with things that he would say, and I think that many of us experienced that. He would talk about body parts. He would say ‘Give me a spin.’ He would want to be greeted with a hug.”
In July 2016, Ailes resigned after former anchor Gretchen Carlson sued the network, saying that she had been fired for turning down his sexual advances.
“The sexual harassment was the least of it,” Camerota, who now anchors “New Day” on CNN, told BuzzFeed. “There was sexual harassment and there was emotional harassment. And there was sort of bullying and there was ideological harassment.”
Check out the video above (harassment discussion begins at 8:46).
