Monday, March 18, 2024

Monica Lewinsky Says Roger Ailes Built Fox News By Ripping Her Life Apart

Designer Monica Lewinsky attends the 2015 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Graydon Carter at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 22, 2015 in Beverly Hills, California.
Designer Monica Lewinsky attends the 2015 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Graydon Carter at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 22, 2015 in Beverly Hills, California.

*In the wake of former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes’ passing, Monica Lewinsky has penned an op-ed piece for the New York Times accusing him of making her life a living hell over her affair with then-President Bill Clinton.

“Mr. Ailes, a former Republican political operative, took the story of the affair and the trial that followed and made certain his anchors hammered it ceaselessly, 24 hours a day,” she wrote in Monday’s paper. “Their dream was my nightmare. My character, my looks and my life were picked apart mercilessly.”

“Truth and fiction mixed at random in the service of higher ratings,” the former White House intern added.

Ailes, who launched the Fox News Channel two years before the Lewinsky affair went public, died last week less than a year after being forced out of his role as chairman amid sexual harassment allegations. He was 77.

In her op-ed, Lewinsky cited comments made years ago by Fox News executive John Moody, who said Lewinsky’s scandal “put us on the news map.”

Lewinsky said Ailes’ strategy to “exploit” her personal crisis made her suicidal.

“My family and I huddled at home, worried about my going to jail — I was the original target of Kenneth Starr’s investigation, threatened with 27 years for having been accused of signing a false affidavit and other alleged crimes — or worse, me taking my own life,” she added. “Meantime, Mr. Ailes huddled with his employees at Fox News, dictating a lineup of talking heads to best exploit this personal and national tragedy.”

Lewinsky has since become an anti-bullying advocate and said the mainstream media used her scandal to further “a culture of humiliation.”

“Our world — of cyberbullying and chyrons, trolls and tweets — was forged in 1998,” she wrote. “It is, as the historian Nicolaus Mills has put it, a ‘culture of humiliation,’ in which those who prey on the vulnerable in the service of clicks and ratings are handsomely rewarded.”

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