The morning after Fox News chief Roger Ailes resigned, the cable network’s former director of booking placed a call to the New York law firm hired by 21st Century Fox to investigate sexual-harassment allegations against Ailes. Laurie Luhn told the lawyers at Paul, Weiss that she had been harassed by Ailes for more than 20 years, that executives at Fox News had known about it and helped cover it up, and that it had ruined her life. “It was psychological torture,” she later told me. […]
Doing so helped Luhn’s career for a time — at her peak, she earned $250,000 a year as an event planner at Fox while, according to both her own account and four confirming sources, enjoying Ailes’s protection within the company. But the arrangement required her to do many things she is now horrified by, including luring young female Fox employees into one-on-one situations with Ailes that Luhn knew could result in harassment. “He’s a predator,” she told me. In recent years, Luhn had a series of mental breakdowns that she attributes to the stress of her situation, and was even hospitalized for a time.
Luhn recounted her story this week in 11 hours of interviews at her Los Angeles home, in the presence of a family friend who first heard her accounts in 2010, long before there was any public discussion of Ailes’s alleged harassment of women. Luhn’s struggle with mental illness notwithstanding, New York was able to independently corroborate key details in her account, including that she was sexually involved with Ailes for many years, from sources who worked at Fox at the same time she did. Additionally, I viewed documents Luhn retained, including a copy of the $3.15 million severance agreement she signed in 2011 that includes iron-clad nondisclosure provisions.
Horrifying.