_____________________
Speaking of explosions, several months after I completed the first draft of this manuscript, in the summer of 2016, all hell broke loose at Fox News, when my boss, Roger Ailes, became embroiled in a catastrophic sexual-harassment scandal. One of my former colleagues, Gretchen Carlson, alleged that he had tormented her throughout her decade at Fox News. I responded to Gretchen’s original allegations with extreme skepticism.
Along with all but a handful of my Fox colleagues, I figured Gretchen was motivated by sour grapes. At the time she got fired by Roger, she had the lowest-rated show on the network. She also withheld her allegations that Roger harassed her until she was fired at the end of June 2016, her contract not renewed. In ordinary times, before the #MeToo movement, there was ample reason to be skeptical, if not cynical. It is self-evident that those days are gone.
I am now beyond sorry that I doubted her, but at the time, her case was not a slam-dunk. Nobody knew that Gretchen had secretly recorded Roger being an obnoxiously macho deviant. At that initial point it was a he said/she said, based solely on her shocking allegations, which the monarch of Fox News, through his spokeswoman and ace attorney Susan Estrich, vehemently denied..
Aside from the accuser’s motive to exaggerate, there was also the fact that the accused did not fit the stereotype. Roger did not seem the type. While the man I knew was a lot of arguably bad things—brawler, bully, ideological zealot, to name a few—he did not seem a sex predator. For instance, I never heard him say anything sexually suggestive or inappropriate about a female colleague. Don’t get me wrong. He was as harsh and insulting to women as he was to men. Remember the scene with Laurie Dhue and the necklace, but he was brutal rather than sexist. “Well, she’s as dumb as a bag of rocks.” “What in hell does she call that outfit?” Man, woman, straight, gay, he was an equal-opportunity insulter.
I never took his jibes personally, but maybe that was a function of our being roughly the same age, both products of the world before feminism, gender equality, equal rights, and sensitivity training. Now I feel like a sap, a sucker who did not know the score. I always pictured Roger as a hail-fellow-well-met, another backslapping scrapper, more likely to tear your throat out than engage in sweet talk, as my first tweet on the Gretchen scandal indicated:
Geraldo Rivera @GeraldoRivera
I’ve known him 40 years. He’s about as flirty as the grizzly in #TheRevenant. I stand with Roger Ailes
Remembering how Roger always had my back through thick or thin, even as his scandal deepened during the Republican National Convention, and as many editorial writers were writing him off, I fired off this tweet:
Geraldo Rivera @GeraldoRivera
Don’t believe the crap about #RogerAiles. Only ones talking dirt are those who hate #FoxNews & want to hurt network that’s kicking their ass
Roger resigned two days later when it became apparent that Gretchen was not alone in alleging abhorrent behavior behind his closed doors. Disbelieving the charges against him, I almost walked out alongside him, enthusiastically joining a budding revolt by many of my colleagues. If Roger was forced unfairly to leave, we vowed to follow him.
Like many of Roger’s big talent, I had a “key man” clause in my contract that allowed me to leave the network if for any reason Roger was ousted or left voluntarily. Roger encouraged the clause to be inserted in his talent deals to enhance his own invulnerability. If you messed with Roger, you risked having the whole enterprise crumble as the talent loyal to him left with him.
Many of us were fixing to follow him out the door. Under the leadership of an enraged Sean Hannity, with hearty cheerleading from hyper-conservative websites, we decided to join forces and demand that our company stand behind our embattled chief executive. To us Know Nothings, it seemed obvious that Roger was being hoisted on a petard of political correctness. Sure he was grizzled, gruff, and tough, but that was his charm. Like Donald Trump and millions of other old machos, including me, Roger was a 1950s relic of The Front Page.
We hail from an era when virtually every executive smoked and drank too much, while often behaving inappropriately with secretaries, female executives, or other men’s wives. Necessarily, times, attitudes, and laws have changed, but my sympathy for Roger is based on the feeling that creaky old relics like him should be allowed to die off. He should have known better, but he was too arrogant and entitled to notice that the world had changed. Please note that I do not think that “dinosaur” excuse applies to the disgusting alleged rapist Harvey Weinstein or to pompous pervert House of Cards actor Kevin Spacey, the single most unpleasant person I have ever met in show business. Those twenty-first-century predators weren’t even around in the 1960s.
When the Roger/Gretchen story broke, I remember vividly being at the Republican National Convention in the makeshift Fox News green room at Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena, clenching my fists along with Sean and angrily condemning what felt like the railroading of our founder and leader.
Producer/brother Craig stopped me from destroying my own career and reputation. He prevented me from sending a third, even more outrageous tweet, blaming the victims and their co-conspirators in management while celebrating the perpetrator.
During that period of high drama and profound flux, I was especially impatient with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly for refusing to back the man who had made her a star, thinking that the elegant, ambitious anchor was selfish and in it only for herself. A “Boycott Megyn” movement started within our ranks, with various on-air personalities muttering about how it was all part of Megyn’s ongoing and ultimately very successful contract negotiations, albeit at another network, NBC. Many Fox talent loyal to Roger were vowing never to go on her Kelly File show again, and I was among them, not that I was often asked.
Without naming names, let me say that the older women at Fox were particularly vicious in their attacks on the soaring celebrity. Thank God that boycott nonsense never went anywhere beyond a few soon-deleted references on Breitbart and Drudge. The next day Sean pulled me aside to say the revolt was over because the allegations against Roger were true. “How bad is it?” I asked. “It’s bad,” Sean replied, shaking his head in melancholy and disbelief.
The most explosive allegation of Roger’s several purported victims of unwanted advances came from Megyn Kelly herself. When word spread that he had allegedly sexually bullied and come on to her at the start of her Fox career, her reluctance to back Roger vs. Gretchen’s lawsuit suddenly transformed from bitchy to heroic.
At that moment, to Roger’s malignant misfortune, Megyn was the most important person at Fox News, maybe in the entire television news industry. For one thing, her contract was expiring the next summer, in 2017, and the network was desperate to keep her. She had become more important than Roger. Her ratings success made her valuable from a commercial standpoint, but that was just the beginning of her appeal. Megyn had crossed over into mainstream recognition and respect. She had become a sought-after celebrity in her own right, separate and apart from Fox.
At the Democratic National Convention with Fox and Friends friends, Tucker Carlson, Heather Nauert, Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt, Brian Kilmeade, me, Major Pete Hegseth, and Clayton Morris. Philadelphia, July 2016.
MEGYN ASCENDANT, AUGUST 2015
Megyn put the nail in Roger’s professional coffin with her charges that he had harassed her back in the day. But it was her interaction with Donald Trump fifteen months earlier that almost changed the course of history. By taking on the candidate’s past chauvinistic and coarse treatment of women during the first Republican presidential debate in August 2015, also in Cleveland, she both distinguished and distanced herself from others at Fox News.
Led by the unflinching Hannity, the slightly subtler O’Reilly, up-and-comer Eric Bolling (a talented broadcaster who gravely damaged his career with a dopey prank allegedly involving intimate pictures of himself to three female staffers), earnest Steve Doocy on Fox and Friends, and me, our network was already behaving deferentially to our hometown hero, the flamboyant Mr. Trump. I began trumpeting his certain nomination from the first day of his campaign in June 2015.
Megyn Kelly and her husband, author Doug Brunt, at Erica’s fortieth birthday party, January 2015.
During that first debate in August 2015, Megyn embarrassed and infuriated Trump by brutally recalling previous public comments he had made about women generally and the actress-comedienne Rosie O’Donnell specifically. Megyn stuck a knife in Trump’s ribs when she famously asked how a man who refers to women as “fat pigs,” “slobs,” and “animals” could ever be president of the United States.
The question was prescient, a harbinger of scandals to come for the forty-fifth president in his long-shot quest for the White House. Flushing with anger, he sputtered. His stunned response was to criticize Megyn for daring to ask so impolite a question. It was a sin for which he would never forgive her. Trump lamely suggested in response that he did not disrespect women generally, but only one woman, Rosie, who suffered his specific wrath for something she had said while hosting The View.
With Eric Bolling, Colonel Oliver North, and Sean Hannity. Inauguration festivities, January 2017.
ROSIE VS. DONALD, DECEMBER 2006
The friction between Trump and the then-almost-as-large-as-life Rosie O’Donnell had its roots in a controversy ten years earlier. Rosie had the temerity in 2006 to tear into Trump, who was at the time the owner of the Miss USA contest.
It happened after he had held a news conference announcing grandly that he would overlook allegations of past drug and alcohol abuse by his current Miss USA, Tara Connor, and allow her to keep the title. “I’ve always been a believer in second chances,” he told reporters, his tone dripping magnanimity.
As we later learned in the campaign, Tara Connor was not the first pageant winner to incur Trump’s wrath for her alleged shortcomings. Hillary Clinton later uncovered another, Alicia Machado, his 1996 Miss Universe, whom he condemned for being overweight, calling her “Miss Piggy.” Hillary used Alicia’s story to flog her campaign theme that Trump and the Republicans were waging war on women.
The day after he gave Tara Connor a reprieve, Rosie ripped his throat out on The View. She ridiculed his hair, his business acumen, and his casino bankruptcies, while asking rhetorically how dare he, a deeply flawed man, pass judgment on anyone.
“He’s the moral authority? Left the first wife, had an affair, left the second wife, had an affair, had kids both times, but he’s the moral compass for twenty-year-olds in America? Donald, sit and spin, my friend,” Rosie fumed. When one of her cohosts brought up that Trump was an extremely successful businessman, Rosie pounced, “He’s been bankrupt so many times! The people that he owed money to got shorted out, but he got to try again and again,” and so on.
Trump went ballistic in his rage, summoning a few of his longtime friends in the media, including me, to his side at his ornate office in Trump Tower to hear him excoriate Rosie, who is also a friend of mine. He was brutal: “She’s a loser. She’s always been a loser,” and downhill from there. I was tempted to replay my damning 2006 Rosie tape when candidate Trump was on the ropes, embroiled in a devastating scandal involving out-takes from the Access Hollywood segment he shot the year before, in 2005, with another mutual friend, Billy Bush.
Three days before inauguration in Trump Tower with the president-elect, January 2017.
As I’ll describe, the Access scandal almost sank him, and continues to haunt him among many women as the worldwide epidemic of sexual harassment allegations that started when Gretchen took down Roger continues to sweep through politics, media, Hollywood, and beyond. Despite the fact that Trump uttered his grossly inappropriate, politically incorrect remarks a generation ago, they continue to dog him. Almost a year after his caught-on-tape remarks were published, and six months into his presidency, in a widely read July 2017 piece in the New York Times Sunday Review, Michelle Goldberg called the president “an erotically incontinent libertine.” Coming, though, as the Access scandal did, in the heat of the campaign, in October, a full month before the 2016 election, with two debates remaining, and before the FBI’s James Comey and the Kremlin’s Vladimir Putin/Wikileaks dropped their bombs on Hillary, Trump had just enough time to recover and pull off the greatest upset in recorded political history, bar none. His wife saved him. When Melania characterized the Access exchange as “locker-room banter,” many men in her husband’s and my generation knew what she was talking about.
As the Access scandal and the war with Megyn Kelly played havoc with the Trump candidacy, he lashed out at Megyn, condemning and berating her at every opportunity. Roger stared him down, deeply critical of the candidate’s obsession with the correspondent. Isn’t it ironic that in the same year Roger Ailes rode to Megyn’s defense against the wrath of Donald Trump, her allegations of Roger’s long-ago sexual harassment ended his career?
The scorn and ridicule from the media industry could not help but contribute to Roger’s steep physical decline and death less than a year later. Megyn’s damning allegations, as described in her bestselling memoir, Settle for More, joined the flood of condemnation from other accusers that swept away what remained of Roger’s legacy so totally that these days scarcely a trace remains. Now, it is almost as if Roger never existed, despite the fact that he was one of the most important figures in the history of television news.
Despite the pity and guilt I feel over the circumstances of Roger’s death, I am filled with regret for stubbornly discounting the accusations of his various accusers, and apologize for my skepticism. Like victims of sexual assault, those alleging harassment deserve the rebuttable presumption of credibility. Even Gabriel Sherman, Ailes’s obsessive pursuer, the reporter who disclosed every sin Roger had ever committed and then some, Roger’s personal Inspector Javert, the New York Magazine writer I called a “nerd with a grudge,” deserves my apology. He was on the right side of history. Roger allegedly used his position to talk dirty to terrified women who worked for him. Might does not mean right. Roger was wrong, and in sticking up for him before I knew the score, I was part of the problem.
Various New York Times reporters, including Emily Steel, worked tirelessly for months to prove that the Ailes scandal was the tip of a Fox News iceberg. In a gigantic April 2017 exposé carried on her newspaper’s front page for several days running, Steel’s thesis was that Fox was Animal House, where horny executives routinely preyed upon vulnerable women. One of her eventual prizes was my old friend, Roger’s aide-de-camp, Bill Shine. After being named one of Ailes’s successors as co-president, Bill was forced to resign amidst the storm of controversy and swirl of lawsuits spawned by the sexual-harassment hurricane. He was essentially accused of aiding and abetting Ailes, although I believe, as our mutual friend Sean Hannity does, that Shine never did anything bad to anybody. He is a great guy, a terrific producer, and is sorely missed at Fox News.
“The New York Times’s real prize, though, was taking down the giant, Bill O’Reilly.” At a Mets game, May 2017.
The New York Times’s real prize, though, was taking down the giant, Bill O’Reilly, who was shamed into resigning about three weeks after the paper’s initial exposé. Not the nicest or certainly not the smoothest guy, impatient and as volatile as an IED, O’Reilly was given to outbursts of rage. He could be scary and socially awkward, but as far as I knew, not evil.
O’Reilly fell off the cliff when the Times revealed that he had settled several sexual-harassment lawsuits, including one claim dating back fifteen years, for a total of around $13 million. He said it was all in an ultimately vain attempt to keep the cases quiet and protect his family and career from scandal. That news was shocking enough. Six months later, it got worse, when news leaked that he had bestowed an additional $32 million fortune on former Fox News legal analyst Lis Wiehl. I can’t imagine that kind of money being paid out unless the underlying secret was undeniably grisly.
Our friend Lis’s $32 million settlement almost equals the $33.5 million O.J. Simpson was ordered to pay to the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman after being found liable for their brutal murders. Just for context, the $20 million Gretchen got from Fox is more than three times the typical settlement from cities to black families, like Freddie Gray’s, whose beloved sons were killed by cops.
I can’t say it often enough: sexual harassment is low down and dirty. If you are a senior staffer using your power and position to prey sexually on a subordinate, you should and will get your balls cut off. Which brings me back to the president.
The news that Donald Trump was caught on a hot Access Hollywood mic sounding like a filthy old Hollywood pervert hit the race for the White House like an exploding bomb. His unguarded remarks to Billy Bush about how he could physically molest any woman he wanted because of his celebrity nearly destroyed his chance to be president. The remarks were raw, arrogant, and ugly.
Donald Trump: I just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.
Billy Bush: Whatever you want.
Donald Trump: Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.
Although the remarks were made in private eleven years earlier, most women cut him no slack. Even some die-hard Trump supporters who had been forced by loathing for Hillary Clinton to stick with him through thick and thin found this latest revelation beyond the pale. Certainly many folks not tuned in to the campaign spectacle found the remarks unsavory. How can we elect someone president when we could not let our children hear his profane remarks?
Prominent GOP senators and governors jammed the doors, jumping off the Trump train in the wake of the revelations. From former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (who had his own series of similar scandals), some of the biggest stars in the GOP firmament announced they had turned off their already tepid support for Trump.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan held his nose, indicating he would never appear with Trump again, despite the obvious threat a landslide defeat for the Republican at the top of the ticket posed to Ryan’s majority in the House of Representatives.
Gross even in the old days, in today’s hypersensitivity to the issue, that 2005 conversation sounds grotesque. I thought mistakenly that the arrogance he displayed talking then about his sexual prerogatives made it impossible for any but his most hard-core supporters to stick by candidate Trump. Remember, in October 2016, with the election just a month away, he was still running well behind Hillary Clinton in most polls.
Going into the second debate, Trump needed a miracle performance to salvage his crippled campaign. He did not quite get it, but did better than expected under the circumstances. His stunt, dragging Paula Jones and the other purported victims of Bill Clinton’s predatory sexual behavior to the front row of the audience, was outrageous, ill-mannered, and out of line, but it was just barely plausible and worked to cheer Trump’s deflated supporters.
Even though Bill was not running for president, Trump made Hillary the chump. Her husband, President Clinton, was punished for his transgressions with Impeachment by the House of Representatives, only the second in the history of the land to be so humiliated, but Bill beat that rap, winning an acquittal in the Senate. He was not forced from office. Eighteen years later, Hillary paid his old tab.
Trump’s obnoxious stunt with Bill’s ladies and his implacable attacks on Hillary’s essential character and honesty wounded her candidacy. Although most liberal women had forgiven or refused to believe the ring-wing allegations against the progressive 42nd president in 1998, by 2016 his reckless, often low-brow adultery was no longer forgivable. Hillary was Bill’s enabler, guilty by association of his sins. It is another reason so many women are angry that Trump is their president. Add to his many transgressions that he made a wife pay for the sins of her husband.
Trump narrowly won that second debate by attacking relentlessly in a way unseen in modern American history. His savage assault, including his pledge to put Secretary Clinton in jail (“Lock her up!”), got gasps from the audience in St. Louis and the millions watching on television, breathing new energy into his deflated followers. Thanks to his swaggering and extraordinarily aggressive performance, he dodged the Access Hollywood bullet and rallied his base. I did not think it would be enough to upend the race. I mistakenly believed that no candidate for the highest office in the land could prevail with just the support of high school–educated, low-to-middle-income white folks, many of whom are deeply religious, and presumably offended by his coarse language and stated sexual prerogatives. I was obviously wrong. That base was solid for Trump, of course, but he also did surprisingly well with suburban dwellers and people over forty who quietly cast their ballots for Mr. Us vs. Them Clintons. Trump even attracted 42 percent of the female vote, but not my wife or her friends.
BOYCOTTING THE IOWA GOP DEBATE, JANUARY 2016
His shocking victory was a long way off when Megyn Kelly lobbed her atomic question at candidate Trump (“You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals’ . . .”) at the first Republican presidential debate, setting in motion their extraordinary feud. In one fell swoop, Megyn managed to do what no other journalist or candidate did all campaign long. She cut Trump down to size, infuriating him and many of her own viewers of Fox News.
Megyn catapulted herself into the first tier of political journalists. Among the liberal media and mainstream audience, she became that rare phenomenon, a hero, the Rosa Parks, Susan B. Anthony, or Malala of broadcast news, especially among the educated women who despised candidate Trump. She showed strength and courage in the face of bluster and fury, and as she would throughout the campaign, she refused to back down or lose her elegant composure.
He attacked her relentlessly with barrages of negative tweets, which put me in an awkward position. He was being a bully. She was standing against Goliath, reporting fairly on the candidate’s various foibles and woes. As he has shown even in his presidency, Donald Trump is not the kind of guy who forgives and forgets. As he typically tweeted:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Everybody should boycott the @megynkelly show. Never worth watching. Always a hit on Trump! She is sick, & the most overrated person on tv.
Geraldo Rivera @GeraldoRivera
@realDonaldTrump @megynkelly I love you man but basta. This obsession w @megynkelly is weird & unhelpful. She’s doing her job, you do yours.
Megyn later thanked me, although unlike her, I was not a profile in courage, but in compromise. Contrast my muted remarks to what Roger said about Trump, whom he had known nearly as long as I have: “Donald Trump’s vitriolic attacks against Megyn Kelly and his extreme, sick obsession with her is beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate who wants to occupy the highest office in the land.”
That is how you put down someone messing with your colleague. Whatever his personal feelings about the candidate or his star journalist, Roger bathed himself and the network in the glory of principle, not that it helped him when his own shit hit the fan.
I was conflicted throughout. My dilemma was that Trump is a closer friend than Megyn. In person she is smart and funny, with a terrific husband and wonderful family, but she rarely booked me on her show. In contrast, aside from my knowing the guy forever, Trump and I had just done Celebrity Apprentice. Together constantly for six weeks, just a couple of months before he began his run for the White House, he gave me the benefit of every doubt on the show.
“Trump puts me on television a lot more than Megyn Kelly does,” I told friends to explain my initial ambivalence and relatively tepid support of what later became clear was an incredibly brave stance by Megyn. Trump was already a monstrously popular, super-connected candidate whose past alleged misogynist treatment of women was certainly fair game at the time she asked her seminal question. In some ways, the divide it revealed between the old ways and the new are at the heart of our current split nation and of the culture of scandal that is devouring macho icons on both sides of the divide.
THE WRATH OF ROGER, JANUARY 2016
The morning after the Trump-boycotted Iowa debate, I incurred Roger’s wrath for what turned out to be the last time. He had nobly sacrificed an enormous ratings bonanza by refusing to capitulate to Trump’s demand to remove Megyn as debate moderator, saying that it would “violate all journalistic standards” to remove her from the panel.
On Fox and Friends that next morning, asked who “won” the Trump-less debate, I answered that in my opinion both Megyn and Trump emerged as winners. She won because of her courage in the face of the Trump steamroller, but he won, too, I said, because his boycott and simultaneous telethon to benefit veterans attracted enough attention to overshadow his rivals. Looking back, I was wrong substantively. Trump’s absence from the Iowa debate probably cost him that state’s primary, which he ended up losing to Ted Cruz, and he barely beat Marco Rubio, who came in a close third.
That night my scheduled appearance on what was then our most important program, The O’Reilly Factor, was suddenly canceled, as were scheduled appearances over the next several days on other high-profile Fox News shows. I was on ice. When I confronted O’Reilly’s longtime producer David Tabacoff as to why my appearance was canceled, he admitted that the order to take me off, and keep me off, had come from Roger Ailes himself. After an absence that lasted until the next week, I apologized on the air for equivocating and not more vigorously backing the home team.
THE RAT PACK ERA IS DEAD, JANUARY 2017
On the issues of workplace morality and sexual harassment, having worked at all the networks over the last forty-seven years, I can say definitively that the social culture is industry-wide. For lots of reasons, TV news is a flirty business. There is a constant and usually harmless sexual banter that goes on. Men tell women they look good, and vice versa, or at least we did before it became fraught with profound consequence.
When grown-ups of equal status are involved, it is usually the kind of lighthearted fun you might hear on a family-hour sitcom. There has to be room for consensual adults to do their thing without the threat of blackmail if relationships don’t work out, which is what I think happened with my Fox News colleague Charles Payne. With its pressure-cooker environment and long hours, the newsroom is sometimes the only place young professionals and old can meet. How do you think MSNBC co-anchors Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski and scores of other happy couples hooked up? After work? Add up all the newsroom romances that have resulted in marriage over the years, including three of my own. Where are busy professional supposed to meet, Match.com or Tinder?
Management’s role is to keep the playing field level, professional, and fair. As society evolved from the Mad Men era, giant steps have been taken to protect subordinate employees from harassment and unwelcome advances, particularly by superiors. Human resources departments have been enormously beefed up and empowered. Roger got drummed out of the business, and he was king of the world. Bill O’Reilly was also banished from Fox News despite having the highest-rated cable news history for twenty years running. Eric Bolling, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, and many other powerful men lost their jobs even though they were hugely popular and had ironclad contracts. At the time of his Armageddon, Tavis Smiley was the most important African American personality on PBS.
Sure, there is far to go, but as the seismic response to Gretchen, Megyn, and the other purported victims of real harassment makes clear, the news business will no longer tolerate loutish conduct by anyone, however powerful. The danger is that in the national reckoning, some few are using the current climate to even old scores with bad boyfriends or despised ex-bosses. Harassers are most often schmucky lowlifes anyway. There is nothing cool about it, and there is no place for them. Perpetrators harass at tremendous peril to their careers and families. Strict policies are in place. Everyone gets mandatory sensitivity training. I had a mandatory session on a Tuesday, which happened to be Valentine’s Day, 2017.
I wrote in a widely circulated Facebook post, “To all the victims of sexual harassment, direct and indirect, I am sorry for what happened to you. As the father of three daughters, including one in the news business, I urge all who have been offended to reach out. Similarly, if you see harassment, say harassment, even if the alleged offender is an old friend.”
The stern point was made in spades. Rico Suave is dead. No man or woman, however exalted or powerful, has the right to impose him- or herself on a subordinate. As one of the aged poster boys of the era, Roger was shamed, shunned, and stripped of all honors, his legacy despoiled, his legend ruined. He has been erased from television history, his name stripped from schools and civic institutions he endowed, even as several of his alleged and lavishly compensated victims have gone on to celebrity and societal acclaim. When I look back on how severely Roger was punished, I regret helping write his professional obituary with my Facebook post. Maybe he had it coming, but given the harsh justice already imposed, the last thing his family needed was a disillusioned old friend piling on.
As I wrote that line, I paused to call him to tell him of my regret, but he did not pick up the phone. Three months later, on May 18, 2017, I did get a call—not from Roger, but about him. The old lion was dead. A hemophiliac, living in the vast Florida oceanfront estate he purchased with his $40 million settlement from Fox, he died after stumbling in his bathroom and hitting his head. Roger left behind his wife, Beth, and teenage son, Zack, and I feel awful whenever I think of the circumstances of his decline and fall.
