When we speak of accusers “coming out of the woodwork,” we speak with faint disparagement of opportunists getting in on the act. Bill Cosby’s lawyer denounced the women lining up outside the gates of Cosby’s citadel as “people coming out of the woodwork with fabricated or unsubstantiated stories.” A Cosby defender, columnist Audrey Ignatoff of RenewAmerica.com, commented, “All of these women seemed to come out of the woodwork. . . . Something about this just doesn’t seem so random to me.”
Some of their stories reflected on what the New York Times, in this piece, called “changing mores” in the workplace. Others aimed their sights directly at Ailes. New York magazine interviewed some of the women who’d contacted Carlson’s lawyer, and last weekend posted “Six More Women Allege That Roger Ailes Sexually Harassed Them.” One of these women was “Susan.” Susan said she’d encountered Ailes half a century ago, when he was 26 years old and running a popular syndicated TV talk show in Philadelphia:
Levin got the same. “To the best of my memory,” he says, “Ailes repeated something about being in a bad place in his past life. He didn’t make any threats and he didn’t really make any clear denial. He was fumbling around in self-pity. I said, ‘OK, to be clear, are you denying this or not? Are you saying she’s a liar? I don’t hear a clear denial.’ He said, weakly, ‘Yes, I’m denying it,’ and he wanted to know what we were going to do.”
