In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, the woman who got Bill O’Reilly removed from Fox News has finally broken her silence over the alleged sexual harassment she suffered while working for the former anchor.
Andrea Mackis could have taken her settlement seventeen years ago and disappeared forever, but instead, she has decided to tell her full truth in an explosive expose where she shares the graphic details of his behavior. The alleged harassment included lewd, menacing telephone calls and conversations in which she says he forced her to listen to his sexual fantasies about her. “I’m going to make you play,” O’Reilly would tell Mackris. “Here was my boss, a man who held my career and future in his hands, acknowledging that he knew I’d never consented but he didn’t care,” Mackris tells The Daily Beast.
Backed up by audio recordings of O’Reilly’s late-night phone calls, the suit detailed the Fox News star’s persistent and menacing verbal assaults during her nearly four years of working for him. They included unwelcome demands for phone sex and mutual masturbation, as well as O’Reilly’s infamous alleged fantasy of soaping her down in the shower with either a “loofah” or a “falafel thing.”
The Daily Beast profile is a deep dive into both the lawsuit and the culture of Fox News at the time, with Mackris’s recollections serving as a horrifying picture of just how toxic O’Reilly had made the work environment. “In the years since, Mackris has suffered the fate of many women in a variety of industries who have had the audacity to call out their more powerful male harassers, only to be legally gagged,” the profile reads, saying Mackris was “psychically wounded, and discarded by the people in charge and society at large. She realizes, of course, that speaking to The Daily Beast about her own ordeal can be interpreted as violating her NDA, risking potential legal consequences.”
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