Bill O'Reilly and His Penis-Shaped Vibrator a Woman Gave Him

[Ed. note: See Smoking Gun for the lawsuit filing.]

I haven't posted on the suit filed against Faux Newz personality (no journalist there) Bill O'Reilly largely because I'm never real comfortable with trying to guess what really happened in a situation where just two people are involved and both give very different versions of the events.

Sure, as a woman, especially one working in largely male-dominated fields, I've been on the receiving end of a bunch of really inappropriate behavior. Not so much the jokes because both men and women engage in banter we should probably avoid in a work setting but more finite situations where men with control over my job specifically suggested my career would be better served if I played the game they wanted. I hate this when it just involves office politics, but when it involves a married boss pushing himself on you knowing full well you don't want to get him mad which can get you fired faster than having sex with him.

Yet, even with the memories of my own nasty experiences still relatively fresh in my mind, it's not easy for me to always assign the woman as the victim and the male as the agggressor. While women are less apt to buy a man a dildo and try to pin him against a desk, some women engage in sexual harassment, too. In some cases, I've seen women I had previously respected quite a bit to pressure a male subordinate into a relationship he didn't seem to want. Just as bad as male-to-female harasssment? You bet.

I've seen a few other women I worked with seem to gladly grab at the little perks they felt would come from an otherwise-unwanted sexual liaison with a nale a work who then only filed complaints or lawsuits once those perks were no longer supplied. Of course, I was also mad at these women too because each one who gladly paid footsy with the boss as long as she liked the extras made it much tougher on those of us who would not play the game.

There's also a difference - in my mind - between a boss or authority figure crossing a line once who, after being rebuffed, stops engaging in this horseshit, and one who is told No any number of times but continues forward just like you said "oh please yes!"

The Paula Jones case, for example, completely floored me because here you have a woman who purported to be on the receiving end of a request by then governor Bill Clinton to engage in something. But that's all even she said happened. When she said no and left (by her account), that was it. Her job was not affected, Clinton did not approach her again, and he took no for her answer during their own brief meeting. That she was later used (and was gladly bought) by the anti-Clinton evil elves to try to end a presidency is just lunacy. That anyone agreed to pay her a cent is even worse.

I've read through the Smoking Gun information on the O'Reilly harassment suit and I'm sorry to report that nothing I read in there about Bill's alleged behavior surprises me. We already know he's callow, pompous, pious when it suits him while seeing no problem when he does the very thing he wants to punish others for, and likes to throw his weight around. From what I read in the court papers alone, what he did was egregious. About the second time he suggested buying a dildo, I would have suggested he shove his own somewhere deep and dark.

But the woman knew what O'Reilly was like. She left the company and then came back at O'Reilly's request. She indicates he may have promised to behave, but he did so at the same time she says he continued this boorish behavior. She also chose to work for Faux, which has a reputation. None of the networks does a hot job of having women of all ages in strong roles, but Faux is completely dominated by right-wing white men. The Faux women are afterthoughts (while the Faux blacks and Latinos downright hard to find).

Based on what I've read so far, I'd like to see O'Reilly punished for his behavior (it was wrong) but I'm not sure it rises to the level of a lawsuit properly seeking tens of millions of dollars for a woman who probably must take some responsibility for how her decisions kept placing her in situations where O'Reilly could do this (fool me once, shame on you...). I'm not saying she drove O'Reilly to do this, but that the choices she made once he started (as alleged) allowed the sitution to go on longer than it had to. Read: If I don't want to get fucked, I won't go to work in a whorehouse. Faux is a whorehouse for the pious righties.