‘Bombshell’ Shows Her Support for the Perverted Fox News Chairman
By Dan Murphy
I went to the movies with my wife last weekend to see “Bombshell,” a movie about the sexist history of Fox news during the years of Chairman Roger Ailes. The movie focused on two of Fox News’ former leading anchors, Megyn Kelly, played by Charlize Theron – who is up for an Oscar nomination for her role, and Gretchen Carlson, played by Nicole Kidman, and their humiliating and degrading sexual harassments with Ailes.
As I watched the movie, I thought about how Fox news was somehow able to weather the storm of the sexual lawsuits and settlements from Ailes, who was forced to resign from Fox News after Carlson sued him for sexual harassment and settled her case for $20 million, and its former top commentator Bill O’Reilly, who also left Fox in disgrace after he settled sexual harassment lawsuits with Fox female staffers for a total of $42 million.
Yet today, less than three years after the shame and departure of both Ailes and O’Reilly, Fox News remains on top of the cable news world.
One role in “Bombshell” getting a lot of news is that of Westchester’s own Jeanine Pirro, played by actress Alanna Ubach. The timeframe of “Bombshell” is 2016, when then-presidential candidate Donald Trump rises to become the Republican nominee, and Megyn Kelly gets caught in the middle of Trump’s campaign and his demeaning comments about women.
Ailes, played by John Lithgow, begins to lose control at Fox when several women come forward with descriptions of what he made them do to work at the network, and succeed. Kelly eventually joins Carlson to publicly come out against Ailes and his demands.
Pirro comes to play in the movie when Ailes tries to combat the allegations against by having some of the stars at Fox come out in support of him. Pirro was one of the Fox commentators and hosts to support Ailes in 2016.
In an interview with “The Wrap” in 2016, Pirro said, “When I read what was clearly absurdities in this complaint, I said to myself, ‘How sad that you’ve got this woman (Carlson) who is making these complaints when there are real victims out there.’”
Pirro, the former Westchester district attorney for 12 years (1993 to 2005) who help create the first domestic violence bureau in the D.A.’s office, added about Ailes: “Honestly, this is a decent man and I have spent my career fighting for women. I have no bones about criticizing someone when they deserve to be criticized. But this is ridiculous.”
In “Bombshell,” Pirro, repeats what she told “The Wrap” as she walks around the newsroom encouraging employees, including Kelly, to support Ailes. Kelly rejects Pirro and others’ requests and eventually comes out against Ailes, telling her story of unwanted advances and sexual harassment, in 2016, and later in her memoir.
Other Fox news personalities came out to support Ailes, like Geraldo Rivera, Greta Van Susteren and Kimberly Guilfoyle. As I walked out of the theater, I wondered: Did Pirro and the others ever apologize for their support of Ailes after learning about his wicked ways later?
Both Geraldo and Greta apologized and amended their support for Ailes after Carlson, Kelly and several other Fox news women came forward with their stories of harassment, and sex, with Ailes. Rivera apologized in a Facebook post, saying he was “filled with regret.” And Greta said: “I read Geraldo’s FB post in which he said he regretted not believing Gretchen Carlson’s claim of sexual harassment. We all regret it.”
But Pirro and Guilfoyle never did publicly apologize, or at least recant their support for Ailes. Guilfoyle was forced off the air at Fox based on her own set of allegations of improper behavior in the newsroom, including showing photos of male private parts to others. She now works on Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign and is dating Donald Trump Jr.
Pirro, who met Ailes more than 30 years ago and who worked for him for more than a decade, added in 2016: “I know the man. I have been in a room with him. I’ve been alone with him. He has never said or done anything (inappropriate). He is brilliant, witty, funny and a genius. This whole complaint and the allegations are absurd… The idea that Roger Ailes sabotaged her career because she refused his sexual advances… are you kidding? This guy is doing 8 million things a day. You really think that he’s chasing her around?”
The movie got mixed reviews, with some calling it ”an unreliable explosive device targeted at Fox News,” but all of the reviews for Ubach were positive, calling her portrayal “as the repugnant Jeanine Pirro brilliant,” and “best of the bunch is Alanna Ubach’s Jeanine Pirro), and “a memorable performance by Alanna Ubach (as a deeply detestable Jeanine Pirro).”
In an interview with Vulture-NY Magazine, Ubach explains how she got to know Pirro before playing her on the big screen:
Question: She (Pirro) is described as the founding member of Team Roger in this movie, for her loyalty to him.
Answer: “Of course, and she’s an a Trumpista to boot! These women fascinate me, but the only logical answer I can give is that it was a generational thing. She was a lot older than the other women who decided to bring Roger Ailes to justice. I’m 44 and she was, I believe, in her 60s when all of this went down. This is a woman who was a teenager in the ’60s, a Lebanese Catholic. Her mother was a department store model and her father was a hardworking Lebanese immigrant, and they lived in upstate New York and she went to Catholic school. I thought she must have felt marginalized from the time she was a kid. Growing up in upstate New York in the 1960s, I’m sure she was going to Catholic school surrounded by a bunch of Irish and Italians, and she probably always felt out of place.
“So, you know, that insecurity, and then also the fact that she was a petite brunette. I thought, I can certainly relate to that, the insecurity of being short and having a little too much hair on your head, maybe a unibrow. She’s obscenely ambitious, and I’m thinking she just had so much to prove, and finally here comes Roger Ailes, who is the hand that makes her rich and famous and gives her everything she wants as far as validation is concerned. Why wouldn’t she defend him?0 He’s almost like a father figure.
“The fortunate thing about playing a famous person in 2019 is you just have to Google them and watch videos. I watched her footage for hours. Then I finally came across this TMZ footage of her being bothered at the airport and I really saw who she was behind closed doors. If I just played celebrity Jeanine Pirro, the one who’s in interviews, then it was going to come across very ‘SNL.’ This was Charles Randolph writing the script and we’re going to want to see what she’s like behind closed doors. So thank God for that footage.
“There was also a Lebanese publication – she’s Lebanese – where she was just an open book. They asked her a lot of questions about her youth and she talked about how insecure she was going to an all-Catholic school in upstate New York. She was the only Lebanese girl at this school. I think that had a lot to do with her finally becoming who she became. She had a lot of drive.” (End of Ubach statement.)
I do not watch Pirro’s weekly show, on a Saturday night when most of us are doing other things, but I do like to flip from Fox to MSNBC or CNN to get the opposing views on the issues of the day. I also occasionally listen to O’Reilly when I find him on the radio.
But I do not appreciate the fact that O’Reilly has refused to accept guilt, and wrongdoing in his interactions with Fox employees that led to settlements in the tens of millions of dollars. The behavior of O’Reilly and Ailes creeps me out, and “Bombshell” will remind you of their shameful actions.
I thought about my 18-year-old daughter after watching “Bombshell,” and how I would not want her to have to go through what Carlson, Kelly and others had to go through. But I also thought about how Pirro never backed off her support of Ailes, even today years after the scandal. I could not find an apology, or even a walk back from Pirro. If anyone can find one, email us at dmurphy@risingmediagroup.com
