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Former Fox News Booker Says She Was Sexually Harassed and ‘Psychologically Tortured’ by Roger Ailes for More Than 20 YearsBy Gabriel Sherman
July 29, 2016
Laurie Luhn at the Fox News 10th Anniversary Reception at Cafe Milano, Georgetown, April 26, 2006. Photo: Courtesy of Laurie Luhn
The morning after Fox News chief Roger Ailes resigned, the cable network’s former director of booking placed a call to the New York law firm hired by 21st Century Fox to investigate sexual-harassment allegations against Ailes. Laurie Luhn told the lawyers at Paul, Weiss that she had been harassed by Ailes for more than 20 years, that executives at Fox News had known about it and helped cover it up, and that it had ruined her life. “It was psychological torture,” she later told me.
So far, most of the women who have spoken publicly about harassment by Ailes in the wake of Gretchen Carlson’s lawsuit had said no to Ailes’s sexual advances. They ran out of hotel rooms, they pulled away from embraces, they complained or avoided or generally resisted, even when it hurt their careers. This is the account of a woman who chose to go along with what Roger Ailes wanted — because he was powerful, because she thought he could help her advance her career, because she was professionally adrift and emotionally unmoored.
Doing so helped Luhn’s career for a time — at her peak, she earned $250,000 a year as an event planner at Fox while, according to both her own account and four confirming sources, enjoying Ailes’s protection within the company. But the arrangement required her to do many things she is now horrified by, including luring young female Fox employees into one-on-one situations with Ailes that Luhn knew could result in harassment. “He’s a predator,” she told me. In recent years, Luhn had a series of mental breakdowns that she attributes to the stress of her situation, and was even hospitalized for a time.
Luhn recounted her story this week in 11 hours of interviews at her Los Angeles home, in the presence of a family friend who first heard her accounts in 2010, long before there was any public discussion of Ailes’s alleged harassment of women. Luhn’s struggle with mental illness notwithstanding, New York was able to independently corroborate key details in her account, including that she was sexually involved with Ailes for many years, from sources who worked at Fox at the same time she did. Additionally, I viewed documents Luhn retained, including a copy of the $3.15 million severance agreement she signed in 2011 that includes iron-clad nondisclosure provisions.
(Ailes’s attorneys Susan Estrich and Barry Asen did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Over the course of the interviews, Luhn alternated between composed, detailed recollections and outbursts of grief, shame, anger, and paranoia. “I've always wondered,” she said, “would the truth come out?”
*
Luhn said she first met Ailes in the summer of 1988 at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the George H.W. Bush presidential campaign. She was 28 and single; he was married and approaching 50. She’d moved from Texas to Washington the year before to work as a flight attendant for Continental Airlines, but she quickly became interested in politics. A volunteer job at the Bush campaign phone bank led to a full-time position in the campaign’s accounting department. After seeing Ailes’s political television ads previewed in the office, she decided she wanted to go into political communications. One Saturday morning right before Labor Day, she introduced herself to Ailes in the elevator at the campaign headquarters. “I’m Laurie Luhn, and I got to see the ads. I'd love to learn how to do that,” she recalled saying. A few days later, she said, Ailes called out to her as he walked by her desk: “If there is ever anything I can do for you, let me know.”
In the fall of 1990, Luhn did call on him for help. She was working on the primary congressional campaign of John Vogt in Central Florida. When it was clear her candidate was going to lose and she would have to return to Washington with no job and mounting bills, she called Ailes in New York at his media consulting company, Ailes Communications.
Laurie Luhn, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes at the Fox News 10th Anniversary Reception at Cafe Milano, Georgetown, April 26, 2006. Photo: Courtesy of Laurie Luhn
Sometime around Thanksgiving, she said, Ailes called her back. He said he was in D.C. and asked if she wanted to come by his Washington office for an interview before he flew home to New York. Luhn brought a copy of her résumé, listing her final title at the Bush campaign: office manager. “Well, we already got an office manager. I don't really know what you could do,” she recalled Ailes saying. Then, she said, Ailes began asking personal questions: “Where are you from? What is your relationship with your parents like?”
Luhn said Ailes then asked her for a ride to the airport and offered to take her out to dinner. “I had nothing but bills. I was in a horrible panic. I must have told him that over dinner,” she said. Afterward, she drove him to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. “We pull up and I say, ‘Thank you so much for dinner.’ He leans over and slips me the tongue and kisses me,” she said, “and hands me a wad of cash. ‘Here's to help you pay some bills,’ he said. It was maybe $200 or $300.” To her at the time, it was a lot of money.
After that, Luhn said, Ailes called her with an offer: He would put her on what she recalled was a $500 monthly retainer to do “research.” Her first assignment was filing Freedom of Information Act requests on Ailes’s competitors Charlie Black, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone, the latter two of whom are now advising Trump. The retainer also paid for Luhn to be available to meet Ailes when he was in Washington.
On the night of January 16, 1991, Ailes was in Washington to prep George H.W. Bush on his Oval Office address to announce the start of the first Gulf War. Ailes and Luhn again met for dinner. According to Luhn, he asked her to go home, watch the speech, and then meet him at the Crystal City Marriott, where he had a suite. By this point, Luhn understood what Ailes expected of her, but she went with him anyway.
She recalled that, when she walked into the hotel room, Ailes asked her what she thought of Bush’s speech. “I was always very complimentary,” she told me. “I wanted to learn how to do all that. I wanted to learn how to do the ads, how to do the coaching. I wanted to learn how to work with candidates.”
Luhn put on the black garter and stockings she said Ailes had instructed her to buy; he called it her uniform. Ailes sat on a couch. “Go over there. Dance for me,” she recalled him saying. She hesitated. “Laurie, if you're gonna be my girl, my eyes and ears, if you are going to be someone I can depend on in Washington, my spy, come on, dance for me,” he said, according to her account. When she started dancing, Ailes got out a video camera. Luhn didn’t want to be filmed, she said, but Ailes was insistent: “I am gonna need you to do better than that.”
When she had finished dancing, Ailes told her to get down on her knees in front of him, she said, and put his hands on her temples. As she recalled, he began speaking to her slowly and authoritatively, as if he were some kind of Svengali: “Tell me you will do what I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it. At any time, at any place when I call. No matter where I call you, no matter where you are. Do you understand? You will follow orders. If I tell you to put on your uniform, what are you gonna do, Laurie? WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO, LAURIE?” Then, she recalled, his voice dropped to a whisper: “What are you, Laurie? Are you Roger's whore? Are you Roger's spy? Come over here.” Ailes asked her to perform oral sex, she said.
Later, Ailes showed her the footage of her dancing. She asked him what he intended to do with it and, she says, he replied, “I am going to put it in a safe-deposit box just so we understand each other.”
After that, Luhn said, she regularly met Ailes in hotels for sexual encounters. He asked her to buy a boom box so she could bring music to dance to. Ailes always left cash for her. A couple of times, while he was advising French politician Jacques Chirac, he gave her francs. “I remember I had to go exchange the money,” Luhn said.
*
As Ailes moved from politics to television news, Luhn had hopes of going along with him. In 1993, NBC hired Ailes to be president of CNBC. Ailes dangled the prospect of an on-air job at the financial-news channel. “He played me,” said Luhn. “He says, ‘I’d like you to come read for me, but you’ll have to get rid of your Texas accent.’ That’s how he does it. The job obviously never happened.”
In the spring of 1996, Ailes recruited Luhn to work on the launch of Fox News. “Rupert is going to pay for this channel. I want to see if you can come,” she said Ailes told her in the lobby of the Crystal City Marriott. A Fox executive called her a few days later and offered her a job as a “guest relations” staffer on Fox News Sunday, the public-affairs program.
At this point, Luhn could have stayed away from Ailes. She had a job as a legal aide at the lobbying firm Patton Boggs and “was pretty happy,” she recalled. But she chose to go work for him at Fox News. Why would she do this? Luhn’s explanation is that Ailes held her so much in his sway that she couldn’t resist. “I was programmed,” she said. Even today, she said, “sometimes the Stockholm syndrome with Roger slips back, and I am still a little girl trying to impress Daddy Roger.”
Plus, going to Fox moved her career in a direction she wanted it to go. She thought working with the guests on cable news seemed like a glamorous opportunity. “I loved that job,” she said. “I loved booking. I loved building the contacts and making sure that those guests were going to love the experience they would have at Fox News, that they would want to come back.”
Laurie Luhn and Megyn Kelly at Brit Hume’s Retirement Party at Cafe Milano, Georgetown, January 2009. Photo: Courtesy of Laurie Luhn
At first, Luhn didn’t see much of Ailes at Fox. But after the network was up and running, she said, the hotel meetings resumed. Now he began calling her to New York for encounters. They developed a system. She says that Ailes or Fox executive Bill Shine would call then–Washington bureau chief Kim Hume and tell her there was a “booking meeting” in New York that Luhn needed to attend. (Through a spokesperson, Shine confirmed he called Luhn to New York for booking meetings.)
They met in the afternoons, she said, usually at the DoubleTree in Times Square, sometimes the Renaissance — Fox people preferred the Muse. “It was always the on-my-knees, hold-my-temples routine. There was no affair, no sex, no love,” she said. Ailes continued to give Luhn cash afterward, and she began racking up personal expenses on her Fox News credit card. (Luhn said she always paid the bills back.)
As she was promoted through the ranks at Fox, Luhn worked harder and harder to please Ailes. She zealously promoted the network’s right-wing agenda. “I was very proud of the product. I was very proud of how we handled 9/11. Very proud of how we handled the run-up to the Iraq War,” she said. “My job was to sell the war. I needed to get people on the air that were attractive and articulate and could convey the importance of this campaign. It was a drumbeat.”
Luhn said she sensed her colleagues in the Washington bureau gossiped about her frequent trips to New York and treated her suspiciously. She is convinced that many people at Fox News knew about what was going on with Ailes. “They all knew there was quid pro quo,” Luhn recalled. Two former Fox employees confirmed people knew Ailes was involved with Luhn.
A former colleague in Fox's Washington bureau said that Luhn was "dysfunctional” at work. “No one knew what the heck she did,” the colleague said. “She was a ‘protected person’ and left alone."
Luhn’s relationship with her boss at the time, Washington bureau chief Kim Hume, became strained. Hume threatened to fire her when she submitted an expense report for the DoubleTree hotel, Luhn recalled. “She said, ‘Do you expect me to sign that? I can get you out of here. I’d get you six weeks of severance.’” (Hume did not respond to a request for comment.)
In 2004, Luhn told Ailes about Hume’s suspicions. Ailes came up with a solution: Luhn got a promotion and a raise, and she would report to Ailes’s deputy Shine. Ailes summoned Luhn to New York to tell her the news, Luhn said. Then he told her to call Hume, from his extension, and inform her that she would no longer be reporting to her. She did, she told me, and Hume hung up. Ailes was sending a message to the bureau chief: Luhn was protected by him. Inside Fox News, Luhn became known as an “FOR” — friend of Roger. After the call, according to Luhn, Ailes turned to her and said, “Now, remember, you’re Doris Day. Go put your uniform on, get over to the DoubleTree, and thank me for this."
Around this time, Ailes’s star Bill O’Reilly was accused by a Fox producer named Andrea Mackris of engaging in unwanted phone sex with her. O’Reilly settled with her for a reported $10 million. Despite the obvious risks, Ailes’s sexual demands only grew more intense after he promoted Luhn, she said. On three occasions, twice at the Renaissance and once at the Omni Berkshire, she said, Ailes demanded that she engage in sadomasochistic sex with another woman while he watched. The final such session occurred in the summer of 2005, Luhn recalled. Ailes snapped pictures. Afterward, he left $1,000 on the dresser and invited the two women to a party at Elaine’s on the Upper East Side, Luhn said. “I remember him being there holding court.”
*
By 2006, Luhn said, Ailes was regularly demanding phone sex in the office, but the hotel visits had stopped. Instead, said Luhn, Ailes instructed her to recruit young women for him. “You’re going to find me ‘Roger’s Angels.’ You’re going to find me whores,” Luhn recalled Ailes saying on numerous occasions, urging her to send young Fox staffers his way. He had promoted Luhn to director of bookings, which gave her the authority to hire employees. She said she chose women Ailes would be attracted to. “You're not expected to hire unattractive people,” she said.
Luhn denied ever setting Ailes up with her staff for explicitly sexual purposes, but she did send them in for private meetings with him where she knew they could be exposed to sexual harassment. One woman who worked for Luhn and spoke only on the condition of anonymity said that Luhn sent her to an after-hours meeting with Ailes in his office. According to this woman’s account, Ailes followed the same pattern he used with Luhn many years before: He asked her about her family and career goals and offered to mentor her — perhaps it would give him “energy.” Ailes also asked about the woman’s shoes, she told me, commenting that “women who like shoes also like lingerie.” He also mentioned that he had advised heads of state with “absolute loyalty and discretion,” so that meant she could “tell [him] everything.” The woman said she found the conversation highly inappropriate and uncomfortable. Ailes tried to hug her and she left the meeting shaken. Months later, Luhn fired the woman. She hired a lawyer and signed a settlement with Fox.
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