He mentions Al Franken in one of his rants described in the complaint. He makes a veiled threat about how Franken is one day going to get a “knock on his door” and that “life as he knows it will change forever.” He keeps ragving about Franken a little bit later and says “Franken is done.” It’s all done in the course of a broader rant about what he’ll do to any woman who tries to rat him out for his sex stuff.
O’Reilly is on in about 12 minutes. It’ll be interesting to see what he has to say.
DtC, I’m on your side, buddy, I hate O’Reilly just as much as you do, but honestly lets not get caught up in sympathy for the sexually abused until you actually are sure of the fact that she was abused. To me it sounds like obscene phone calls, while uncomfortable, she could have just hung up. The fact that she has so many of these monologues taped means that she probably wanted to stick it to Bill and make a big name out of her self in the process. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure that his Murdoch’s goons are involved, but I think this lady knew what she was getting into. I think the appropriate response would have been after the first recording to tell him to stop, and threaten him. It would have shut him up, I bet.
But the liberal side of me is pretty happy to see this moralizing bastard get tarnished. It doesn’t matter if he is guilty or innocent. If those tapes exist, which I doubt he could know, he is going to look really bad. That’s all I care about. Consider Bill’s career history when the tape comes our of him with vibrator noise in the background. That will be sweet.
But I honestly think of it this way. I think she is playing a game, and I think Bill is pissed and knows it. He was stuipd to make those calls though. All it takes is for those tapes to get out. It doesn’t matter if he is guilty, because he will have to live with the fact that America knows his fantasies about Falafel and such. How would your average blue-colar Fox News enthusiast like that? Probably not very much. Of course his fanbase is so devoted they’ll probably just pretend it didn’t happen.
I honestly don’t even care about his legal liability, nor do I care if the woman was holding him up for money. I’m just happy to see the bastard get humiliated. If he really did make those phone calls (and it sounds more and more like he did), then his credibility is destroyed.
It doesn’t matter if he’s guilty or innocent???
Can you be more specific about what liberal principle is involved here?
It’s not a liberal principle, it’s that there are two separate issues at work here.
The first is whether Bill O’Reilly made obscene phone calls to a Fox producer and fantasized about falafel while pleasuring himself with a dildo. The second is whether that constitutes sexual harassment.
O’Reilly is not denying the first part, only the second. So when we say we don’t care about “guilt” we’re really only talking about legal liability. The fact of the behavior itself seems to have already been established.
The fact in and of itself that tapes exist of Bill O’Reilly blathering sexual fantasies to a woman not his wife, telling her what he wants to do to her, talking about other women he’s “bedded down,” all while violating himself with a sex toy is great news indeed. I could care less whether it legally constututes sexual harassment. That’s a separate issue. Even if he isn’t legally liable for sexual harassment, he’s still been exposed as a hypocrite, a fraud and a perv. That much cannot be disputed (IF those tapes exist, which O’Reilly seems to believe they do, which means the conversations must have occurred).
The reason that it doesn’t matter if he’s guilty or innocent, is because he obviously said those things on the phone. Whether or not it is considered harassment or not doesn’t really bother me. I don’t like the man, and I’d love to see him get humiliated. What he did to Jeremy Glick was reprehensible, and I’ll be happy to see him get any payback of all the bad karma he’s been dishing out for years now. Sure he does benefits, but then it makes you wonder if he only does it to further his nice-guy image, as he always uses it to defend himself.
I am not claiming that there is some liberal principle that I hold that makes me not care if he is innocent or guilty. The guy is bad, and whether or not he gets off the hook, it won’t matter because what he said will get out. That’s what I mean. Not whether he actually is innocent or guilty but whether he is found innocent or guilty. I care if he actually is guilty or not, but he’ll get something of what he deserves in any case.
Come on, Mace, can’t you see the comedy in this whole thing even if O’Reilly is not legally liable? I mean Come on, the most self-rightous prick in the whole Fox stable is caught on tape perving all over an employee, talking about food sex, and raping himself with a big fake dick! What’s not funny about that? 
(And yes, I would still think it was hilarious if it was Michael Moore or somebody on the left, but at least Moore is not a moralist)
Marv Albert was forgiven mostly because he engaged in a consensual sex act when he violated the Kama Sutra code (bite her gently).
Al Franken is so boring, any phone sex talk he engages would mostly consist of a dry reading of Gray’s Antomy. The alleged victim would fall asleep before she realizes she was ‘harassed’.
According to the New York Daily News, she has tapes. They dedicate two pages of transcipts. The content makes Clarence Thomas look sexually ingenue in comparison , and the movie A Dirty Shame seem tame.
Do you have a link to the transcripts?
Okay, that’s a mental image I really did not need. But what’s worse is that it was still festering in my mind when I read this:
And my treacherous subconscious instantly combined the two.
Knock knock
Al: Hello, can I - OH MY GOD!
Bill: How d’ya like me now, Frankey!?!
And now I’m posting this, because I refuse to suffer alone.
Just when I thought the mental evocations in this thread could not get any worse.
May you burn in Hell, Miller.
One day I’ll find an old Gypsy woman who knows how to throw the mojo juju and I’ll have her target you.
I can’t wait for jibjab to give us the Flash version.
“My name’s Bill O’Reilly look what’s in my bottom…”
sub[/sub]
But what about the children? Won’t somebody please think of the children? 
Actually, according to the ABC report to which Yosemite linked, Makris’'s lawsuit is a direct response to a suit that O’Reilly filed first, alleging extortion. So he appears to have filed a pre-emptive suit, throwing in the kitchen sink, to which the Makirs lawyers came back with specific allegations that simply omitted the fluff that O’Reilly had tossed in to the mix.
This makes the whole mess even stickier: What was Makris doing that prompted O’Reilly’s suit? Preparing a genuine suit that he thought he could undercut by striking first? Just looking for hush money to enrich herself?
I have no inclination to believe either side until a lot more information (all of which will be tainted, of course) comes out. In the mean time, I suspect that DtC had better enjoy his glee while the scandal is fresh, because I can’t see this doing anything to hurt O’Reilly’s career. Heck, even back in the “innocent” 1950’s A Face in the Crowd pointed out that scandals don’t really hurt celebrities. Outside of the realm of children performers having a sex scandal, (Paul Ruebens, Fatty Arbuckle–and Arbuckle violated the “live boy or dead girl” rule), these things rarely bring career to a halt, although they can slow it down for a bit. If you’re big enough to begin with, or if your primary audience is not children, (as with the gloved one), even a sex scandal may only slow you down without stopping you.
But this mental image… you hve to flesh it out! What’s Bill wearing, huh?
I picture him in a fuschia muscle shirt and bicycle shorts.
I can’t fault her too much for coming back to Fox. She wasn’t happy at CNN and, in the lawsuit posted on TSG, it was stated that she told O’Reilly she would come back only if he acted in a professional manner (to which he agreed). I think the only thing that can be said about that is that she’s naive and gullible, not that she was necessarily trying to gather evidence for a case.
Keep in mind that some of these alleged conversations took place over dinner and she couldn’t just “hang up on him” then. She also told him several times, “You’re my boss.” It’s not like she let it go on without any objections.
I’m keeping an open mind about it, as we need to know why he filed a suit before she did, but what DtC says makes sense–he’s not denying what happened, he’s only denying things that weren’t even alleged to have happened.
Unfortunately, I pictured him naked. My brain needs a Silkwood shower…pronto!
Franken screamed because of his immense pity for O’Reilly’s baby dick.
Curious then that O’Reilly’s lawsuit against Mackris alleges that she’s making her allegations partially because she and her lawyer are Democrats interested in embarassing and tarnishing the reputation of Fox and O’Reilly before the election … .
If Fox and O’Reilly were as “Fair and Balanced” as they claim to be, why would this be an issue?