Fox News employees say their CEO was complicit in Roger Ailes' culture of fear and harassment

On Tuesday, The Daily Beast reported that Suzanne Scott, the current CEO of Fox News, was complicit in predecessor Roger Ailes' culture of sexual misconduct in ways for which she has not ever been held to account.

"More than a dozen women — both current and former Fox News staffers, working on-camera and behind the scenes — told The Daily Beast that Scott has yet to be held accountable for her role over the years as a longtime Ailes lieutenant in allegedly facilitating a corporate culture of sexual misconduct, objectification of women, and surveillance," reported editor-at-large Lloyd Grove and former Fox News reporter Diana Falzone.

"She carefully controls her encounters with non-Fox News journalists — she declined to speak to The Daily Beast for this story — despite her leadership of perhaps the most scrutinized media organization on the planet as a female trailblazer in what remains a male-dominated industry," said the report. "Understandably, there is relentless public interest in her performance. Yet her engagement with the press has largely been confined to trade publications and media power lists."

"It's a total sham she's there on behalf of women," said one former Fox News anchor. "If she had turned things around there, you wouldn't have new sexual harassment cases and probably more we don't even know about because of arbitration clauses." Another former anchor agreed, saying, "Scott was definitely part of the Ailes club. I never saw her stray from how he did business. She carried out all of his directives of retaliation."

Ailes, who was instrumental in creating Fox News' brand of right-wing reporting, fell from grace in 2017 as a series of lawsuits alleging sexual harassment and paranoid surveillance of employees came to light. He ultimately stepped down from the company amid the scandals.