The woman who accused former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly of sexual harassment is "blowing up her NDA" and speaking about her experience to The Daily Beast.
Andrea Mackris, who was a Fox News producer at the time, accepted a settlement of $9 million from her former boss almost 17 years ago. Now she's telling the Daily Beast the graphic details of O'Reilly's alleged harassment, including lewd and threatening phone calls as well as conversations where he allegedly forced her to listen to his sexual fantasies about her.
"Here was my boss, a man who held my career and future in his hands, acknowledging that he knew I'd never consented but he didn't care," Mackris said.
"I may not get the past 17 years back," she said, reflecting on the challenges her career as faced since she took the settlement, "but there is one way I can retrieve my power from this storm of lies, loss, greed and grief. It's the same thing I did back in 2004 before Fox, Bill O'Reilly and their teams of willing executioners bound me to a contract that promises to ruin whatever is left of me if I dare do it again. Tell the truth. Walk free."
O'Reilly's career continued to thrive after Mackris' exit, landing lucrative contracts, book deals, and TV appearances until a New York Times report on his multimillion-dollar payouts to his victims was published in 2017, prompting News Corporation head Rupert Murdoch to cut O'Reilly loose with a $25 million golden parachute.
While Mackris says she misses journalism, she remains traumatized by her battles with O'Reilly, Fox, and even fellow journalists who were skeptical of her story.
"My own profession reprinted the lies. They reprinted them around the world so they have been a part of the problem," she said. "My profession has not wanted to look at their role in this. I'm a journalist and a writer. It's who I am, so to ask me to be something else is like really impossible. I never wanted to leave. I never thought that my career was going to end. I really thought they would hear the tapes."
Read the full interview over at The Daily Beast.
