I hope that karma really does exist. Sometimes I believe that it does, especially in the case of Bill O’Reilly. The sex harassment suit against O’Reilly and FOX News is the ultimate liberal shadenfreude, the delight in the misfortune of others. I often wonder why there is no equivalent in English. There should be, considering it is a great American pastime.
I don’t fault O’Reilly for being a nasty man. I have no business pointing fingers, considering how many fingers have been in me. If I got slapped with a $60 million dollar lawsuit every time I tried to put a falafel on somebody, I don’t know where I’d be, but I am sure it would involve washing dishes.
Many are shocked at the dollar amount. They say that because the figure is so high that the case could only be one of extortion. I think that $60 million is not nearly enough, because a woman’s sense of safety, sexual and otherwise is far more valuable than that, and is something that can never be replaced or paid back.
There is no retribution for transgressive acts, only the chance for some type of justice to be meted out. Consider that 60 million is not only consolation for having had to deal with this upsetting situation where Bill O’Reilly is calling you up at all hours and ejaculating, then afterwards talking about how good he was on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, but also the absolute invasion of privacy experienced by having filed suit against the media monolith FOX. Look at the alleged rape victim in the Kobe Bryant case. Even though her identity was to remain sealed from the public eye, every lurid factoid of her life was documented on the tabloid pages. To come out and accuse a cultural hot topic like Bill O’Reilly is tantamount to social death.
Andrea Mackriss may be a household name any day now, just like Monica Lewinsky. No matter how progressive we would like to think we are, we forever place blame on the victim, and force them into infamy where they will design handbags and endure jokes about dress stains for the rest of their natural lives. 60 million doesn’t even begin to cover it. For the rest of us, it is an expensive laugh charged to those who cannot possibly afford it. Bill O’Reilly will not lose his job, nor his reputation. He might spin it into how any regular Joe like himself could be victimized by a crazy broad, and weave it carefully into the FOX mythology of hate, a cautionary tale of the hysteria and greed of women.
What I find truly sinister about the whole mess is the way that he said, “If a woman ever breathed a word I’ll make her pay so dearly she’d wish that she’d never been born.” That is evil, and what I find intolerable. When we act irresponsibly, we must be willing to be accountable for it, or at least hope to get away with it without people finding out, and certainly without threatening the victim into silence. The proper course of action would have been for him to keep kissing as much ass as possible, getting Mackriss higher and higher paying jobs, lighting a lot of candles and scanning the night sky for shooting stars.
He also said, “It’d be her word against mine and who are they going to believe? Me or some unstable woman making outrageous accusations.” Why would anyone not believe her? Would she go to all this trouble to make these accusations, knowing full well the breadth and scope of the FOX empire and the power they had to effectively destroy her life if she wasn’t telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Why do we not believe hysterical women? Hysterical women are always right. It is brave for Mackriss to defend herself, and wondrous to have all the details.
I love seeing the other side of Bill. His bravado and lusty retelling of his sexual adventures, the fond nostalgia he had when he told Mackriss that once while getting a massage in Thailand that he showed “the little brown woman” his penis and she was amazed, are endearing and human. I find I can’t demonize him as easily as I did when he was just the cantankerous pundit spewing conservative propaganda. His vanity and naughty antics make him sweeter to me. They cut the bitter taste of his politics and arrogant manner. It is complex, all that I feel now about Bill O’Reilly. I hate him for his bullying threats, especially the bizarre one about Al Franken, and how FOX dealt with those who might stand in their way. I hate him for refusing to take the blame, thinking that he would never be held accountable, that he could write his own moral code and live without guilt or remorse of any kind just because of his power and fame. Strangely, I love him more now too, because he is just a man, with fantasies and desires and vulnerabilities. I can identify with him. I have a vibrator too! He also has to deal with the public scrutiny of his private life, probably not as probing and violating as what his accuser will have to go through, but which seems for him would be personally unendurable. He comes off as such a brittle guy, and something like this could likely shatter him. He’s cracked enough as it is with this case blowing up like a car bomb outside the FOX News studio, and having built up such a Great Wall of Hate from liberals and most thinking people. Who knows when the whole structure will crash down all around him leaving him, his cell phone, his vanity, his vibrator, his passion for exfoliation and Middle Eastern food scattered and lost in the rubble? I feel for him, and I doubly feel for Mackriss.
This story makes me think that we are all indeed, beholden to karma, and payback is a bitch.