Sarah Palin Won’t Tell Jake Tapper If She Was Harassed At Fox News
You Betcha: Sarah Palin speaks at a rally in Elon, N.C. during the 2008 presidential campaign. Image by wikimedia
Sarah Palin refused to definitively answer when asked in a Thursday interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper whether she had been sexually harassed while working at Fox News, which fired top primetime host Bill O’Reilly after years of such allegations.
“I wouldn’t put up with anything that would be perceived as intimidating or harassing,” she told Tapper, adding that she believed that Fox News, where she was a paid commentator for five years, needed a change in its culture.
But when pressed by Tapper, Palin would neither confirm nor deny whether she herself was sexually harassed while working there.
“I just — you know, it was time to part ways and, you know, get out there in, I guess, a more diverse arena to express views and to speak for the public, and that’s what I’ve been able to do now,” she said, explaining her departure from the channel.
Many prominent women at the channel – including former hosts Megyn Kelly, Gretchen Carlson and Andrea Tantaros – have alleged being subjected to sexual harassment by network executives.
O’Reilly is the second Fox bigwig to be forced out after such allegations surfaced — former network head Roger Ailes resigned in July.
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at solomon@forward.com or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
