Fox News turned 30 on Wednesday. The network threw itself a party: CEO Suzanne Scott rang the Nasdaq closing bell, Sean Hannity and Brit Hume swapped stories on air, and the original anchors got together to remember the “chaotic” launch in 1996.
What didn’t make the anniversary specials is the part of Fox’s history that cost it the most money and ended the careers of its two biggest names: a decade of sexual harassment claims, settlements and firings that started at the very top. Here’s that history, with the receipts.
What happened with Roger Ailes?
Roger Ailes built Fox News and ran it for 20 years. In July 2016, former Fox & Friends host Gretchen Carlson sued him for sexual harassment. Within weeks, more women came forward, and Ailes resigned that month. He denied the allegations. Fox settled with Carlson in September 2016 for $20 million, Fortune reported.
One of the women who talked to investigators was Megyn Kelly, then Fox’s biggest rising star. In her memoir, she wrote that Ailes made sexual comments to her, offered to help her career in exchange for sexual favors and grabbed her and tried to kiss her in his office, The Hollywood Reporter reported. She said she turned him down and reported it.
Ailes died in May 2017. In the first nine months after he left, Fox’s parent company reported about $45 million in costs for “settlements of pending and potential litigations.”
How much did Bill O’Reilly’s settlements cost?
Bill O’Reilly was the most-watched host in cable news. In April 2017, The New York Times reported that O’Reilly and Fox had paid about $13 million to five women to settle claims of harassment and other inappropriate behavior, going back to 2002. Advertisers fled, and Fox fired him that month.
Later that year, the Times reported something worse. In January 2017, O’Reilly had paid $32 million to settle with longtime Fox legal analyst Lis Wiehl, who alleged a nonconsensual sexual relationship, NBC News reported. Fox renewed his contract weeks later anyway, at a reported $25 million a year. O’Reilly has denied wrongdoing.
Who else at Fox was accused or paid?
- Kimberly Guilfoyle: Fox let the co-host go in 2018. A former assistant later accused her of sexual harassment, and Fox paid the assistant upward of $4 million, CNN and The New Yorker reported. Guilfoyle denied it.
- Ed Henry: Fox fired the anchor in 2020 after a former producer, Jennifer Eckhart, accused him of sexual misconduct. She sued, saying he raped her. A judge dismissed Fox from the suit in 2025, and in April an appeals court refused to bring the network back in. Henry denied the allegations.
- Tucker Carlson’s show: Fox paid former producer Abby Grossberg $12 million in 2023 to settle suits alleging a misogynistic, discriminatory workplace on Carlson’s show, NPR reported.
- The shareholders’ bill: In 2017, Fox’s parent company settled shareholder claims over the scandals for $90 million, paid by insurers, Fortune reported. Nobody admitted wrongdoing.
Did anyone at Fox go to prison?
Not for harassment. But Fox’s orbit has had its share. Wayne Simmons spent years on Fox as a “former CIA operative” and terrorism analyst. He’d never worked for the CIA. In 2016 he was sentenced to 33 months in federal prison for major fraud against the government, wire fraud and a gun charge.
Al Pirro, the ex-husband of longtime Fox host Jeanine Pirro, was convicted of tax fraud in 2000 and served time. On his last day in office in 2021, President Trump pardoned him. In 2025, the Senate confirmed Jeanine Pirro as U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C.
Why does Fox News hire so many women who look the same?
It wasn’t an accident. Former Fox staff described an Ailes-era network where women anchors sat at glass-topped desks and a camera crew called one shot “the leg cam,” NPR reported. One anchor recalled Ailes calling the control room to complain, “Move that damn laptop, I can’t see her legs!” Women on air were steered toward short dresses and skirts. Gretchen Carlson said pants weren’t allowed on Fox & Friends.
That look became the Fox look, and it’s still easy to spot. The message to women at the network was that how they looked on camera was part of the job, decided by the man who, many of them later said, was harassing them.
Who defended Roger Ailes?
When Carlson sued, a lot of Fox’s women stood up for Ailes. Greta Van Susteren called Carlson a disgruntled employee and said she’d “absolutely never” seen Ailes act inappropriately, CBS News reported. After more women came forward, Van Susteren said she regretted it, writing that the behavior had been “hidden from all of us.”
Megyn Kelly went the other way. She helped bring Ailes down, then spent the next decade moving right. In November 2024, she took the stage at a Trump rally and called him “a protector of women,” after a jury had found he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll. And Bill Shine, the Fox executive women said had failed to act on complaints, left Fox in 2017 and became Trump’s White House communications director a year later. Shine denied the allegations.
The BeezLoop Take
Fox’s anniversary coverage told a story about a scrappy network that gave conservatives a voice. That’s true as far as it goes. But for 20 of its 30 years, the man in charge was the man its own stars accused of harassing them, and the network paid tens of millions to keep accusations quiet while renewing the contracts of the men involved.
Fox did change some things after 2017, and its CEO today is a woman. But the network that lectures America every night about morals and law and order has spent more on harassment settlements than most companies will ever see, and the people who covered for it went on to power, not exile.
The open question: if Fox wants credit for 30 years, will it ever tell its own audience the whole story?
Also on BeezLoop: Fox News sells anger at other Americans, and how Fox hosts handled the Cornell rape case.
Sources: Fox News (30th anniversary) · Fortune ($45 million in settlements) · Rolling Stone (O’Reilly timeline) · NBC News ($32 million Wiehl settlement) · NPR (Grossberg settlement) · NPR (Ailes and Fox) · Fortune ($90 million shareholder settlement) · The Hollywood Reporter (Megyn Kelly) · CNN (Guilfoyle) · NPR via WLRN (Ed Henry suit) · Bloomberg Government (Second Circuit) · CBS News (Van Susteren) · U.S. Justice Department (Wayne Simmons) · CNBC (Al Pirro pardon) · NBC News (Pirro confirmed) · NPR (Bill Shine) · TODAY
