Bill O'Reilly Out At Fox News After Sexual Harassment Allegations 21st Century Fox announced Wednesday that Bill O'Reilly will not return to Fox News after a review of the sexual harassment allegations against him that provoked an advertiser boycott. ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: TV host Bill O'Reilly won't be returning to Fox News from that holiday - ever. This afternoon, the controlling owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, announced that the network is dropping O'Reilly after a thorough review of sexual harassment accusations against him. In a statement, O'Reilly said - and this is a quote - "it is tremendously disheartening that we part ways due to completely unfounded claims. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik has been covering the controversy and joins us now from New York. And David, what happened in recent days to lead to the Murdoch family's decision to oust O'Reilly? DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Well, it was pretty clear there was a bit of a split in the Murdoch family.
Rupert Murdoch wanted to ride this out, see how it went. Bill O'Reilly is not a personal favorite of his, but he's made the network and the Murdoch family a lot of money, call it, in the nine figures for advertising. I mean it's over a hundred million dollars a year. And they thought perhaps this would blow over. The sons said - James and Lachlan said this is a regressive face to be putting on Fox News right now. He is coming under scrutiny for sexual harassment accusations in the past. There were new ones being compiled in recent days that were seemingly just not going to end. There was a concern that this would be sort of the image attached to Fox News, particularly in LED Canopy Light of the sexual harassment scandal that cost Fox News chairman Roger Ailes his job last summer. SIEGEL: How bad is that that scrutiny of O'Reilly? Where do those accusations now stand? FOLKENFLIK: Well, there have been new ones in recent days. The activist lawyer Lisa Bloom in Los Angeles has been filing other complaints on behalf of new clients and doing so for women whom she says aren't seeking financial compensation.
That is, these are just women who want their stories heard. Most recently, there's an African-American woman who claimed that O'Reilly had really referred to her leeringly and looked at her in ways - talked to her in ways that sexualized her without in other ways conferring on her the sense of being a colleague. And while one could if this were a one-off say, well, perhaps that's not that big a deal, but as The New York Times recently disclosed, the payments made by O'Reilly and his employers over the past dozen years have been in the neighborhood of $13 million. And there was a notion that this somehow might be a bottomless pit and would not allow Fox to get past the scandal and taint last summer. And this would be the issue that sort of defined Fox.