Yes, Bill O’Reilly Is A Liar — But Remember That Whole Sexual Harassment …Thing?

by Valerie Beaumont

While conservatives continue to victoriously celebrate the downfall of Brian Williams (in the form of a six-month suspension), they remain silent  about the Right’s own “Brian Williams” — Bill O’Reilly.
“I’ve been there. That’s really what separates me from most of these other bloviators. I bloviate, but I bloviate about stuff I’ve seen. They bloviate about stuff that they haven’t,” O’Reilly once claimed. But, as the Fox News hero celebrated the revelation that Williams lied about nearly being shot down in a helicopter while covering the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Bill-O was unprepared for the media uncovering his own lies. 
For instance, here is a heroic tale of O’Reilly rescuing a photographer in the “war zone” that was the Falkland Islands.
While O’Reilly denigrated Mother Jones writer David Corn as a liar following Corn’s and Daniel Schulman’s report on the Fox anchor’s own inconsistencies regarding his presence in a “war zone” no American journalist actually reached, many are speaking out against O’Reilly.
“There are now a half a dozen journalists and personnel from CBS who were working O’Reilly on the ground in Buenos Aires who dispute his claims,” PoliticusUSA reports. Veterans group VoteVets demands that Fox News remove O’Reilly from the airwaves:

NBC acted completely appropriately in taking Brian Williams off the air and looking into claims he’s made over the years. Fox News has to do the same thing. The issue, for me, isn’t that Fox has been caught off guard and didn’t realize O’Reilly was telling possibly false tales. That I can accept. It’s what do they do about it now? That will tell us a lot about how seriously they take their news organization.

While many feel O’Reilly should not be on the air, some are confident he should have been gone long ago. Fox News and O’Reilly would love to pretend that the infamous 2004 “falafel” lawsuit did not happen, but it did. While settlement details have been kept confidential, O’Reilly found himself the subject of a $60,000,000 sexual harassment lawsuit filed by his former producer, Andrea Mackris.
The lawsuit alleged that O’Reilly, obsessed with vibrators, phone sex, and masturbation, repeatedly propositioned his former producer between 2002 and 2004. The filing features frequent talk of masturbation, phone sex, vibrators, disgusting propositions, descriptions of O’Reilly losing his virginity, a story of a “girl” at a Thai sex show being amazed by his penis size, too much info about O’Reilly’s “big cOck,” threats, and falafels.
For those who need a refresher, here are some highlights from the court documents, via the Huffington Post:


Shortly after accusing the former producer of extortion, O’Reilly paid Mackris millions of dollars in the confidential settlement. Then, it was back to business as usual.  He encouraged his viewers not to “believe everything you hear and read,” asserting that there was “no wrongdoing in the case whatsoever by anyone”:

On a personal note, this matter has caused enormous pain, but I had to protect my family and I did. Some of the media hammered me relentlessly because, as you know, I am a huge target, as is Fox News. . . .
The good news is that ‘Factor’ viewers and listeners seem to have given me the benefit of any doubt when some in the media did not. You guys looked out for me and I will never forget it. This brutal ordeal is now officially over, and I will never speak of it again.

And O’Reilly did not speak of it again. But he certainly was willing to criticize someone for telling the same lies he has told. And he certainly was willing to pretend that his conduct toward women with whom he was in contact was somehow dwarfed by Williams’ deceptions.
Should Williams be off the air for a while? Yes. Should O’Reilly? Permanently — retroactive to 2004.