Monica Lewinsky Writes Obit For Roger Ailes, Who Built Fox News Off Her Scandal

Monica Lewinsky Image by Getty Images

(JTA) — Monica Lewinsky said the late Roger Ailes’ success in building Fox News was directly related to his capitalizing on the affair involving the former White House intern and then-President Bill Clinton.

Ailes, the former head of Fox News forced out under the cloud of a sexual harassment scandal, died last week at 77.

“This is not another obituary for Roger Ailes,” Lewinsky wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times published Tuesday. “It is, I hope, instead an obituary for the culture he purveyed — a culture that affected me profoundly and personally.”

Ailes, Lewinsky charges, took the story of her affair with Clinton and the subsequent trial and “made certain his anchors hammered it ceaselessly, 24 hours a day.”

“As the past year has revealed, thanks to brave women like Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly, it is clear that at Fox, this culture of exploitation wasn’t limited to the screen,” wrote Lewinsky. “The irony of Mr. Ailes’s career at Fox — that he harnessed a sex scandal to build a cable juggernaut and then was brought down by his own — was not lost on anyone who has been paying attention.”