Journalist and founder of the Women in the World summit Tina Brown has angered many for her condolence tweet in the wake of former Fox News president Roger Ailes’s death.
“Awful harassment revelations not only way to remember him,” Brown, whose 2017 Women in the World conference featured a panel on sexual harassment with Gretchen Carlson, tweeted on Thursday.
Carlson came forward last summer about Ailes’s patterns of sexual harassment and regular abuses of power, and spurred his eventual departure from the network.
At least 20 women have alleged that Ailes harassed them, and accounts of that harassment are beyond upsetting ― Gabriel Sherman’s September 2016 account of Ailes’s behavior in New York Magazine, in which Sherman calls Ailes “the most predatory man in media,” was particularly disturbing. One of the network’s makeup artists, Sherman wrote, often noticed that women anchors would come back from visits with Ailes and need touch-ups. “They would say, ‘I’m going to see Roger, gotta look beautiful!’ One of them came back down after a meeting, and the makeup on her nose and chin was gone.”
Many on Twitter were quick to respond to Brown’s tone-deaf tweet, calling her out for lauding a man whose decades-long media career came at the cost of exploiting, bullying, and harassing women:
Ailes’s wife announced her husband’s death on Thursday morning. He was 77 years old.
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