The New York Times business reporter who wrote the stories that led to the departure of Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly was threatened by him in 2015, reports Eric Lutz of Mic.
Lutz writes, “Emily Steel — whose reporting in the New York Times brought down Bill O’Reilly — was threatened by the now-former Fox News host two years ago for covering his tall tales about the Falklands war.
“‘I am coming after you with everything I have,’ O’Reilly told Steel on the record in 2015. ‘You can take it as a threat.’
“Steel, who joined the Times as a media reporter in 2014, was one of the two journalists whose reporting earlier this month led advertisers to leave The O’Reilly Factor and, eventually, to the network dumping O’Reilly on Thursday. Steel and Michael S. Schmidt reported April 1 that Fox and O’Reilly had paid $13 million to silence women who accused the conservative host of sexual harassment.
“In an episode of the Daily podcast from the Times after O’Reilly’s ouster, Steel described spending months investigating the claims against the host in the face of ‘resistance’ from the network.
“‘We were just trying to follow the facts of our story,’ Steel said. ‘We really had to dig to get this information. There’s a reason why these settlements were for so much money, was to keep these women from talking. There was a lot of resistance.'”
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