Greta Van Susteren Wants Apology from ‘Smear Merchant’ WaPo Reporter Over Fox Piece
Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren wants an apology from The Washington Post media reporter Erik Wemple after he called her out in a piece on morality at the network.
Wemple used the return of Ed Henry to Fox after dealing with personal matters to write about the irony of Ailes dealing with that before the allegations of harassment against him ignited.
He called out Van Susteren in particular for her statement at the time not only saying she had no knowledge of sexual harassment at Fox, but that Gretchen Carlson‘s allegation “doesn’t have any ring of truth to me.”
Van Susteren defended her comment days later, but as far as Wemple’s concerned, “Van Susteren was behaving just as the Roger Ailes Fox News would have her behave, as a loyal knee-jerker who gets out in front of the evidence.”
Well, Van Susteren fired back yesterday on her blog expressing shock at being considered a “villain” here.
She continued to insist she had not personally heard anything about sexual harassment going on at Fox (“it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen to her,” she clarifies), but she’s outraged at Wemple for making her “some sort of villain and defender of Roger Ailes”:
My “crime?” Answering questions as to what I knew or didn’t know at the time. Answers that are still true today in that I did not know about it and had never heard about it and Gretchen never told me about it but had made a big impression on me with her unhappiness about another topic – being underutilized at Fox on air.
One last thing, Wimple [sic] says I should apologize. I would like an apology from some – not all but some – women who knew about sexual harassment in the workplace years ago but did not slip an anonymous source note under the door of HR (yes anonymous without sufficient data to identify themselves.) That anonymous note might have prevented this from happening to other women, including Gretchen.
And I would like an apology from Wimple [sic] who is a smear merchant. He doesn’t have a clue — he is just tying to jump into a hot media topic with a “me, too.”
It’s unclear whether “Wimple” was a misspelling or a nickname..
And Wemple responded:
Here, @greta again ignores her own lamentable record on the Roger Ailes sexual harassment scandal: https://t.co/StyfzdOJ9a cc @jayrosen_nyu
— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) August 27, 2016
Credit @Greta for hilarious misspelling of my name in this post. So funny. https://t.co/StyfzdOJ9a
— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) August 27, 2016
[image via screengrab]
— —
