Court Transcripts
"Bad Black People." Why Bill O'Reilly Is Wrong Even When He's Right"
"Bad Black People." Why Bill O'Reilly Is Wrong Even When He's Right"
The latest Bill O’Reilly eruption:
An allegation of domestic violence
O’Reilly has, in past scandals, chosen to counterattack, as when the magazine Mother Jones pointed to exaggerations in his coverage of the 1982 Falklands War, which O’Reilly covered from far-off Buenos Aires.
He’s in a different position this time. Last year, the Nassau County (N.Y.) Supreme Court overseeing the custody case assigned a psychologist to interview major parties in the case. The psychologist, Larry Cohen, evaluated family members and testified in court.
According to court documents obtained by Gawker, Cohen testified that O’Reilly’s teenage daughter had witnessed abuse of his former wife, Maureen McPhilmy.
Cohen told the court that the daughter witnessed “an incident where I believe she said her dad was choking her mom or had his hands around her neck and dragged her down some stairs.”
When Gawker first published the allegation on Monday, O’Reilly was in familiar attack mode.
“Allegations against me in these circumstances are 100 percent false,” BillO said through his lawyer. “I am going to respect this court-mandated confidentiality put in place to protect my children and will not comment any further.”
O’Reilly had not commented further with release of the court documents.
Cohen reported that O’Reilly told his daughter that her mother was “an adulterer,” and that her new stepfather — McPhilmy married a police detective — was “not a good person” and that spending time in her mother’s home would “ruin her life.”
The psychologist’s testimony also related O’Reilly telling his daughter of “going ballistic” on occasions and needing to control his behavior.
O’Reilly and McPhilmy were divorced in 2011. The couple’s custody battle went on for more than three years. It was finally resolved earlier this month when the court gave custody of the couple’s two children to McPhilmy.
Still, O’Reilly has a record of questionable personal behavior, as well as a record as a public moralist.
Former producer Andrea Mackris sued BillO for sexual harassment in 2004, producing lewd tapes in which O’Reilly suggested that she masturbate with a vibrator and spoke of sexually fondling her with “the falafel thing.”
O’Reilly counterattacked, using the Murdoch-owned New York Post, but then settled the case for a reported $5 million to $10 million.
He has had a curious amount of contact with Washington state. In 2008, O’Reilly brought down a flood of nasty phone calls on the office of Gov. Chris Gregoire, attacking Gregoire for allowing an atheist exhibit in the state capitol at Christmas time.
O’Reilly has feuded with other journalists. He threatened a New York Times reporter that he would be “coming after you” if he was dissatisfied with her story over the Falklands War. He once sent a producer to Seattle to do an ambush interview of Seattle Post-Intelligencer publisher Roger Oglesby. BillO did not like the P-I editorial page.
O’Reilly displayed his temper famously when he hosted the program Inside Edition.
Yet, O’Reilly is also a moralist. After the Baltimore riots, the Fox News host decried African-American families as having “no supervision, kids with no fathers — the black neighborhood devastated by the drug gangs who prey upon their own.”
O’Reilly recently charged thaT America is “degenerating on a moral level” and that “secular forces” have succeeded in banishing the Judeo-Christian philosophy from America’s public schools. Children in those schools are getting “little moral guidance,” O’Reilly alleged.
O’Reilly was able to go on the offensive and tough out the controversy over his war reporting. “It’s a lie,” he said in February. “Mother Jones and the far left websites couldn’t care less about the truth. They’re in the business to injure. This is a political hit job.”
The custody case testimony is not a political hit.
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