Make it Stop - Sean Hannity Accused of Sexual Harassment

There is another claim of sexual harassment against a FoxNews personality. It must be a day ending in “y.”

This is the story via New York Daily News:

Former Fox News contributor Debbie Schlussel claims that host Sean Hannity sexually harassed her.

Schlussel said on the Pat Campbell Podcast Friday that Hannity repeatedly invited her back to his hotel room during an event they were at together in Detroit. Schlussel did not say on the podcast when the event took place.

“He had some event at a bookstore where he signed his book for people standing in line. He asked me to come meet him at this book signing,” Schlussel said on the podcast.

“So I met him there and it was very awkward. He had me stand up there with him while he signed books and I felt very weird. These people don’t know me and they didn’t come for me to sign their books. So then I left to get ready for the show and he said, ‘Why don’t you come back with me to my hotel?’ and I said no, I have to get ready for the show.”

This is the interview:

Hannity is having none of it. The Blaze asked for a comment and they got one:

“LET ME BE CLEAR – THE COMMENTS ABOUT ME ON A RADIO SHOW THIS WEEK by this individual are 100% false and a complete fabrication.

This individual is a serial harasser who has been lying about me for well over a decade. The individual has a history of making provably false statements against me in an effort to slander, smear and besmirch my reputation.

The individual has not just slandered me over the years but many people who this individual disagrees with.

This individual desperately seeks attention by any means necessary, including making unfounded personal attacks and using indefensible and outrageous political rhetoric.

My patience with this individual is over. I have retained a team of some of the finest and toughest lawyers in the country who are now in the process of laying out the legal course of action we will be taking against this individual.

In this fiercely divided & vindictive political climate, I will no longer allow slander and lies about me to go unchallenged, as I see a coordinated effort afoot to now silence those with conservative views. I will fight every single lie about me by all legal means available to me as an American.”

We don’t have an actual date on when this alleged encounter happened but, if Schlussel’s description of the circumstances is correct, it seems to be from 2004-2005 when Hannity’s book Deliver Us From Evil was released and Hannity was on a book tour. By 2007, Schlussel was accusing Hannity of plagiarizing one of her columns. And in 2010 she accused Freedom Alliance of being a fundraising scam run to benefit Hannity. I am just noting these two instances as an aid in dating the allegation. The Freedom Alliance charge, in particular, seems to have been debunked in excruciating detail via tax documents. And while I’m at it, I might was well note that I’m not a fan of Debbie Schlussel. To call her columns unreliable is much like calling the work of such luminaries as Jim Hoft and Warner Todd Huston dross. It simply doesn’t do justice. So count me skeptical that anyone is going to plagiarize anything she wrote.

This is a good point for some full disclosure on my part. I’ve been an intermittent Hannity listener for some years though the last time I listened to his show was in late 2015 (about the time I stopped listening to Rush) because it was clear Hannity was tossing his conservative beliefs to the winds in the service of Donald Trump. If you check my archive you will see that I’ve was pretty harsh to Hannity and at one point his show complained to RedState’s owner about one of my posts.

Having said that, on the whole I find more opportunism than actual substance in this allegation. This seems to be about 12 years old. It is easy to accuse someone of something over a decade after the fact but damned hard to provide a defense. And can we be honest here? Is asking a colleague of the opposite sex to come back to your hotel room after a business meeting, in this case a book signing, secret code for “I want to have monkey sex?” Because, it seems to me, that just a couple of weeks ago Mike Pence was being hammered for never having one-on-one meetings with female colleagues and the leftist consensus was that he was neo-Taliban of some type who oppressed women because the only way women can get ahead is by having personal time with a boss/mentor. (If you have doubts about Pence’s philosophy, read this article again.) Where would they get together? A restaurant where Hannity would inevitably be recognized? I don’t know how Hannity travels on the road but most people traveling professionally typically have a suite because they do business in their hotel room. I know when I was an Army IG I conducted under-oath interviews in my hotel room without ever once having actual sex with a witness though more than a few of them ended up screwed.

I’m afraid this is what Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly have inflicted upon their FoxNews colleagues and it is something that is not going away. The left and the media have an interest in damaging FoxNews. The trail of lawsuits and out-of-court settlements created by the unbounded libidos of Ailes and O’Reilly virtually guarantees that sexual harassment allegations are going to target a lot of FoxNews personalities. Hannity will not be the last by a long shot.

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