I really did it for my daughters': L.A. radio host Wendy Walsh on why she spoke out against Bill O'Reilly
As Wendy Walsh pursued a career as a TV news correspondent and anchor in Los Angeles during the late 1980s and ‘90s, sexist remarks and bad behavior from supervisors were common.
She had bosses attempt to “stick their tongues down my throat,” as she describes it. One of them once told her not to get up from a makeup chair until she looked “datable” to him, she said.
“I’ve had it all,” Walsh, 54, told The Times in a recent telephone interview. “I’m a woman of a certain age who has been in the TV industry for a long time.”
Walsh, now a psychologist with an advice show on radio station KFI-AM (640), has stepped into the spotlight with a sexual harassment accusation involving a job she didn’t get. She contends Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly went back on a stated commitment to get her a position as a paid contributor at Fox News after she rejected his advances at a 2013 dinner meeting at Hotel Bel-Air.
Walsh had been appearing as an unpaid guest in an occasional segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” called “Are We Crazy” and met with O’Reilly in the hope of turning it into a regular job. But at the end of the meeting, she said, he asked her to go to his hotel suite. She declined, and the opportunity disappeared.
The timing of the exchange falls outside of the statute of limitations for a sexual harassment lawsuit in California. Walsh is not seeking any monetary compensation from O’Reilly or Fox News. But she has chosen to go public with her story and also filed a complaint with the human resources hotline of Fox News parent 21st Century Fox, which is now having the matter investigated by its attorneys.
Walsh’s attorney Lisa Bloom also filed a request Tuesday with the New York State Division of Human Rights to investigate sexual harassment and retaliation at Fox News.