Powerhouse attorney Lisa Bloom took a victory lap on Thursday two months after helping to oust Fox News host Bill O’Reilly from his cable news perch over accusations of sexual harassment by a several former network employees taht she represented.
“With Bill O’Reilly, this has been a long process,” Bloom said at TheWrap’s Power Women Breakfast in New York, recalling what she told one client: “It’s way overdue, he’s got to go.”
Back in 2004, Bloom said she was “shocked” when O’Reilly was not fired the first time he was accused of sexual harassment.
Bloom spoke out against the cable news star on a variety of TV programs but the “Fox News machine” came after her as retaliation, Bloom told TheWrap CEO and founder Sharon Waxman during a panel discussion.
“When 2016 rolls around and my friend Wendy Walsh came to me and said, ‘There is a reporter asking if I was sexually harassed by Bill O’Reilly… I was and I’ve never talked about it publicly,’” Bloom said.
She assured Walsh that she would represent her for free and stand by her.
“We’re going to take him down,” Bloom said she told Walsh. “She said, ‘That’s impossible — he’s got the No. 1 show on cable TV.”
Bloom said that everything she does people consider impossible until she does it.
“Then they say, ‘That was inevitable,’” Bloom said.
Bloom got her way and O’Reilly was fired in April following a New York Times report that he and the network had paid out $13 million to five women who accused him of harassment or misconduct — and the subsequent lost of more than 60 sponsors from his show.
Bloom explained that she doesn’t have the money or the resources of the Murdoch family but “the power of public shaming” goes a long way.
“I’m’reilly very comfortable using that power,” Bloom said.
“The O’Reilly Factor” finished 2016 as the most-watched show in cable news and O’Reilly has essentially dominated the industry for nearly two decades, finishing No. 1 in all of cable news for 16 straight years.