The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal’s role in the account is anchored in Emily Steel and Michael S. Schmidt’s reporting on Bill O'Reilly and Fox News. Their work brought the terms of sexual-harassment settlements into view: agreements that did more than resolve individual claims, restricting what claimants could disclose and leaving the public with little knowledge of what had happened. The reporting also helped turn the mechanics of those agreements into a larger question about how confidentiality could suppress claims rather than prevent further harm.

Reporting on the Settlement Terms

Steel’s investigation began with her work on Fox and O'Reilly. She and Schmidt had already reported that O'Reilly and Fox relied on settlements containing confidentiality clauses. The details warranted closer examination: the agreements, as Steel learned, placed extensive limits on the women who signed them.

The women had to surrender evidence, including recordings, diaries, emails, and backup files. They and, in one case, their attorneys could be barred from helping other women with similar claims. If a subpoena required a claimant to testify, she had to notify O'Reilly’s side, giving his team an opportunity to contest her being called. One agreement required a woman’s lawyer to provide legal advice to O'Reilly on sexual-harassment matters. Another barred a claimant from making disparaging statements about O'Reilly or Fox News and from responding to journalists who contacted her. It also recorded that she had not filed a complaint with agencies responsible for enforcing harassment laws.

The financial terms made the bargain especially stark. One alleged victim received about $9 million and another $3.25 million; violating the restrictions could mean losing the money. The agreements therefore joined compensation to silence, while placing evidence and control over possible disclosures largely in the hands of O'Reilly and his representatives. The account does not identify which payment belonged to which woman, but makes clear how much was at stake in keeping the terms intact.

From Individual Deals to a Wider Question

The agreements Steel uncovered were not described by employment lawyers as unusual. They were standard practice, and for many claimants among the few available routes to resolution. Women might need the money, value privacy, lack better options, or want to resume their lives without being branded a liar, flirt, tattletale, or habitual litigant. Taking a harassment case to court could be punishing: federal protections excluded some workers, including freelancers and employees of workplaces with fewer than fifteen people; the filing period could be as short as 180 days; and federal damages were capped at $300,000.

The arrangements also shaped the incentives of lawyers. Many worked on contingency, receiving at least a third of a client’s award and nothing if the case failed in court. Settlements thus developed into a profitable field in which some lawyers resisted severe restrictions while others accepted them or yielded in order to secure a larger award. The reported agreements showed how a resolution that might help an individual claimant could at the same time limit information available to other workers and potential claimants.

The government’s role offered no simple counterweight. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission often kept its settlements confidential, had limited enforcement authority, and was required by its mandate to settle when possible. It could hold information about employers with many complaints without making that information public, leaving prospective employees unable to consult the agency about a workplace’s record. In the larger inquiry that followed Steel’s findings, this opacity helped explain why people could have difficulty discovering patterns even when complaints had reached institutions tasked with addressing them.

Place in the Broader Investigation

Steel had proposed that the paper examine whether such restrictions were legal, how widespread they were, and whether harassment lawyers were confronting the problem or profiting from settlements. Rebecca Corbett assigned that broader line of inquiry to Jodi Kantor. Kantor contacted attorneys and legal scholars around the country and shared their accounts with Megan Twohey. Their research extended beyond O'Reilly and Fox to the operation of confidentiality agreements across workplaces.

Kantor’s synthesis was that the United States had a system for muting harassment claims. Women routinely relinquished the right to discuss their own experiences; alleged harassers could move on to new workplaces without the public understanding that similar conduct had been reported before. Because settlements and confidentiality clauses were rarely examined in law-school classrooms or open court, their broader consequences remained difficult to see. Steel and Schmidt’s reporting therefore functions in the account as an opening disclosure: it supplied concrete examples of restrictive deals, while the subsequent inquiry traced how that model could conceal information and shift the costs of silence onto other workers.