Deposed Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly broke his silence Thursday on the death of Roger Ailes via a USA Today op-ed in which he claimed that hatred toward the cable news channel’s founder was what “killed him.”
In a column in which he lauded Ailes for his many accomplishments in the TV industry, O’Reilly noted that the world is currently in a “rough age” in which technology is breeding bad behavior. “The downside of that is turning us into a nation where hatred is almost celebrated in some quarters,” he wrote. “Roger Ailes experienced that hatred and it killed him. That is the truth.”
O’Reilly also lashed out at those who rushed to judgment on Ailes, who was ousted from the network he architected months before the Fox News anchor himself was shown the door amid a similar swirl of allegations involving sexual harassment of fellow employees.
“Roger was convicted of bad behavior in the court of public opinion, and it was painful for many of us to watch,” O’Reilly wrote. “He, himself, was stunned and never really recovered.”
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While O’Reilly doesn’t exactly specify how hatred led to Ailes’ death, a medical examiner disclosed Thursday that the 77-year-old’s passing was related to complications from a fall he experienced last week that led to bleeding in his brain.
