Televangelist and Religious Right leader Pat Robertson asserted on his “700 Club” program today that a recent string of sexual harassment allegations involving Fox News personalities are “totally bogus” and the result of some nefarious conspiracy to destroy the network.
Robertson was reacting to reports that Fox News host Eric Bolling has been suspended amid an investigation into allegations that he had sent lewd photos to several female colleagues, which followed harassment allegations against the network’s late CEO Roger Ailes and popular host Bill O’Reilly, among others.
As Robertson sees it, some unnamed people have probably been sending “salacious material” to women and framing Fox News hosts in order to decimate the network’s primetime lineup.
“Easy to do? Absolutely,” Robertson insisted. “Is it being done? Probably. And the latest attack is against a guy named Eric Bolling, who I think is a straight arrow. He was on this program, he’s a dedicated Catholic, goes to mass every day, a very nice man. They’ve pulled him off the air because somebody sent some pictures ostensibly over his name.”
“So easy to do now and anybody can make charges,” he continued. “Ladies and gentlemen, if this is going on—and they could easily do it, I’m not a conspiracy theorist but it’s so easy to see what is being done—I think it’s a terrible shame and Fox had better … gird up their loins and realize that people are going after them and know that this is a game that people are playing. Anybody could send a salacious piece of literature and say it came from Sean Hannity or it came from this one or it came from the other one. Totally bogus.”
Robertson said that Fox must stop letting its lawyers handle these allegations and just “let the programmers run that network.”
