As we have noted several times before, David Barton’s self-proclaimed reputation as “America’s premier historian” is entirely undeserved given that he seems to be unable to accurately report on even straightforward issues that are easily verifiable through a simple Google search.
Barton demonstrated the tendency on his “WallBuilders Live” radio program today when he claimed that former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly was once sued for sexual harassment merely for complimenting a woman on her hair.
“There’s a hypersensitivity” in society today, Barton said. “Everybody’s heard about Bill O’Reilly being dropped from Fox and sexual harassment suits. I don’t know all the details—I don’t want all the details, but I do know one of the sexual harassment suits was real simple. In his studio, he has this crew around him at Fox and as he’s walking off the studio, he looked at one of the folks working there and he says, ‘Wow, you have really pretty hair.’ And she filed a sexual harassment suit because he said she had pretty hair … Maybe she’s a little hypersensitive. To get a compliment, anybody else would say, ‘Oh, thank you!, that’s very kind of you.'”
Barton’s claim is, of course, totally false, as there are no reports that O’Reilly was ever sued for sexual harassment merely because he complimented a woman’s hair.
While pundit Kirsten Powers says that O’Reilly once joked about her blonde hair, neither she nor anyone else ever sued him over such comments.
In actuality, O’Reilly was fired in the wake of multiple lawsuits and settlements involving complaints “about a wide range of behavior, including verbal abuse, lewd comments, unwanted advances and phone calls in which it sounded as if Mr. O’Reilly was masturbating.”
