Gretchen Carlson’s next fight
WHEN GRETCHEN CARLSON WAS A CUB REPORTER in Virginia in the early ’90s, she was returning from a shoot in the TV production truck when the cameraman at the wheel suddenly asked her if she had liked it when he attached a microphone under her shirt. “I was touching your breasts,” he noted. Carlson sat bolt upright, then leaned away from him and into the passenger door as far as possible. He continued the one-sided commentary on her breasts all the way to the studio, either not noticing or not caring that his co-worker, only a few months into her first TV job, was repulsed and terrified.
When she got back to her office, the assistant news director’s antennae went up. “He knew something was wrong,” she says now. “Probably because I was shaking.” After he insisted that she spill the beans, she reluctantly recounted what had happened. The cameraman was fired.
Maybe this story sounds like an unfortunate encounter with a creep in a bygone era. But in recent days, it has become clear that it’s not an aberration, and hardly history. After a tape surfaced of Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for President, joking about sexual aggression, millions of women, from all points on the political spectrum, joined an Internet movement started by a Canadian writer to discuss not just the assaults they had suffered but also the constant, wearing, workaday nature of sexual harassment, using the hashtag #notokay.
“I think this is happening every single day to women in all walks of life and in all different types of corporations,” says Carlson, 50, who has become something of a magnet for letters from women who have lost their jobs after complaining about sexually inappropriate behavior at work. “I’ve
