There are a lot of things you probably don’t know about Gretchen Carlson. That she was a champion violinist—“a prodigy at 14,” as she put it—and it was her violin-playing that first got her involved in the Miss America pageant system (with talent being 50% of the score, she said) that eventually led to her career in TV journalism. Or that she’s recently spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill, stumping for a bill that would end forced arbitration in sexual harassment cases. It’s bipartisan, backed by Kamala Harris as well as Lindsey Graham.
The main thing you don’t know about Carlson, the thing only she and a handful of lawyers and executives know, is what she’s not allowed to tell anyone: the details of her settlement with Fox News, whose former chairman she sued in July of 2016 after spending 11 years as one of the network’s most famous on-air faces. Carlson’s lawsuit alleged that Fox News chairman Roger Ailes had sexually harassed her, making her the first of more than a half dozen women who publicly accused him of misconduct. Fox News forced Ailes out weeks later, with a reported $40 million parachute, and he denied the allegations until his death in 2017.
In the long year before the #MeToo movement exploded, Carlson was perhaps the most famous woman who had challenged a powerful harasser and won, and her story figured into two adaptations that have coincidentally made it to screens this year. This summer Naomi Watts played her in the Showtime series The Loudest Voice, based on the book by Vanity Fair special correspondent Gabriel Sherman. In December, Nicole Kidman will portray her in Bombshell, a film already making headlines for what appears to be Charlize Theron’s uncanny transformation into Carlson’s former colleague, and fellow whistle-blower, Megyn Kelly. Because of the settlement—and the kind of forced arbitration clauses she’s working to end—she could not participate in either project, or even talk about what they get right or wrong. So instead she’s working on telling a new story.
“The last three years have really deepened me as a person,” Carlson said in a recent phone call from her home office in Connecticut. “I’m ready to continue on with my career in television. I’ve seen the good in media and the bad in media over the last three years, and I know how to move it forward.”
On Saturday, Lifetime will premiere the first of two new documentaries hosted by Carlson, Beyond the Headlines: Escaping the NXIVM Cult With Gretchen Carlson. The heart of the documentary is Carlson’s interviews with Catherine Oxenberg, the former Dynasty star whose daughter India became deeply involved with the “executive success” organization led by Keith Raniere. Oxenberg’s efforts to free her daughter helped lead to the New York Times investigation of the alleged cult and Raniere’s eventual conviction of, among others, racketeering and sex trafficking.
“We saw a lot of parallels in my story and also the story of Catherine Oxenberg,” Carlson said. “She and I have parallels with regard to both being singular individuals who were trying to take on something really massive.”
Carlson said she’s not specifically looking to tell stories that mirror her own. (Her first Lifetime documentary, Gretchen Carlson: Breaking the Silence, aired in January and profiled other women who have spoken up about sexual harassment.) What she wants to do, she said, is get back to telling the stories at the center of the culture. Her next project will take on the college-admissions scandal, which, like NXIVM, will also be the subject of a Lifetime original movie.
“I’ve been a journalist for more than 25 years,” Carlson said. “I’m used to covering what everyone’s talking about. And my favorite kind of shows to watch are the real-life stories behind the scenes.”
She’s not done with politics either, though she seems done with the partisan Fox News model for good. “I do see myself as this unifying figure, coming back,” she said. “When did the ugly c-word become ‘compromise’? That’s really upsetting and disappointing to me because I am a unifier, and it doesn’t mean I’m weak to compromise. It means that I like to get crap done, and the only way that we’re going to get stuff done is to see some sort of compromise and to come together.”
Asked about her time on the air at Fox, where she recirculated rumors that Barack Obama was Muslim and criticized a school district’s efforts to accommodate transgender students, she pointed to times when she pushed back against the network’s status quo, like when she advocated for the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban three weeks before she was fired in 2016. “Where I could, I made my voice heard,” she said. “I was in a tough position, but there were days that I went against that and I made myself heard. But I had to be careful.”
Carlson remembers exactly where she was when the first reports about Harvey Weinstein broke in the fall of 2017, more than a year after her Fox News settlement. “I can tell you exactly where I was for all of these big stories when they came to light because they’ve been so emotional for me,” she said. “When I see them unraveling and unfolding, I’m thinking to myself, Wow, this is so surreal. How could I have ever known that these things would happen as a result of me jumping off the cliff? I thought I was going to just be sitting home crying every day because I had been fired. I had no way of knowing that this cultural revolution would start.”
And though she’d faced skeptics when she first made her allegations against Ailes, including her former colleagues, she knew her actions had helped create a different climate. “I was hopeful that they wouldn’t be as maligned as I had been,” she said. “Because we had already started to make so much progress, and they would actually be believed.” Still, when Time featured the “Silence Breakers” on its Person of the Year cover, Carlson was not included. (She magnanimously tweeted, “It’s ok making landmark change today on the Hill introducing my legislation to stop arbitration clauses for sexual harassment in employment contracts and its bipartisan! Imagine that.”
Carlson still plays the violin sometimes, when nobody else is in the house. But she’s growing comfortable with the things people don’t and can’t know about her, even as the story of what happened at Fox News has become a central part of her identity and her work. She’s relentlessly on message and able to turn nearly any question toward the subject of sexual harassment and ending forced arbitration. (And I tried asking about everything from her thoughts on Nicole Kidman’s Bombshell wig to the 2020 presidential field.) Asked what her dream subject would be, she broadly said, “an interview that would solve one of the major issues that we’re facing in our country.”
For now, though, she’s stretching out the muscles that laid dormant for years after her Fox News settlement, finding her own way into ripped-from-the-headlines stories. Don’t think the college-admissions scandal is about female empowerment? “Why is it [that so many] women have been charged in this?” she asked. “Women still pick up most of the slack in the family. And so how much did that play into them being charged?”
Carlson’s television icons, she said, were Diane Sawyer, Jane Pauley, and Barbara Walters: “They gave me the strength to want to know more and be more curious. I hearken back to them as my role models, and what I hope I will continue to be as a role model for young women coming up in the business now.”
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