Awful Truth About Laurie Luhn and Roger Ailes

…by Jonas E. Alexis

The New York Daily News confirmed last year what we have been trying to say for years, that there is such a thing called political whore. You just can’t make this stuff up:

“Laurie Luhn, the latest woman to accuse ex-Fox boss/perennial pervert Roger Ailes of sexual harassment, is now saying she only became the disgusting old pervert’s ‘whore’ because she thought it would advance her career. And it did. She went from his cash whore to his on-the-books madam.”[1]

Ailes, the news reported, once asked Luhn to show up at his hotel suite “wearing a garter and pair of stockings he had asked her to buy and dance for him, which he filmed with a video camera.” Luhn could have said no, for participating in such an obvious carnal performance would put her moral principle at risk. But she accepted the offer and went for the ride.

Luhn even agreed to dance for Ailes in the garter belt. “When the dancing was done, ‘Ailes told her to get down on her knees in front of him,’ she said, and put his hands on her temples.”[2] Ailes said to Luhn:

“Tell me you will do what I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it. At any time, at any place when I call. No matter where I call you, no matter where you are. Do you understand? You will follow orders. If I tell you to put on your uniform, what are you gonna do, Laurie? WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO, LAURIE? What are you, Laurie? Are you Roger’s whore? Are you Roger’s spy? Come over here.”[3]

The NY Daily News was quite surprised that Luhn didn’t take legal actions. “Did she run out screaming into the night into the nearest precinct to report him? No, instead she continued in an arrangement that paid her well. Ailes told her she was his whore. And she was. After he got her to involve other women in S&M sex, he’d leave a grand on the dresser. When he put her on the Fox News payroll, he allowed her to hire staff — good-looking only. Luhn even fired another woman who refused to have sex with Ailes.”[4]

The Daily Mail reported: “Luhn claims she then performed oral sex on Ailes at his request, and that he later showed her the video he made of her dancing, telling her: ‘I am going to put it in a safe-deposit box just so we understand each other.’”[5]

As soon as Luhn got promoted on Fox News, she had that Ailes asked her to engage in sadomasochistic sex with another woman while Ailes took photos. That’s not all. By 2006, Huhn started to “engage in phone sex with Ailes from her office.”[6] Then Ailes moved on to other territories and began to set up new ground rules: “You’re going to find me Roger’s Angels. You’re going to find me whores.”[7]

Luhn eventually came out and declared that she was harassed by Ailes for two decades and that Ailes was “a predator.” But this story goes to the heart of what we have been saying for years: morality cannot and will never be silent forever. Political whores may want to dismiss or deny it, but they do so at their own peril. This also shows that the Enlightenment ideology has failed miserably and pathetically.

Take Luhn, for example. Isn’t she as irresponsible as Ailes? Wasn’t she willing to “perform the sexual acts” that Ailes demanded, obviously for money and power?[8] Was she so blind to realize that sexual liberation eventually leads to moral torture and sometimes to death? Luhn was willing to trade her moral principle for money and power and publicity stunt, but she could not see that she was only killing herself. “It was psychological torture,” she later said.[9]

Well, violating the moral law always leads to moral slavery and “psychological torture.” As St. Augustine rightly put it more than a thousand years ago, “Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.”[10]

Luhn found that out the hard way, and the moral law within her kept condemning her for engaging in immoral acts with Ailes for money and fame. This eventually led her to a mental breakdown, which also led to psychiatric drugs.

“She was kept under Ailes’ watchful eye after that, she claims, and he monitored all her correspondence while also lashing out when he learned she was taking medication for her anxiety.

“’Don’t take pills, and don’t you ever tell that doctor about us!’ Luhan said Ailes told her, referring to the psychiatrist who prescribed the drugs. ‘His whole deal was they can never prove anything about you and me unless you say something. He said that to me for 20 years. Why do you think I got so messed up?’”[11]

Luhn signed a $3.5 million settlement in the summer of 2011 which basically said that she should never revealed what actually happened between her and Ailes. But all that changed when Luhn heard about other women suing Ailes. She finally realized that she either had to go with the lies, which would hunt her for the rest of her natural life, or she had to side with the truth.

Upon much reflection, Luhn decided to break her silence. She said: “The truth shall set you free. Nothing else matters.”[12] She told New York Magazine: “I am reporting sexual harassment. Whether I am a crazy person or not, I am reporting sexual harassment.”[13]

Like Agave in Euripides’ The Bacchae, Luhn was actually saying that sexual liberation—which Enlightenment thinkers brought to the fore under the umbrella of “liberty, fraternity, and equality”—can never lead to true freedom. It can only lead to horror and suffering precisely because it violates the moral law. As E. Michael Jones writes at the end of Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film:

“By following our illicit desires to their logical endpoint in death, we have created a nightmare culture, a horror-culture, on in which we are led back again and again to the source of our mysterious fears by forces over which we have no control. It is a little like watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre over and over again and watching the hippies drawn inexorably to their doom in the uncanny house that has become not a place of refuge, but of slaughter instead. That house is our culture.

“We are all being led into that house of horrors by a mysterious force over which we seem to have no control. That force is our conscience. The only way we can escape its clutches is by admitting that what it has to say about our guilt is true.”[14]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq5k3xWpkOM&feature=share

[1] Linda Stasi, “Stasi: Roger Ailes’ ‘whore’ not so innocent,” NY Daily News, July 30, 2016.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Chris Spargo, “Roger Ailes ‘filmed worker dancing in bra, met her for hotel romps and sexually harassed her for 20 years before Fox News paid her $3.15m in hush money,” Daily Mail, July 30, 2016.

[4] Stasi, “Stasi: Roger Ailes’ ‘whore’ not so innocent,” NY Daily News, July 30, 2016.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Chris Spargo, “Roger Ailes ‘filmed worker dancing in bra, met her for hotel romps and sexually harassed her for 20 years before Fox News paid her $3.15m in hush money,” Daily Mail, July 30, 2016.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] For a cultural history on this, see E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2000).

[11] Spargo, “Roger Ailes ‘filmed worker dancing in bra, met her for hotel romps and sexually harassed her for 20 years before Fox News paid her $3.15m in hush money,” Daily Mail, July 30, 2016.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Meena Jang, Former Fox News Booker Goes Public With Roger Ailes Harassment Claims: ‘”He’s a Predator,’” Hollywood Reporter, July 29, 2016.

[14] E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film (Dallas: Spence Publishing, 2000), 279.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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