Bo Dietl—Fox News’s resident “tough cop,” commentator, and sometimes private investigator —denies being part of Roger Ailes’s alleged goon squad. He will, however, tell you that your sexual-harassment lawsuit against your employer is quite likely politically correct “bullshit.”
On Sunday, New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman reported how Ailes—the former Fox News chief who was recently forced out due to multiple sexual-harassment accusations—had allegedly funneled some of the network’s budget to hire operatives and private detectives to help wage covert war against his enemies in politics, news media, and elsewhere.
“I was also the target of an operation, a source told me,” Sherman wrote. “One source also said private investigators employed by Fox contributor Bo Dietl were instructed to follow me and my wife. (Dietl’s firm was used to track Andrea Mackris, the producer who accused Bill O’Reilly of sexual harassment in 2004, the source said.)”
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Dietl occupies a unique space within the Fox News organism because he both serves as an on-air contributor (often taking hardline positions such as “illegal aliens” being behind “this epidemic of rapes” in America), and has also offered the services of his private-investigation company to Fox News Channel. But Dietl, a former detective in the NYPD and a one-time Arby’s spokesman, insists that his role was never that nefarious.
“This article in New York magazine, the reporter called me up on Friday, I think, and asked me about this [thing about him and his wife],” Dietl told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “I never did that, and all of a sudden [Sherman] puts me down as doing something I never did… It’s a load of bullshit… Again, I told him that I [and my company were] never, ever hired by Roger to follow him or his wife… I have never been hired to do anything like that.”
When presented with Dietl’s pushback, Sherman simply emailed The Daily Beast: “I stand by my reporting.”
Asked about the Mackris details, Dietl would only say that any “confidential stuff” that he and his firm had been hired to do for Fox over the years—regarding “threats on principals at Fox News,” “litigation support,” what have you—would remain as such.
Dietl continued by praising his longtime buddy and occasional client, stating that he has “the utmost respect for Roger Ailes,” and that he feels “sorry that such a great thing [as Fox News] is being tainted by all these allegations.”
(Ailes, for his part, has endorsed the private investigator’s work and character, saying that: “I have known Bo Dietl both personally and professionally for many years. He does excellent work and personally is a man I trust … [He is] a loyal man. I have recommended him to others in the past.”)
“Knowing [Roger], I can't believe these allegations,” Dietl said, stating that the deluge of accusations felt like “the old pile-on,” and that “political correctness takes a big play on what goes on” with most sexual harassment workplace lawsuits.
“Too often, it’s like a shakedown, like extortion,” he continued, dismissing a majority of cases as “so minimal.”
“Look, if someone looks really great in a dress, and you say, ‘You look really great!’ or ‘You've been working out, you look great!’ [what's wrong with that?]” he asked, rhetorically. “I love women… but I think political correctness has gotten to a level that… if someone says something they construe as… being a sexual manner, right away it goes into a sexual lawsuit, and if they're not happy with their job,” he added, they then pursue legal action.
“My experience in investigating [cases like] these is 98 percent of these are bullshit,” Dietl declared.
He did clarify that for “that [remaining] 2 percent,” the guilty parties should be punished to the “fullest extent of the law.”
When presented with the argument that the allegations against Ailes have hardly been “minimal,” Dietl replied that the “only allegation I’ve heard that seemed serious was the woman… with psychiatric problems… who got $3 million,” referring to Laurie Luhn, a former Fox booker who has accused Ailes of two decades worth of “psychological torture.”
“It’s a shame,” Dietl said. “The guy's fucking destroyed. Honestly, if I [were Roger], I’d keep fighting. I wouldn't give in.”
Dietl’s roster of famous friends go well beyond Ailes. The former cop has deep Hollywood ties, which includes being the only regular Fox News contributor to have appeared in multiple Martin Scorsese projects, including the now-defunct HBO series Vinyl and the mob-movie classic Goodfellas. In Scorsese’s 2013 R-rated dark comedy The Wolf of Wall Street, Dietl played himself, appearing in a scene with Leonardo DiCaprio.
“Scorsese taught me how to act,” Dietl told Page Six. “I didn’t go to acting school.”
Among Dietl’s other high-profile celebrity endorsers? None other than Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, whom Dietl has endorsed for the White House.
“I have known Bo Dietl professionally and personally for many years,” Trump said, in an endorsement similar to Ailes’s. “Bo Dietl has ethics that carry him successfully through every venture and in every relationship. He is professional, diligent, and caring.”
