“I decided early on that I was not going to sit down and shut up,” says former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson. Last July she filed a lawsuit against her former boss, the late Roger Ailes, for firing her because she complained about sexual harassment at the network. After that Ailes was ousted from Fox, but when she left, Carlson says that she felt like she was “jumping off a cliff without knowing what lies below.” She also began receiving thousands of emails from women who had been harassed.
“I have stacks of them in my office, and I responded to every one,” Carlson says. “Most had never told their husbands about what had happened to them, and many had ruined their careers when they spoke up.” In Be Fierce: Stop Harassment and Take Your Power Back (Center Street, Sept.) Carlson shares those stories along with her own experiences and insights from experts working to confront the problem of sexual harassment. “We need to start talking about it,” she says. “We can’t expect things will change simply because there are a couple of high profile cases.”
When Carlson began to ask some of the women who’d written to her if they’d be willing to have their stories included in the book, she was unsure how they would react. “But 98% of them said ‘yes.’ I think because I would be doing the interviews myself, there was a level of trust. They didn’t have to worry about how they were depicted,” Carlson says. The book also includes a chapter on men, “enlightened men who are working to empower women in the workplace. As long as 95% of Fortune 500 companies are run by men, we need them,” Carlson notes. She provides a playbook that shows women how to develop a plan if they do step forward to complain about sexual harassment. “Often women take it and take it,” she says. “When they finally do something about it, there’s really no going back for them. They need a plan.”
Carlson’s also passionate about addressing what she sees as the dangers inherent in arbitration clauses now commonly found in employment contracts. “They’re sold as a benefit to employees, but they’re not,” she says. “They’re fooling us into thinking we’ve come so far when it comes to sexual harassment. But it’s really that we’re not hearing about these cases anymore, because they’re shrouded in secrecy. In most cases when women go to arbitration, the perpetrators stay in the workplace.”
Carlson isn’t just writing about the issues faced by women in the workplace; she’s taking practical steps to confront them. She recently created the Gift of Courage Fund. Its primary goal is to help girls and young women recognize their full potential, as well as to help women gain a safe and nurturing place in the workforce.
After the book’s publication, there’ll be a national book signing tour, and Carlson plans to host events at universities and high schools across the country to address the growing problem of campus sexual abuse. “If this book helps one person to come forward,” she says, “it will all be worth it.”
Today, 1–2 p.m. Gretchen Carlson will sign blads of the first 100 pages of Be Fierce at the Hachette booth (2502, 2503).
