Roger Ailes’ Lawyers Rip Journalist Gabe Sherman

Roger Ailes

Facing multiple allegations of sexually harassing female employees along with lawsuits from two of his accusers, to say nothing of advising Donald Trump on presidential debate prep, ousted Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes apparently still has time to plot the downfall of perceived foes.

According to The Daily Beast, No. 1 on the 76-year-old Ailes’s enemies list appears to be New York Magazine national affairs editor Gabriel Sherman, who has spearheaded the reporting on the former cable news executive’s recent scandal that led to his abrupt resignation last month.

The 37-year-old Sherman, who has broken several Ailes stories in recent weeks—notably the damaging scoop that Fox News star Megyn Kelly, an Ailes protégé, had told an internal review of fired Fox anchor Gretchen Carlson’s harassment lawsuit allegations that she, too, had been an Ailes victim—is preparing a major exposé on Ailes and his behavior toward women, expected to be published in the magazine’s next issue.

Gabe Sherman

In what seemed timed as a preemptive strike, two of Ailes’s attorneys—Susan Estrich, a law professor and a partner in the blue-chip Los Angeles law firm Quinn, Emanuel, and Mark Mukasey, a top litigator in the well-connected New York firm Greenberg, Traurig—contacted The Daily Beast in the past day to attack the journalist in slashing, nasty, and deeply personal terms.

“Gabe Sherman is a virus, and is too small to exist on his own, and has obviously attached himself to the Ailes family to try to suck the life out of them,” Mukasey, the son of former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, said in an interview Tuesday after sending an email to The Daily Beast inviting a reporter to call for his comments.

“This is Gabe Sherman’s last stand, and it falls flat,” Estrich said in an emailed statement, referring to Sherman’s reporting on last week’s complaint against Ailes and four other Fox News executives by suspended Fox News personality Andrea Tantaros.

In his only response to the new attacks, Sherman told The Daily Beast: “I don’t take it personally. I’m going to keep my head down and continue to report.”