Shut the F*** Up! The Second-Most-Powerful Man in America is Talking

The truth, though, was that Shawn had spent most of his first month bound to a futon all day, every day. He was constantly sexually abused. His abductor terrorized and threatened to kill him if he ever told anyone who he was. Shawn would later say, “There wasn’t a day when I didn’t think he was just gonna kill me.”

All of these details became public, and O’Reilly was widely criticized for “blaming the victim.” But he never apologized for what he’d said. He never acknowledged he was wrong.

What does all this have to do with being a raging narcissist? I get in touch with John Gunderson, one of the country’s leading experts on personality disorders, to find out. Gunderson, the director of psychosocial and personality research at McLean Hospital in Belmont and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, tells me that a primary characteristic of narcissistic personality disorder is a lack of empathy. Gunderson — who, again, was talking generally rather than about O’Reilly — says people with NPD “seem to disregard or dismiss what ordinarily would evoke concern or sympathy.” Furthermore, he says, it’s “difficult for them to apologize. If they make a mistake, they would be ashamed of it and more apt to withdraw, or to just never mention it again.”

Narcissistic Behavior: “Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.”

In 2004, a Fox News producer named Andrea Mackris filed a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment against O’Reilly, her boss. Mackris had worked for O’Reilly for a total of four years, in two separate stints, booking guests for The O’Reilly Factor. The suit was loaded with alleged quotes from dirty O’Reilly phone calls, including one in which he fantasizes a shower scene and confuses a staple of Middle Eastern cuisine with a loofah. “So anyway I’d be rubbing your big boobs and getting your nipples hard, kinda kissing your neck from behind…and then I would take the other hand with the falafel thing and I’d put it on your pussy but you’d have to do it really light, just kind of a tease business….”

Mackris alleged that O’Reilly repeatedly propositioned her and her friends and masturbated while talking with her on the phone. He also allegedly threatened that if any woman dared to claim sexual harassment against him, he would “make her pay so dearly that she’ll wish she’d never been born. I’ll rake her through the mud, bring up things in her life and make her so miserable so that she’ll be destroyed. And besides, she wouldn’t be able to afford the lawyers. I can endure it financially as long as I can. And nobody would believe her, it’d be her word against mine and who are they going to believe? Me or some unstable woman making outrageous accusations? They’d see her as some psycho, somone unstable. Besides, I’d never make the mistake of picking unstable, crazy girls like that.”

The suit was settled in two weeks for an undisclosed amount. Unsurprisingly, researchers have discovered a link between narcissism and sexual aggression. A 2003 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology concluded that narcissistic males are “more punitive than other men toward a woman who refused them some sexual stimulation that they had anticipated.” Huh.