Roger Ailes' Office Protects Him from Gay Terrorists
There's so much to love about Fox News chief Roger Ailes — and so much of him to love — but our favorite character trait is his lunatic paranoia. Did you know he bomb-proofed his office against "those gays"?
Yes, according to an Ailes profile by Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson, Ailes' first office at Fox News headquarters was built to some very... specific standards:
Murdoch installed ailes in the corner office on Fox's second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. (In 1989, Ailes had broken up a protest of a Rudy Giuliani speech by gay activists, grabbing demonstrator by the throat and shoving him out the door.) Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having "bombproof glass" installed in the windows – even going so far as to personally inspect samples of high-tech plexiglass, as though he were picking out new carpet. Looking down on the street below, he expressed his fears to Cooper, the editor he had tasked with up-armoring his office. "They'll be down there protesting," Ailes said. "Those gays."
We knew that Ailes has a permit to carry a concealed weapon, and has said in the past that he "will fight" in the event of some unspecified 9/11-level attack. But we always assumed he was afraid of Muslims! Not of bomb-throwing homosexualists.
Well, actually, he's afraid of Muslims too:
Inside his blast-resistant office at Fox News headquarters, Ailes keeps a monitor on his desk that allows him to view any activity outside his closed door. Once, after observing a dark-skinned man in what Ailes perceived to be Muslim garb, he put Fox News on lockdown. "What the hell!" Ailes shouted. "This guy could be bombing me!" The suspected terrorist turned out to be a janitor. "Roger tore up the whole floor," recalls a source close to Ailes. "He has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim – which is consistent with the ideology of his network."
