When A FOX 5 Reporter Was Arrested For Child Molestation And Remained On The Murdoch Payroll

There's been a lot of outrage in the news tabloids this week that the Brooklyn Tech teacher accused of sexually abusing students hasn't been fired already from his teaching job.

The Brooklyn Tech teacher currently resides in Rikers Island, so it's not like he's teaching his classes at this moment, but the usual teacher trolls want him fired immediately because taking time to investigate any allegations made against a teacher takes too long and any teacher accused of doing anything needs to be fired from their teaching job immediately, truth of the accusations or allegations be damned.

Ironically, back in 2010 FOX 5 reporter Charles Leaf was arrested for allegedly molesting a little girl and was NOT immediately fired by the NY Post's parent company, News Corp (which also owned FOX 5.)

Now if Leaf had been a teacher, the NY Post would have tried him in the court of public opinion immediately, declared him guilty before his criminal trial and called for his firing within hours of his arrest.

But that's not what News Corporation officials did at the time.

Nope - instead they suspended him, pending further investigation into the matter.

Here's my blog post at the time noting that if Leaf had been a teacher, he wouldn't have gotten the same treatment from News Corp:

Saturday, October 9, 2010

But If He Were A Teacher, They'd Say Fire Him

An employee of Rupert Murdoch's Fox 5 TV station has been arrested on child molestation charges:

Acclaimed Fox 5 reporter Charles Leaf was suspended Friday after he was accused of molesting a 4-year-girl inside his New Jersey home.

The 40-year-old Leaf was arrested Thursday at his Wyckoff home on charges of aggravated sexual assault on a minor and endangering the welfare of children, authorities said.

"Fox 5 management is aware of the matter and that Charles Leaf has been suspended pending further investigation," said a station spokeswoman.

Notice how Fox 5 management has NOT fired the employee, but is rather suspending him first and conducting an investigation next to make sure the charges are true BEFORE they fire him.

That's a kind of due process and it makes reasonable sense to, you know, look into charges before you fire somebody.

And Fox is treating Leaf like this even though when he called in sick to work on Thursday, the day he was arrested, he never mentioned the arrest.

He simply asked "for a day off to deal with family issues."

Now if Charles Leaf were a teacher, the very same Murdoch media machine would be clamoring for his immediate dismissal sans investigation.

Allegations would be reason enough to fire him.

An actual arrest would be "proof" that he needed to be fired.

Even though every once in a while, the police arrest somebody on molestation charges who is actually, uh, innocent - even in the school system that the New York tabloids like to disparage so much.

Take this man:

After days of falsely being portrayed as a child rapist, a Brooklyn school custodian broke down in tears yesterday as the charges against him were dismissed.

"Just kill me," a distraught Francis Evelyn, 58, muttered to family members who tried to soothe him as he left Brooklyn Criminal Court.

Evelyn had been led out of Public School 91 in Wingate in handcuffs on Monday and spent two days in jail at Rikers Island after an 8-year-old girl said he had repeatedly molested her in a basement bathroom between Feb. 1 and March 9.

But the Trinidad native knew he was innocent.

"I went through hell," Evelyn later told Channel 7 news.

He said he would never forget being in jail - his first time ever behind bars, the station reported.

"They were threatening me, and tell me they're going to take me out, they're gonna cut my throat," he said. "It's their sister, their niece. It was hell."

His niece Hazel Smith told the Daily News her uncle was devastated.

"He's been stripped. You don't strip a good man. It's like my uncle, he was raped also," she said. "He has neighbors, he has kids. He's good inside his heart."

But she said the family held no malice for the accuser.

"She has something going on with her life and my uncle had to pay the price for it," Smith said. "I hope the child gets the help she needs."

Questions about the case quickly surfaced after sources said the second-grader had been abused in the past and had recently accused another student.

Tuesday night, prosecutors rushed to court to request that Evelyn be released on his own recognizance after initially asking for $150,000 bail.

"People are dismissing the charges due to insufficient evidence," prosecutor Roger McCreedy told Judge William Garnett yesterday as Evelyn clasped his hands and bowed his head.

"Dismissed and sealed," Garnett responded.

School officials reinstated Evelyn to his job a few hours later.

PS 91's widely respected principal, Solomon Long, has been yanked from the post he held for 16 years for allegedly failing to report an abuse charge the child previously made against another person.

Long remains exiled at a district office, pending an investigation. The principals union is calling for him to be returned to his post.

For his part, Evelyn has one wish for his future.

"I want my name to be cleared," Evelyn told Channel 7. "I want to walk the street with my head up."

In the Murdoch world, Evelyn's name would never be cleared.

It seems only if you're a Murdoch employee, like Charles Leaf (or Bill O'Reilly, for that matter), are you given the benefit of an investigation before they tarnish your reputation for life and call for your immediate firing.

The Leaf case has another parallel to the Brooklyn Tech case - like the Brooklyn Tech teacher who had been accused of beating a boy a few years before he was hired as a teacher by the DOE (though he was not convicted of any crime in the alleged incident), FOX 5 reporter Charles Leaf had a allegations of violence in his past:

POSTSCRIPT: Leaf sounds like a typical Murdoch creep. According to the DailyNews, this isn't the first time he has found trouble:

Known for his aggressive style, Leaf, an ex-Marine, began working for Fox 5 in 2006 and has won two Emmy awards, according to his profile on myfoxny.com.

Leaf previously worked as a TV reporter in several cities, including Denver, Detroit and Mobile, Ala.

It's not the first time Leaf's conduct has become the subject of unsavory headlines.

In November 1999, Leaf, then a reporter in Mobile, Ala., was sued by a local councilwoman who alleged that the newsman attacked her while trying to interview her for a story.

Frela Wojciechowski said in the suit that Leaf pursued her to her car after a meeting and slammed the door on her arms and legs when she refused to talk.

Leaf abruptly left the station, WPMI. The suit was later settled, and no criminal charges were filed.

I wanted to write this post about Charles Leaf (who has since been convicted of molestation and been sentenced to prison) and the Brooklyn Tech teacher to point out the hypocrisy of the tabloids in the Tech case, particularly the hypocrisy of the people at the NY Post.

When it's a teacher accused of sex crimes, they go after him with both barrels.

When it's an employee in a subsidiary news outlet of the NY Post's parent company News Corporation, they're completely silent - even as the accused was not immediately fired or dropped from the payroll.

Direct Evidence Of Corporate Criminal Activity By News Corporation Surfaces

From The Independent:

Detectives investigating possible corporate charges against Rupert Murdoch's media empire have obtained evidence to suggest that News International paid private detectives to unlawfully access the phone records of a leading IRA mole who lives under the protection of the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

Senior Scotland Yard officers are analysing an invoice originally seized from a private investigator by the Metropolitan Police in 2007. The document – which dates from the time of the discredited original phone-hacking investigation – bills News International £850 for "Scappaticci phone records".

At the time the invoice was submitted, in April 2006, a senior News of the World executive had allegedly commissioned private detectives to find Freddie Scappaticci, Britain's top agent inside the IRA who was known by the codename "Stakeknife". David Cameron's former director of communications Andy Coulson was the newspaper's editor at the time. Last week, he was convicted of conspiracy to hack mobile phones.

It is understood the explicit request to be paid for obtaining confidential phone records makes the invoice unique amongst the files held by the Metropolitan Police (Met) – and central to possible corporate charges. The request is effectively asking, in black-and-white, to be compensated for a criminal offence.

... 

Last week, Coulson was convicted of conspiracy to hack mobile phones. Five other News of the World journalists pleaded guilty to similar offences. After an eight-month trial that made headlines around the world, former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks was acquitted of four charges.  

However, the conviction of such a senior figure as Coulson has raised the possibility that News International – now rebranded News UK – could face a corporate charge, which may have serious consequences for the ability of the parent company News Corp to operate in the United States. The investigation into News UK as a "corporate suspect" caused pandemonium at the upper echelons of the Murdoch media empire when they learnt of the development two years ago.

Shortly after the company was informed it was under suspicion in May 2012, executives in the US ordered that the company dramatically scale back its co-operation with the Met. A News Corp analysis of the effects of a corporate charge, produced in New York, said the consequences could "kill the corporation, and 46,000 jobs would be in jeopardy".

Lawyers for the media giant pleaded with the Met and the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute the company, saying it would not be in the "public interest" to put thousands of jobs at risk.

Gerson Zweifach, group general counsel of News Corp, flew to London for emergency talks with the Met in 2012. According to Scotland Yard, he told police: "Crappy governance is not a crime. The US authorities' reaction would put the whole business at risk, as licences would be at risk."

I remain skeptical that corporate charges will be filed against News International/News Corporation or hopeful that even if they are, Murdoch's millions won't win the day for the evildoers, as they did in the Brooks case.

But it's becoming increasingly clear that if the Brits want to file corporate charges against Murdoch in the UK, the evidence is there to do so, and with the FBI grabbing 80,000 emails from News Corporation servers last week here in the U.S., there's a good chance the DOJ could mount a criminal case against Murdoch and News Corporation here as well.

FBI Seizes 80,000 Emails From News Corporation Servers

Interesting news:

The FBI has seized 80,000 potentially damning emails from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., giving the media titan worries on both sides of the Atlantic in the ongoing phone hacking scandal.

While Murdoch was in London on Thursday facing the fallout from the conviction of one of his former star editors, it was disclosed in the U.S. that the FBI took and shared the mountain of emails with British prosecutors.

The emails, all copied from servers at News Corp.’s Midtown headquarters, include messages Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s former protégé, sent up the chain of command during the height of the phone-hacking scandal, The Daily Beast reported.

The emails have been shared with British prosecutors, but they were not used as evidence in the trial of Brooks and former News of the World editor Andy Coulson.

It was not immediately clear what the emails say or what the FBI further intends to do with them.

Murdoch is juggling troubles in England and America as his company maneuvers to dodge corporate charges and keep the 83-year-old billionaire from being prosecuted himself.

He turned up in London to speak to his News UK staff in the wake of Tuesday’s stunning conviction of Coulson. Murdoch has yet to publicly address his former star editor’s conviction on phone-hacking charges. But he appears to have bigger problems to worry about.

Scotland Yard has advised him it wants to interview him “under caution” — a warning given to suspects.

British prosecutors appear to be working up a case for corporate charges to be brought against Murdoch’s company. Under section 79 of Britain’s Regulations and Investigatory Powers Acts, company directors can be brought to justice if evidence shows they consented or connived with the misdeeds of employees, or were negligent.

A corporate charge could be devastating for News Corp., which concluded in an in-house analysis that it could “kill the corporation” and put “46,000 jobs in jeopardy.”

In 2012, News Corp.’s general council, Gerson Zweifach, told British police and prosecutors if the company faces a corporate charge it risks losing its U.S. Federal Communications Commission licenses. The FCC licenses includes those for Fox News Channel, Fox Sports and Fox Broadcasting Co.

Peter Jukes covers much of the same hacking story ground over at Daily Beast.

 

Count me as dubious the Obama DOJ and FBI are going to go after Murdoch and News Corp.

 

Or that if they do decide to go after Murdoch and News Corp, that they're successful at it.

 

Murdoch spent millions defending Brooks and you can bet he'll spend way more to save his own wrinkled old ass.

Still, here's hoping.

Did Joel Klein Help Break Up Rupert Murdoch's Marriage?

Read the entire Michael Wolff piece on Rupert Murdoch's impending divorce to his third wife, Wendi, for a Game of Thrones-like story of familial intrigue, plotting and backstabbing within the Murdoch family and News Corp inner circle, but definitely take note of what happened to Rupert's marriage to Wendi when Joel Klein came aboard:

In a world whose main currency was having Rupert's ear, Wendi had altered the balance of power, to the consternation of executives and family. There followed the orange hair; the Prada suits; the kooky diets. And there was the discordant Wendi voice: not just her accent, widely mocked, but her straightforwardness: her mentioning Rupert's Viagra in Vanity Fair; and her own often hilarious jibs, complete with mimicry, albeit with a Chinese accent, at the other members of Murdoch family.

What to do about Wendi became a major corporate and family preoccupation – and a constant worry for Murdoch himself. Buying the most expensive apartment in New York and having her decorate it was one of Murdoch's strategies to keep her busy. Encouraging her to produce movies was another. Still, he liked being with her. In public, he would take her hand. She became a key aide during his 2007 takeover of the Wall Street Journal.

At least one intimate judged that an abiding concern for Rupert in the 2008 and 2009 period was holding his marriage together – that it was an issue for him of pride. It was important for him not to fail at what everyone said would fail. The winds and cross currents between them were very strong with almost nobody, in the family or in the company, ready to say if they were becoming closer or growing further apart. Not least of all because Rupert, trying to cater to all the various interests of his court, often told people what they wanted to hear.

Vacationing with Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg on Diller's yacht, they appeared to be deeply in love. Not long afterwards, he told his son Lachlan it was over. At some point, Wendi's base of social gravity moved from the media set – David Geffen, Barbara Walters, Ivanka Trump, Arianna Huffington, Graydon Carter – to a different jet set. Dasha Zhukova, the girlfriend of Russian Oligarch Roman Abramovich, and Larry Gagosian, the international art dealer, became her close friends and business partners.

An article in the New York Times quoted sources described as friend's of Wendi as saying she was living more and more an independent life. In fact, she was, trying to hold on to her life, while Rupert, in the company of trainers and message therapists, seemed to be more and more removed from her.

Wendi had made a particular enemy of Joel Klein, the lawyer and News Corp executive who more and more was Rupert's closest corporate confidant and one of the company's chief plotters. What's more, the most damaging results of the hacking scandal for Murdoch had been an increasing breach with his children and an urgency, on his part, to calm the internecine feuding. Wendi, again, was the odd person out, even the expendable one in the Murdoch family.

Interesting how Wendi managed to survive all the various plotters in the Murdoch circle until Joel Klein became Rupert's closest corporate confidant.

Michael Wolff describes Klein as one of News Corporations' "chief plotters" and Wendi as an "enemy" of Klein's.

You have to wonder what poison Klein whispered into Rupert's ear to help move Murdoch toward divorce.

Maybe Wendi Deng took out the wrong guy at the Parliament hearing when she defended her husband against a man attacking him with shaving cream.

Maybe Klein was the real enemy.

How The Murdoch Family Treats The Help

Must read piece in Gawker last week about how Rupert Murdoch and his wife Wendi treated a former staffer and tutor of their children:

A former household staffer and tutor for Rupert Mudoch and Wendi Deng's children is speaking out for the first time about the relentless nightmare that is working for the Murdochs: Screaming tantrums, nannies discarded by the side of the road on a whim, no benefits, unpaid overtime, young girls body-shamed by their mother—and near abandonment for workers injured on the job.

Ying-Shu Hsu spent more than year as a full-time Chinese tutor and nanny to Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng's daughters, Chloe and Grace. Six years ago, while holding then 2-year-old Chloe in her arms, she tripped over a tricycle in the Murdochs' Beverly Hills home and fractured her knee, causing permanent damage. Unable to work and cut off from workers' compensation benefits owing to the Murdochs' shoddy paperwork, Hsu was sent packing with a severance payment and told never to contact the family again. She sued the Murdochs unsuccessfully for damages in 2007 (the lawsuit has never been previously reported), and has never been able to work since. She lives off Social Security now.

Read the whole piece. It's horrifying. Wendi Deng comes off much worse than Rupert in the piece, but remember, he's the one paying the staff like this:

Deng, Hsu says, was notorious among her household staff for being cheap, despite her husband's fortune. Food in the refrigerator, Hsu said, was strictly labelled for Rupert and the kids and was hands off for the staff. Hsu's hours were supposed to be from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., but Deng frequently asked her to work later, especially when the family was travelling, and never paid her overtime. Her job included no benefits, paid vacation, or sick leave—perks that are routinely afforded to nannies in New York (and are now mandatory under a recently passed Domestic Workers Bill of Rights). When the Murdochs were away and Hsu wasn't travelling with them, she didn't get paid. Though Hsu's nominal salary at $3,000 per month totaled $36,000 per year, with unpaid vacations and time off when the Murdochs travelled without her, she ended up earning just $26,200 in 2005. For perspective, according to a 2011 survey of nanny employment practices in Brooklyn conducted by Park Slope Parents, 8 in 10 families reported continuing to pay their nanny for regular hours while they were away. And the average Brooklyn nanny received more than 11 paid days off per year.

What's more, the Murdochs' household corporation, KRM Services (as in Keith Rupert Murdoch), classified Hsu as a self-employed independent contractor despite the fact that she was clearly a household employee. According to tax documents disclosed in Hsu's lawsuit against the Murdochs, KRM Services treated Hsu as a 1099 employee and didn't withhold any taxes or pay the employer's share of her Social Security taxes in 2005. IRS guidelines make it abundantly clear that if "you can control not only what work is done" by an employee "but how it is done," then that staffer qualifies as a household employee for whom employment taxes must be paid. There is no question based on Hsu's description of her job that Deng had total control over what she did and how she did it. Indeed, during the course of Hsu's litigation, Deng filed a sworn declaration with the court affirming that she controlled the "time, manner, and place of where Ying-Shu Hsu performed her work [sic].

Here's how Ms. Hsu was injured while in the Murdoch's employ:

In January 2006, while travelling with the Murdochs to their Beverly Hills estate, Hsu was working late caring for Chloe and Grace. At 5:30 p.m., Chloe demanded a certain kind of yogurt that the Murdochs had run out of. Chloe didn't believe Hsu when she told her there wasn't anymore, so Hsu carried Chloe in her arms to the refrigerator to prove it to her. Along the way, she tripped over a tricycle in the kitchen. Since she was carrying a two-year-old, Hsu couldn't maneuver her body to protect herself as she fell. She broke her kneecap.

"My bone was sticking out," she says. A housekeeper rushed her to the hospital, where doctors told her she needed surgery. But the surgeon's schedule was booked, so Hsu spent four days in excruciating pain at the Murdochs' in Beverly Hills, wearing a temporary cast and taking painkillers. "Wendi told me it was no big deal," she said. "Rupert broke his leg skiing once and he was fine."

After her surgery, Hsu recuperated at the Murdochs' for another two weeks before she was well enough to travel home on January 27. When she left, she says, Wendi promised she could come back to work as soon as she was feeling up to it. "She verbally told me, 'After you get better, you can come back,'" Hsu said. Not long after, Deng's secretary sent her a personal check from Deng for $5,000, or just under two months' salary. After that, nothing.

"She never contacted me or followed up," Hsu said. "I tried to contact her in June—I hadn't worked in almost six months. But I could only leave messages, and she never called back. In July, her secretary sent me a check for $3,000 and said, 'You're on your own. Don't bother us any more.'" At that time, Hsu was still on crutches, with two steel pins in her knee. She wasn't in much of a position to seek new employment, but felt that—despite the job's unpleasant aspects—she could have continued on with the Murdochs as Deng, she says, had promised.

...

Through it all, Hsu got nothing aside from a total of $8,000—roughly two-and-a-half months salary—in severance from Deng. Five years after the accident, she walks with a limp. Throughout her long rehabilitation, during which she was severely impaired and in pain, she got none of the workers' compensation benefits to which she as entitled. By the time evidence of her coverage emerged four years later, she had recovered to the point where a doctor no longer found her to be impaired enough for benefits. She moved to Las Vegas, gave up on pursuing anything from workers' compensation, and lives off her Social Security benefits. She feels embittered at both the Murdochs and her own lawyer, James Napoli, whom she feels abandoned her after the Murdochs' belated discovery. And she suspects—without evidence—that Napoli folded in the face of a powerful adversary. Napoli did not return a phone message.

Hsu never spoke to Deng again after the accident. Today, she has a simple message for her: "Treat people fairly and nicely. That's how you keep people. She's mean."

Treating the staff like serfs, cheating on employee taxes and Social Security, trying to cheat an insurance company, dropping an employee injured in his employ like a broken children's toy, and letting his wife terrorize staff like she's Catherine the Great - that's Rupert Murdoch for you.

No wonder he has such disdain for teachers.

He sees us as extensions of the household staff - to be treated the way he and his wife treated Ms. Hsu.