Andrea Mackris has a story to tell and she’s damn well going to tell it. Mackris is one of the women with whom “Bill’O” settled harassment claims. In 2004, she agreed to a $9 million dollar settlement, obviously three million of which would go to her lawyer, leaving her the six million as compensation for having to put up with a woman’s worst nightmare (Also a girldad’s worst nightmare).

Her entire promising career was in the hands of a serial abuser who used her for his own pleasure. Now, evidently, Mackris wants Bill to really pay. She spoke to The Daily Beast and we suggest everyone read the entire article, some of which, we will excerpt here:

Mackris recalls to The Daily Beast for the first time intimate and graphic details of O’Reilly’s alleged harassment, including lewd, menacing telephone calls and conversations in which she says he forced her to listen to his s*xual fantasies about her. “I’m going to make you play,” O’Reilly would tell Mackris. “Here was my boss, a man who held my career and future in his hands, acknowledging that he knew I’d never consented but he didn’t care.”

If one’s blood pressure isn’t rising… she was just trying to make a living as an adult professional woman, someone who deserved some g-damned dignity! He is a…

For those of us in the legal community, Makris was not necessarily “abused” by her lawyers (or the opponents’) but she wasn’t respected by them, either:

“She felt pressured, rushed, and forced to sign the NDA. Backed into a corner. There was no other option for her,” Lou Mackris told The Daily Beast. “It wasn’t about a settlement for her. She wanted this to stop and go back to work. Obviously, that didn’t happen.”

They had made it very clear to her, no one was going to hire her, no one was going to believe her, the $6 million (we aren’t counting the money going to the attorneys) was the best she was going to do, and “no,” she was not going to trial. They said no other lawyer would take her case to go to trial. (A lot of lawyers would have taken her case, whether they’d be effective or not is impossible to predict, too many variables.)

She was further insulted. O’Reilly’s lawyers (through RCA) knew she was in the midst of a crisis (of course, she was!) and had PTSD, and thus they spread her payment out through three installments, to ensure she kept to the non-disclosure terms.

It wasn’t just the lawyers. Mackris told The Daily Beast that she felt traumatized by opinion pieces attacking her credibility by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (dismissively titled “The Nonsense Factor”) and the Philadelphia Daily News’ Michael Smerconish (“The case against Bill O’Reilly is bogus,” wrote Smerconish, an occasional O’Reilly Factor guest and substitute host on his radio show) as well as by lurid headlines in the New York Post trashing her reputation (“‘LUNATIC’ O’REILLY GAL WENT NUTS IN A BAR,” screamed one). Yet Mackris ultimately signed the agreement.

Remember, this woman even had tapes of him speaking to her. Imagine how she might have been treated if she didn’t have such ironclad proof.

We support her for coming forward and are humiliated as part of the media, legal profession, and men in society. Read her story, and then help someone who might be in her position, comfort them. It can be a brutal world and sometimes all we can do is make it a little better for one person.

By bravely coming forward, Mackris is doing far more than that.

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