A Death on W Street by Andy Kroll

Author:Andy Kroll [Kroll, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2022-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

On August 1, 2017, Rod Wheeler filed a lawsuit in a federal court in New York against Fox News; its parent company, Fox Corporation; Ed Butowsky; and Malia Zimmerman. From a legal standpoint, the thrust of the suit was a strange one: Wheeler claimed that Butowsky and Zimmerman had somehow defamed him by fabricating the quotes attributed to him that appeared in Zimmerman’s now-retracted story about Seth and WikiLeaks. He also accused Fox of racial discrimination, alleging he wasn’t hired full time because he was Black.

Wheeler’s lawyer had stuffed the complaint full of raw evidence—text messages, emails, voicemails, excerpts from phone calls. The texts Butowsky sent about how President Trump had read a draft of Zimmerman’s story and “wants the article out immediately,” Butowsky and Wheeler’s meeting at the White House with Sean Spicer, Butowsky’s role in recruiting Wheeler and helping guide Zimmerman’s investigation—it was all in Wheeler’s complaint. A reporter at NPR, David Folkenflik, broke the story of Wheeler’s lawsuit on the day it was filed, writing that Fox and Butowsky had allegedly “worked in concert under the watchful eye of the White House to concoct a story about the death of a young Democratic National Committee aide” to distract from the revelations of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

As Joel, Mary, and Aaron read Wheeler’s complaint, they encountered one revelation after another. They realized Butowsky, Zimmerman, and Wheeler had worked together for months to produce a story that smeared Seth. And they had done it behind the family’s back. With the benefit of hindsight, Aaron had sometimes wondered if there was more going on with Wheeler, Butowsky, and Zimmerman than he knew; he imagined them connected by gray dotted lines, suspicions that he had no proof to back up. Now he and his parents had their proof. There was a word for what Wheeler, Butowsky, and Zimmerman had done: conspiracy.

They read the follow-up stories David Folkenflik at NPR published about Fox and Butowsky, and their shock soon gave way to rage. For the first time, they began to think about what options they had to repair some of the damage caused by Butowsky, Zimmerman, and Fox. It haunted them that people they’d trusted had used them, played them for fools. Sean Hannity and Fox News had transformed their family’s tragedy into a political cudgel, turning any parent’s worst nightmare into a way to score points for the Republican Party and help out the president. And even though Fox had retracted Malia Zimmerman’s story, no one at Fox ever gave them a clear accounting of what went wrong and why. No one had ever apologized.

And no matter how hard they tried, Joel and Mary couldn’t put an end to the lies. Their voices weren’t loud enough to break through the noise and spread what they knew to be true. “Whatever we did,” Joel would later say, “we got drowned out.”

They felt like they had no other choice but to bring a lawsuit. “If this is what it takes to

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