"Roger Ailes.  Bill O’Reilly.  Harvey Weinstein.  Charlie Rose.  Matt Lauer.  Garrison Keillor.  The American media landscape—with some notable exceptions—has always been a boy’s club, across the political spectrum.  And we are now witnessing significant numbers of male journalists, editors, personalities, producers, showrunners—on screen, in print, over the radio—losing their livelihoods and—so far—their reputations as their long-rumored and long-excused predatory behavior is being exposed with serious consequences," says University of Redlands Professor Kathleen Feeley.  
 

"The whisper networks that operated around such powerful men have been amplified in recent months and are being taken seriously.  Gossip has always served as a tool of the less powerful: to gain access to resources and status, to protect themselves and others.  And now the so-called gossip around men like Lauer—Todays paterfamilias around whom an increasingly disposable cast of female co-anchors have revolved for more than 20 years—is being legitimized and amplified to a national and global audience as newsworthy discourse to be taken seriously. 

 
"We are hopefully in the midst of exposing and rejecting—for good—the long-held practice of discrediting female (and male) accusers of sexual harassment and abuse by dismissing their experiences and truths as rumor or innuendo and then going in for the class-based, sexualized, racialized, and/or gendered smear.  And the downfall of these celebrated predators will hopefully presage transformations in workplaces across the United States, providing much-needed support, vindication, and new opportunities for those under-represented in the halls of power."  
 
Feeley has written widely on celebrity gossip and the Hollywood film industry and its key figures including Mary Pickford, Irving Thalberg, Louella Parsons, and Hedda Hopper.  Most recently, a forthcoming chapter “‘The Great and Important Thing in Her Life’: Depicting Female Labor and Ambition in the 1920s and 1930s U.S. Movie Magazines,” in Mapping Movie Magazines, ed. Daniel Biltereyst and Liesbeth Van deVijver (forthcoming in 2018 from Palgrave/MacMillan) examines the professional and personal relationships amongst Joan Crawford and the female writers and editors of an emerging Hollywood press corps and the complex and contested discourse they produced in the pages of movie magazines around issues of work, harassment, ambition, and likeability in the 1920s and 1930s America.
 
She earned her Ph.D., U.S. History and Women's Studies Certificate, Department of History, The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York (GSUC/CUNY), February 2004. and her B.A., magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, History and Women's Studies, Colgate University, Hamilton, N.Y., May 1990