Bill O’Reilly says attacks are ‘horror show’

NEW YORK — Bill O’Reilly says he’s being attacked for political purposes and that it’s been a “horror show” for him and his family.

The former Fox News Channel host was interviewed by one-time colleague Glenn Beck on this weekend’s story in The New York Times that Fox paid a $32 million settlement to a former legal analyst who had accused O’Reilly of harassment.

On Beck’s radio show Monday, O’Reilly said that he could not discuss specifics about former analyst Lis Wiehl’s case. He said the Times hates him and is intent upon keeping him out of the marketplace. There was no immediate comment from the newspaper.

O’Reilly also said that it was “incomprehensible” that his former colleague Megyn Kelly would speak out against him, saying that “I helped her dramatically” in her career.

He posted online an undated thank-you note Kelly had written to him for giving a gift at a baby shower.

O’Reilly was fired in April.

Kelly says she complained to her bosses about O’Reilly’s behavior after she had accused former Fox chief Roger Ailes of sexual harassment.

Kelly, now on NBC, spoke Monday after the settlement with former Fox analyst Lis Wiehl was reported.

When Kelly’s memoir was released last November, O’Reilly publicly questioned the loyalty of those who criticized Fox.

She said on NBC that “the abuse of women, the shaming of them, the threatening, the retaliation, the silencing of them after the fact — it has to stop.”