OR, Bill O reilly was an easy target for legal extortion. I've seen it happen (on a smaller scale). Who knows? I am withholding judgement until those pesky things called facts come out. One other thing, if there were non-disclosures, how is this getting press?
Joe, I read about one of O'Reilly's harassment legal problems few years ago. He even spoke about it on his show, so this is no big revelation. Apparently there were additional incidents however, which makes the story more juicy (a'la Bill Cosby). On rare occasions, a sealed court case can be opened as the result of a Freedom of Information request if the public interest is compelling, especially in civil matters. It could have been the case here because the NYT was writing a story and may have filed the FOI request. They are used routinely by the press.
Most of the time though, these settlements are reached with a simple contract between the plaintiff and defendant and a non-disclosure is part of the agreement along with a large payout of cash and no admission of guilt. No court is involved, so FOI requests aren't effective. If the press can get someone to leak information however, they can publish it without fear of penalty. The whole thing is sort of messy.
As an aside, these "cash for silence" agreements are used often by large corporations to avoid bad publicity and the potential enormous costs of class action suits, ethics be damned. Many years ago, a colleague of mine lost his parents in an commercial airplane crash. Within 24 hours, the airline had contacted him asking if he would sign an agreement to not discuss the crash, nor the results of any investigation, nor join a class action suit, in exchange for a large cash settlement of several $100,000's (a lot of money 40 years ago). He refused to sign, and won a couple million $$$ in the class action, but it took four years. IMO, sometimes corporations act in very ugly ways and deserve to be "outed".
