Fox News hosts offered a spirited defense of a recently fired Forbes contributor who wrote that “irresponsible” intoxicated women “are the gravest threat to fraternities” in part because of the possibility that the fraternity would be liable if a woman was sexually assaulted at a party.  

On September 23, Forbes published and quickly retracted a column in which contributor Bill Frezza identified “drunk female guests” as “the gravest threat to fraternities.” The since-deleted column warned fraternity members that:

[W]e have very little control over women who walk in the door carrying enough pre-gaming booze in their bellies to render them unconscious before the night is through ...

In our age of sexual equality, why drunk female students are almost never characterized as irresponsible jerks is a question I leave to the feminists. But it is precisely those irresponsible women that the brothers must be trained to identify and protect against, because all it takes is one to bring an entire fraternity system down.

Frezza was subsequently fired for his controversial column. 

Some of the co-hosts of Fox News' Outnumbered came to Frezza's defense on the September 25 edition of the show. Co-host Andrea Tantaros agreed that Frezza expressed a “legitimate fear” and said, “I don't know why this writer is taking so much heat because this is actually a problem that goes on.” Tantaros asked, “the guys, what are they supposed to do, lock them out?” Co-host Kirsten Powers complained of a “culture now where we literally cannot tolerate differing ideas,” and guest host Jesse Watters suggested that intoxicated women were responsible for their own assaults:

WATTERS: Let's just try to identify this guy's fear here, Andrea. What he's afraid of is he hosts a party at the house and these girls pregame too hard and they come over sloppy drunk. They take too many shots and they go up to your room and the next thing happens in the morning, I don't know what happens, I can barely remember what happens, she gets hurt, she gets assaulted, anything could happen and then they're liable.

Not every Outnumbered host defended the inflammatory article. Co-host Kennedy pointed out that fraternities are responsible for the safety of their guests, and her colleague Sandra Smith added, “I feel like it's the fault of the fraternity that has ...no policies to handle this.” 

The Outnumbered hosts previously suggested a link between drinking and sexual assault when they agreed it was wise that college women avoid consumption of alcohol in order to avoid the risk of sexual assault. As an expert explained to USA Today, “People don't get raped because they have been drinking, because they are passed out or because they are drunk. People get raped because there is a perpetrator there -- someone who wants to take advantage of them.”