nypost.com . . .
'BOOZY' BOAST
By DAREH GREGORIAN
October 19, 2004 -- The woman who's suing TV personality Bill O'Reilly for sexual harassment boasted she had written a book to "take [him] down" — months before she went back to work for him, a witness swore yesterday.
Andrea Mackris also bragged that she was good buddies with O'Reilly's arch nemesis — Air America talk show host Al Franken, the witness said.
"What we thought we had here was somebody trying to hit us up for a lot of money, but now we know it's much more than that," said O'Reilly's lawyer, Ronald Green.
Green said the bombshell revelation came from Upper West Side restaurateur Matthew Paratore, who owns a bar that Fox associate producer Andrea Mackris used to frequent — before she was barred for loud, lewd and indecent behavior at the beginning of the summer.
Green said Paratore shared what he knew about Mackris for a sworn affidavit in a 90-minute proceeding that was witnessed by eight people and taken down by a court reporter. Paratore could not be reached last night.
"He [Paratore] has no interest in this case, no stake in this case," Green said. "But he said what was happening here is just dead wrong."
Asked to comment on Paratore, Mackris' lawyer, Benedict Morelli, said, "It's ridiculous. We can't talk right now," and hung up on a Post reporter.
Mackris, 33, filed suit against her boss, O'Reilly and his bosses at Fox News Channel last week, charging that the popular loudmouth had subjected her to a slew of inappropriate comments and engaged in unwanted — and extremely graphic — phone-sex conversations with her.
She said the inappropriate comments began shortly after she first went to work for O'Reilly in May 2002 and continued until January 2004, when she quit Fox to work for CNN.
That was when Mackris crowed to Paratore, who said they'd known each other "for years," that "she had decided to take down Bill O'Reilly and Fox. She said she'd written a book" at the end of 2003 or early 2004, Green said.
She apparently shopped the book to a publisher during her short stint at CNN — and told Paratore that "the publisher told her it needed something more. It needed more impact," the lawyer said.
Mackris, who continued socializing with O'Reilly while she was working at CNN, went back to work for him in June 2004. Soon after, her suit says, O'Reilly started engaging in the unwanted phone sex with her.
Paratore said Mackris was no stranger to unwanted sexual advances — she'd frequently made them on him at his restaurant, North West, Green said.
"He [Paratore] said he was the object of her sexual propositions, sexual rants and drunken propositions," Green said, including once when she allegedly started taking off her clothes.
"If you think I'm going to f - - - Bill O'Reilly, I'm going to f - - - you even more," Paratore quoted her as saying, according to Green.
Paratore also said that earlier this year, Mackris had dinner at his restaurant with Franken, who featured O'Reilly in his book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them."
O'Reilly sued Franken over the book, but the suit was tossed. To further stick it to "The O'Reilly Factor," the liberal Franken named his Air America radio show, "The O'Franken Factor."
According to the affidavit, during their dinner, Mackris boasted to restaurant staffers that she and Franken "share a common political belief" which was contrary to O'Reilly's, who's been labeled a conservative although he says he's an independent.
Paratore said that over time, Mackris' drunken antics got to be too much, and he banned her from the bar, Green said.
Fox News is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Post.
Additional reporting by Dan Mangan
