She probably was legitimately attractive by Roman cultural norms and almost certainly leveraged that when dealing with Rome. The smear campaign was more playing that aspect up while downplaying the fact she was a genuine once-in-a-generation genius than making up things about how sexy she was.
During Trump’s first term, Fox pushed back just slightly on some of the shit he was trying to pull. Turned out even Fox wasn’t entirely comfortable with Trump being president. However, this backfired and pushed some viewers to OAN because Fox had spent the last couple decades training their viewers to hate anyone who even slightly opposes a Republican president. Of course, that increased OAN’s profile, which got them on Trump’s radar. Trump loves them because they won’t stop sucking his dick, so he promotes them to his followers, so now a bunch of people that used to religiously watch Fox now religiously watch OAN and think that Fox isn’t conservative enough.
They made a monster and it slipped its leash.