This story has been updated to reflect comment from Fox News.
In a lawsuit filed Monday, former Fox News host Andrea Tantaros reportedly sued top executives at the network, charging that they retaliated against her for complaining about sexual harassment by Fox’s founding chairman, Roger Ailes.
The top executives named in the suit include Bill Shine—one of the two men who replaced Ailes—the New York Times reports.
This most recent controversy comes a month after Ailes resigned when former Fox anchor Gretchen Carlson sued him for sexual harassment.
The suit, which was filed in the New York Supreme Court in Manhattan, is the latest bone of contention between Tantaros and the network. Fox claimed this past winter that Tantaros breached her contract when she wrote a book without seeking the network’s approval first.
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The chief lawyer for Fox has charged Tantaros with using the sexual harassment claims to gain leverage in the contract dispute, the Times reports. Judd Burstein, Tantaros’s lawyer, said that Fox was using the book permission issue as a way to silence her.
“Fox News masquerades as a defender of traditional family values, but behind the scenes, it operates like a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency and misogyny,” Tantaros’s suit says, according to the Times.
Fox News told Coins2Day it does not comment on pending litigation.
During arbitration, Burstein said that Fox News offered to pay Tantaros more than $1 million if she dropped claims against Ailes and others at Fox, including “O’Reilly Factor” host Bill O’Reilly. Although she thought of him as a friend and mentor, the lawsuit says that Tantaros suffered unwanted sexual advances from O’Reilly.
Tantaros joined Fox as a contributor in 2010, and was named co-host of “The Five” the next year. But after Tantaros refused Ailes’s sexual advances, she was demoted to a lower-rated show called “Outnumbered,” according to the Times.
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The Times reports that in April 2015 Tantaros met with Bill Shine, a close aide to Ailes who was then a senior Fox News executive, to discuss the meetings she’d had with Ailes. Tantaros reportedly asked Shine if he had instructed Irena Briganti, Fox News head of publicity, to attack her. But Shine allegedly told her that, “Briganti is like a rabid dog on a chain that we can’t control. Sometimes that dog gets off the chain,” and that Tantaros “needs to let this one go.”
“Ailes did not act alone,” the lawsuit reportedly states. “He may have been the primary culprit, but his actions were condoned by his most senior lieutenants, who engaged in a concerted effort to silence Tantaros by threats, humiliation and retaliation.”
Coins2Day has reached out to Burstein and will update the story if he responds.
