© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: A Fox News Channel sign is seen on a television drive-in outside the News Corporation building in New York, US, November 8, 2017. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/FilePhoto
Written by Helen Koster and Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Fox has settled a $12 million lawsuit filed by Abby Grossberg, former Fox News producer, alleging gender discrimination and accusing the network’s lawyers of pressuring her into making misleading statements in the case of Dominion Voting Systems, whose attorney is Tanfer. Rahman said on Friday.
The deal follows Fox’s April 18 agreement to pay Dominion $787.5 million to settle a voting technology company’s defamation lawsuit in Delaware.
A week later, on April 25, Fox announced that it had parted ways with Tucker Carlson, the conservative host whom Dominion had accused of allowing allegations of election fraud about the company to be exposed on his show, while casting doubt on the plausibility of those allegations. Claims in private messages that appeared in legal filings.
Grossberg was the head of guest reservations at Carlson.
“We are pleased that we were able to resolve this matter without further litigation,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement.
“While I stand by the claims and allegations I have made public, in light of today’s $12 million settlement, under which I have now withdrawn those claims, I am pleased that Fox News has taken me and my legal claims seriously,” Grossberg said in a statement.
Grossberg was fired after she filed her lawsuit March 20 in federal court in Manhattan. She has worked for Fox since 2019.
While being fired, Fox said her legal claims were “full of false allegations against Fox and our employees.”
In seeking unspecified monetary damages, Grossberg claimed he was subjected to a hostile and discriminatory work environment. It accused Fox of, among other things, gender and religious discrimination as well as equal pay violations.
She also sought unspecified damages in a similar lawsuit in Delaware Supreme Court, which she dismissed in May.
Grossberg said that while preparing with Fox’s attorneys for her September 2022 deposition in the Dominion suit, she felt “coerced and intimidated into not saying anything that would make her a ‘Star of Dominion’ witness.”
Dominion sued Fox for $1.6 billion for promoting false vote fraud allegations related to the 2020 US presidential election. Had the Dominion case gone to trial, Grosberg would have been a key witness.
Grossberg said Fox subjected her to sexism, misogyny and anti-Semitism.
Carlson was among the defendants in the Grossberg lawsuit in Manhattan. The show Grossberg worked on, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” was the highest-rated prime-time American television news program.
Grossberg alleged that Carlson made derogatory comments toward women, and cited incidents such as Carlson’s staff discussing whether Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was “hotter” and better at sex than Republican opponent Theodore Dixon.
Grossberg claimed that on her first day on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” she discovered several photos of then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi who was in her 80s posing in a plunging bathing suit, revealing the Democrat’s cleavage, on her computer and elsewhere in the room. all over the office.
She also alleged that one of Carlson’s employees called Grossberg into his office and asked if Maria Bartiromo, who worked for her before Carlson, was having sex with Republican Representative Kevin McCarthy, now the Speaker of the House.
Grossberg alleged that a Carlson show executive once remarked that the “mother’s room,” an office reserved for network employees to pump breast milk, was “a waste of space” and should be replaced with “a room of tanning beds for men to tan testicles.”