Fired Fox News exec files $48M suit, claims he was a ‘scapegoat’
Cortes says network breached agreement in harassment case
A former Fox News Latino executive terminated this year by the network filed a lawsuit Tuesday charging 21st Century Fox with slander and fraud for breaching a $2.5 million settlement with a victim who claims she was assaulted at the company’s headquarters.
Francisco Cortes, formerly the vice president for Fox News Latino, is seeking $48 million in the suit filed in federal court in New York.
Cortes alleges the parent company broke an agreement signed in February 2017 by him and Tamara Holder, who had worked as a legal and political analyst for Fox News, and two other employees at Fox, whose identities remain unknown. The New York Times reported in March 2017 that Holder said a network executive attempted to force her to perform oral sex on him in February 2015 when they were alone in his office. For that story, Fox News and Holder gave a joint statement to the Times, which said when she reported the incident in September 2016, “the company promptly investigated the matter and took decisive action, for which Ms. Holder thanks the network.”
Because of the February agreement, Cortes says in the suit that he could not comment without breaching the contract, while Holder and Fox News “intentionally breached their contractual obligations” to him under the agreement.
Cortes says in the suit “the relationship between (he) and Tamara Holder was consensual” and will produce evidence the allegations he sexually harassed Holder are false.
Instead, Fox used the situation to make Cortes a “scapegoat” to “cleanse Fox of the taint caused by the recent sexual-harassment scandal being faced by Fox, which was to be a significant obstacle to their retention of advertising revenue, and to their $15.2 billion takeover of European pay-TV group Sky,” the suit says.
Fox News addressed the suit in a statement, saying, “The allegations in this lawsuit are frivolous and without merit.”
Over the past several months, Fox News has ousted section heads and popular on-air talent amid a growing number of legal suits and payments, in excess of $45 million, in settlements over sexual-harassment and discrimination charges.
Corporate culture can be a factor United Kingdom regulators consider in the ongoing approval process for Fox’s $15 billion bid to acquire the remaining 61% of U.K.-based TV and Internet provider Sky it doesn’t own.