Fox News settles gender discrimination lawsuit with Abby Grossberg for $12m
Fox Corporation has settled for $12m a lawsuit by the former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg, who had made claims of gender discrimination.
She also accused the network’s lawyers of pressuring her to make misleading statements in the Dominion Voting Systems case, her lawyer Tanvir Rahman said on Friday.
The payout to Grossberg will settle all litigation that she brought against Fox Corp, Fox News Network and her former co-workers, including former Fox host Tucker Carlson.
In a statement, Fox News said: “We are pleased that we have been able to resolve this matter without further litigation.”
The lawsuit claimed that Fox’s legal team “coerced, intimidated and misinformed” Grossberg during preparations for her testimony in a legal battle between the network and Dominion, an elections technology company.
She maintained in the lawsuit that she had received “damaging and woefully inferior and inadequate legal representation” compared to male counterparts at Fox News and that the experience had resulted in “irretrievable reputational and emotional harm”.
In her lawsuit, Grossberg had asserted that Carlson’s show had a cruel and misogynistic workplace, and that she had been pressured to give misleading testimony in the Dominion case.
The settlement is the second highprofile one involving Fox in the span of a couple of months. The conservative network settled with Dominion for $787.5m in April as a trial was about to get fully under way after the voting machine company sued Fox for defamation, accusing the network and its parent company of knowingly broadcast false and outlandish allegations that Dominion was involved in a plot to steal the 2020 election.
Less than a week later, on 24 April, Carlson, the network’s most popular personality, was fired. The network says the firing was unrelated to the Dominion settlement. Carlson has not commented.
Word of the settlement with Grossberg came during a particularly busy 24-hour period for Fox. On Thursday, popular on-air personality Geraldo Rivera indicated he had quit after being fired from a network show called The Five.
Meanwhile, on Friday, a network
spokesperson said the separation with Rivera was “amicable”. Rivera appeared on the channel on Friday morning for a farewell segment in which he said: “I love Fox, I love the people at Fox, I always will.”