Fox News sued one of its senior producers Monday over the $1.6 billion defamation claim it is fighting concerning allegedly knowingly providing disinformation regarding the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Fox News’s lawsuit came the same day that the producer, Abby Grossberg, who has worked with hosts Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo, filed lawsuits against the company, accusing Fox lawyers of attempting to coerce her into lying to investigators to protect top executives and slamming the television network for being misogynistic.
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According to Fox’s lawsuit, Grossberg told the network last month that she intended to sue it for discrimination. Fox then said it was thus compelled to sue her on Monday to prevent the release of its legal maneuvers.
“Ms. Grossberg has threatened to disclose FOX News Media’s attorney-client privileged information and we have filed a temporary restraining order to protect our rights,” the network said in a statement, per NPR.
The way Grossberg put it, she and Bartiromo were meant to take the fall for Fox’s repeated airing of conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems and its supposed role in manipulating the results of the election. To her, that treatment was not an anomaly but rather a symptom and verification of Fox’s pervasive culture of misogyny and discrimination.
“That’s what the culture is here,” Grossberg said on Monday, per the New York Times. “They don’t respect or value women.”
Grossberg claimed she and Bartiromo were not provided the necessary resources to vet the accuracy of claims against Dominion and even, on one occasion, pressured not to fact-check a segment with Rudy Giuliani, according to the New York-based news outlet.
The senior producer filed her lawsuits Monday in the Southern District of New York and in Superior Court in Delaware, where a pretrial hearing in the Dominion defamation lawsuit is scheduled for Tuesday. Grossberg, who worked as a booking producer for Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo’s respective shows, was placed on forced administrative leave after filing her lawsuits on Monday.
Fox’s request for a restraining order against Grossberg, which has not yet been ruled on, was criticized by her attorney.
“Having just received and read Fox News’ frivolous attempt to silence Abby Grossberg, we are happy that the full story regarding her case will now be heard by three separate courts in each of which we are confident she will receive the justice she deserves and certainly the fair treatment which she hasn’t experienced thus far from her employer Fox News,” Parisis Filippatos told the Daily Beast.
Grossberg’s accusations against Fox News of misogyny and discrimination include allegedly being asked last year by Justin Wells, Carlson’s top producer, whether Bartiromo was having a sexual relationship with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy; hearing Fox superiors call Bartiromo a “crazy b****” who was “menopausal”; and being pulled into a meeting with human resources and told that she was not performing well after she complained about harassment from two male producers on Carlson’s show, according to the New York Times’s reading of Grossberg’s lawsuits.
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Dominion Voting Systems, which produces and sells voting machines and software, sued Fox News in March 2021 for baseless claims that the company helped rig the presidential election for Joe Biden. While the pretrial is scheduled for Tuesday, the trial is expected next month.
