This reporting is featured in this week’s edition of Confider, the newsletter pulling back the curtain on the media. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.
A ghost of Fox News’ past has come back to try and haunt the conservative cable giant.
Andrea Tantaros has revived her longstanding, twice-dismissed claims against the network, filing a new case alleging she was subjected to sexual misconduct from multiple execs and on-air stars, forcible touching and groping, gender and sex discrimination, and gross and purposeful negligence.
Additionally, she asserts that Fox News tampered with and illegally accessed her computer—part of alleged retaliation against her for complaints about harassment by late Fox News founder Roger Ailes—and that she was wrongfully terminated for speaking up.
Adding to the bizarreness of the situation, Tantaros is representing herself in court. Just before the Nov. 23 deadline for the New York Survivors Act, she filed a summons, which was delivered to Fox News and Fox Corp on Dec. 4 and gives her more time to file a full complaint.
As in her two previous lawsuits, Tantaros, a former rising star who co-hosted shows like The Five and Outnumbered, claims she was harassed or groped by Ailes, recently fired Fox exec John Finley, one-time GOP Sen. Scott Brown, and actor-slash-pundit Dean Cain. This time around, she added former correspondent-at-large Geraldo Rivera to her list of victimizers. Brown and Cain have previously denied her past groping claims, while Rivera texted Confider in response to these new charges: “Bullshit.”
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This latest legal action from Tantaros comes after her last two lawsuits against Fox were dismissed—and after a lengthy period in which she all but disappeared from the public eye. The former star pundit was abruptly sidelined by the network in April 2016. Fox claimed it was due to her not getting company approval for her anti-feminist book, while Tantaros alleged she was yanked off the air after complaining about harassment from Ailes. That lawsuit, in which she wrote that Fox “operates like a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult,” was dismissed in 2017 after a judge ruled that the claims were covered by her Fox contract’s arbitration clause.
She eventually upped the ante, filing another lawsuit in federal court, this time claiming Fox hacked her electronic devices so that Ailes, who was fired by Fox in 2016 amid a sex-misconduct scandal, could secretly record her and other female employees disrobing. During the course of that suit, her first lawyer Judd Burstein was replaced by attorneys from Morgan Lewis, who would later ditch her. After Tantaros operated pro se and represented herself, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in May 2018, declaring the case to be “based primarily on speculation and conjecture” and she’d “fail[ed] to adequately make out the basic elements of her claims.”
Once a highly vocal presence on TV and social media, Tantaros has largely gone silent over the past five-plus years, save for some recent tweets about the Israel-Hamas war and some in-court beefing with right-wing edgelord Michael Malice, her book’s ghostwriter, over claims she failed to pay him.
Tantaros’ resurrected claims against her former employer follow a bevy of recent lawsuits from other ex-employees accusing the channel of wrongful termination, retaliation, and condoning a hostile work environment.
Fox has yet to respond to her summons and the network did not respond to a request for comment. And Tantaros has not responded to Confider’s repeated requests for comment.
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