Fox News, Roger Ailes Hit With Sexual Harassment Suit By Julie Roginsky
Julie Roginsky, Democratic strategist and Fox News contributor, has filed a sexual harassment suit against the network, its former CEO and Chairman Roger Ailes, and current co-president Bill Shine, NPR reports.
The action alleges that beginning in 2015, when Roginsky, who is of Russian-Jewish heritage, started appearing as a temporary host of Fox’s “The Five,” Ailes repeatedly arranged private meetings with her during which he made inappropriate comments regarding her appearance and personal life.
In the last of those meetings, the suit states, Ailes pondered making Roginsky a permanent host of “The Five,” then dismissed her after she refused to have private drinks with him. She was subsequently removed from “The Five” and experienced a diminishment of her role on Fox’s “Outnumbered.”
Ailes resigned from Fox News last July after a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against him by former Fox anchor Gretchen Carlson led to the exposure of numerous similar lawsuits against him. Then-Fox anchor Megyn Kelly also claimed that Ailes had sexually harassed her.
Roginsky’s suit alleges that subsequent to Ailes’s ouster, Shine retaliated against her over her refusal to speak in Ailes’s favor by further reducing her role at Fox, and that Fox failed to properly investigate Roginsky’s allegations against Ailes.
Roginsky’s suit follows a recent New York Times investigation, which revealed that Fox News Network and host Bill O’Reilly have settled five allegations of sexual harassment against O’Reilly.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO