Andrea Tantaros, a former host of the Fox News opinion show The Five, filed a lawsuit against the organization’s former CEO Roger Ailes and other senior executives including Co-President Bill Shine, alleging that Ailes led a campaign of online harassment against her.
Fox News outside counsel Dechert LLP provided the following statement to Pacific Standard:
Fox News and its executives flatly deny that they conducted any electronic surveillance of Ms. Tantaros. They have no knowledge of the anonymous or pseudonymous tweets described in her complaint.*
Tantaros first filed sexual harassment claims against Ailes and eventually Bill O’Reilly in 2015, and, after rejecting a settlement offer of $1 million, she sued both Fox and Ailes last year, calling the network “a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult.” She was fired in April of 2015.
The new suit claims the Ailes hacked both her company-issued BlackBerry and her laptop, planted spyware on the latter, and fed information to “sock-puppet” social media accounts meant to “emotionally torture” Tantaros and convince her to drop the original suit.
*Update — April 24, 2017: This post has been updated to include a statement from Fox News outside counsel Dechert LLP, provided after the story’s initial publication.
