After Catch and Kill Fallout, Former Fox News Staffers Demand to Be Released From Their NDAs

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NBC News, attempting to do damage control, says it will release former employees from nondisclosure agreements if they want to speak up about sexual misconduct at the network. Now, at least six former Fox News staffers, including Gretchen Carlson, are calling on their former employer to follow suit.
By Diana Falzone
October 28, 2019[/blockquote

On Friday night, MSNBC’S star prime-time host, Rachel Maddow, delivered a remarkable announcement. NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News, as well as her own network, would allow former staffers to be released from their nondisclosure agreements. “Any former NBC News employee who believes that they cannot disclose their experience with sexual harassment as a result of a confidentiality or non-disparagement provision in their separation agreement should contact NBCUniversal and we will release them from that perceived obligation,” the statement read.

The Peacock’s hand, it’s fair to say, had been forced. Days earlier, former NBC correspondent Ronan Farrow had launched an aggressive publicity tour for his latest book, Catch and Kill, a gripping account of his efforts to break the Harvey Weinstein story—a story that he alleges NBC tried to cover up, ultimately forcing him to take his reporting to the New Yorker. (NBC has strenuously denied many of the claims in Farrow’s book, including the allegation that NBC stopped Farrow’s reporting on Weinstein after Weinstein threatened to reveal Matt Lauer’s misconduct, which NBC has called “a smear.”)

For many women journalists, including myself, it was a clarifying moment, underscoring the frustrating pace of change in the media industry since the fall of Weinstein, and before him, Fox News chief Roger Ailes. For decades, powerful corporations have relied on NDAs to sweep sexual misconduct under the rug, often paying out millions of dollars to keep employees silent about the predatory behavior of senior executives. The system works against victims in other ways too: Litigation is costly, stressful, and frequently prohibits or otherwise prevents a litigant from obtaining new employment. In the post-#MeToo era, these settlement agreements are a relic of a system designed to prevent women from telling their own stories or to correct falsehoods disseminated by former employees or their surrogates.

Now, in the wake of the NBC scandal, at least six former Fox News employees, including Gretchen Carlson, the first woman at Fox News to publicly file a lawsuit against Ailes, are calling to be released from their NDAs. “All women at Fox News and beyond forced to sign NDAs should be released from them immediately, giving them back the voices they deserve,” Carlson told me over the weekend. “None of us asked to get into a workplace dispute. We simply had the courage to stand up and say something—but in the end it’s our voices no one can hear. Because of our NDAs, we can never say what is factually correct or incorrect about what happened to us at Fox.”

More: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/former-fox-news-staffers-demand-to-be-released-from-their-ndas