Legal troubles at Fox News grew worse Tuesday with 13 plaintiffs, including reporter and anchor Kelly Wright, joining a lawsuit that alleges racial discrimination and harassment at the company. The plaintiffs are all former or current employees. Their suit accuses the network of "abhorrent, intolerable, unlawful and hostile racial discrimination."
The lawsuit expands upon a previous complaint filed by Tichaona Brown and Tabrese Wright, two black women who worked in the payroll department. Brown and Wright claim that Fox News comptroller Judith Slater made racist comments that were ignored by the company's higher-ups.
Their complaints have since been joined by several other Fox News employees or former employees who insist they experienced the same type of behavior from Slater.
“When it comes to racial discrimination, 21st Century Fox has been operating as if it should be called 18th Century Fox,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers, Douglas H. Wigdor and Jeanne M. Christensen, said in a statement.“We sincerely hope the filing of this race class action wakes 21st Century Fox from its slumbers and inspires the company to take a conciliatory and appropriate approach to remedy its wrongs.”
The class-action lawsuit — which names Slater, Fox News lawyer Dianne Brandi, Fox News and 21st Century Fox as defendants — alleges that Brandi knew about Slater’s actions dating back to 2008 and refused to do anything about it because she “knew too much about senior executives.”
Slater would allegedly make fun of the way black employees said the words “ask” and “mother” and asked some of them, “Who is going to Africa?” after Donald Trump won the presidential election. She also is accused of making minority workers arm-wrestle white female supervisors for her own “entertainment and amusement.”
The suit also lists complaints against former host Bill O'Reilly, who was recently fired amid ongoing accusations of sexual harassment and after it became evident that O'Reilly and the network had already paid out $13 million in settlements to five of the accusers.
Wright alleges that O'Reilly regularly shunned him from his show and once refused to allow him to share a series of positive stories because they "showed Blacks in 'too positive' a light." O'Reilly allegedly suggested that Wright call then-CEO Roger Ailes and co-president Bill Shine to "offer to sing the national anthem at the Fox News Town Halls" instead.
As Wright put it, he felt that he was “effectively sidelined and asked to perform the role of a ‘Jim Crow’ — the racist caricature of a Black entertainer.”
“We sincerely hope the filing of this race class action wakes 21st Century Fox from its slumbers and inspires the Company to take a conciliatory and appropriate approach to remedy its wrongs,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys Wigdor and Christensen said, as the network has not yet responded to the allegations.
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