Fox News conservative commentator Andrea Tantaros, who was mysteriously suspended from the network in April, alleges that her decline at the network is a result of her repeated complaints of sexual harassment by recently deposed executive Roger Ailes. According to her lawyer, Tantaros “made multiple harassment and hostile-workplace complaints,” but Fox executives allegedly never investigated. Tantaros and her counsel told New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman that they believe her demotion to hosting daytime gabfest Outnumbered and her eventual suspension were “retaliatory” acts for her sexual-harassment complaints.
According to Tantaros, Ailes began harassing her in 2012 when he asked her to do “the twirl” during a private meeting in his office. Several months later, she alleged, he made sexual advances at her. In early 2015, after being demoted from a gig on the network’s 5 p.m. talk show The Five, Tantaros claims Ailes commented that she “must look really good in a bikini.” After filing a formal workplace complaint, Tantaro’s lawyer said, the Fox star was told by an executive not to fight such a “powerful man” like Ailes. One year later, after allegedly making a few more complaints, she was pulled off the air in April 2016.
Fox’s attorneys, however, dispute such an account—they say she was suspended because she failed to include the network in vetting her 2016 book Tied Up in Knots: How Getting What They Wanted Has Made Women Miserable, which includes a suggestive cover image of Tantaros bound by ropes.
